boston-startup
(40)
Anthony Habayeb
He spent a career refusing to specialize, then a bike ride with doctors handed him the one hard problem worth building a company around: making the AI behind real decisions something a human can actually answer for.
Colin MacNaught
Colin MacNaught is the CEO and co-founder of BondLink, a Boston-based fintech company that brings modern technology and transparency to the municipal bond market. Before starting BondLink in 2015 with technologist Carl Query, he spent seven years managing debt for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, issuing close to $25 billion in bonds and notes and earning two national Deal of the Year awards from The Bond Buyer. He studied public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and built BondLink to give public-sector issuers digital tools to reach investors, improve disclosure, and lower borrowing costs for taxpayers.
Daniel McKinnon
Daniel McKinnon is the CEO of Proof Authentication, a Boston-based anti-counterfeiting technology company whose non-duplicatable printed marks and smartphone verification app are used by Fortune 500 brands. Before taking the top job in 2021 alongside the company's Series A round, he spent nearly a decade as Senior Counsel for Intellectual Property and Global Brand Protection at New Balance, where he led the sportswear maker's aggressive legal campaign against copycat brands in China. He is best known for helping secure a landmark $1.5 million damages award against the counterfeiter New Boom, at the time the largest such award granted to a foreign company by a Chinese court.
Gilad Tal
Gilad Tal is co-founder and CEO of DualBird, a Boston-based deep tech startup rebuilding the foundation of analytics and AI data infrastructure by running silicon acceleration as cloud-native software. A Technion-trained electrical engineer and physicist with 14 years in ASIC and software development, he previously founded and led TerrainEDA, an EDA startup acquired by Synopsys. At DualBird he and his co-founders use rewritable FPGA hardware to plug into Apache Spark and Iceberg environments, claiming up to 100x faster performance and up to 90% lower cost with no changes to existing workflows.
Jake Vadeboncoeur
Jake Vadeboncoeur is the founder and CEO of MediaGlobe, a Boston-based paid media facilitator that gives serious advertisers whitelisted, enterprise-class ad accounts on Meta, Google, and TikTok. The company positions itself as a partner for high-spend buyers in ecommerce, affiliate marketing, and lead generation, promising lower CPMs and no arbitrary spend caps. A Merrimack College business graduate who cut his teeth in media buying, Vadeboncoeur built MediaGlobe into a venture-backed operation that raised a Series A in 2023 and reports serving well over a thousand clients.
John Eielson
John Eielson is co-CEO and co-founder of FlatWorld, a Boston-based digital-first publisher that sells college textbooks for roughly $25 to $40 to make higher education more affordable. A former U.S. Coast Guard officer turned strategy consultant, he and longtime business partner Alastair Adam acquired the assets of Flat World Knowledge in 2016 and rebuilt it around a simple idea: instructors matter, and quality and affordability do not have to be a tradeoff. Today FlatWorld's titles are used by professors at more than 2,000 colleges and universities.
Jonathan Kay
Jonathan Kay is the co-founder and CEO of Apptopia, a Boston-based app intelligence company that turns mobile app data into signals used by investors, brands and developers. He started Apptopia in 2011 as an online marketplace for buying and selling apps, backed early by Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher, then rebuilt it into a data business whose forecasts and estimates are relied on by clients including Google, Visa, Target, Microsoft, Zoom and NBC. Kay took over as CEO in 2021 as the company raised a $20 million Series C and doubled down on serving hedge funds and public-market investors with predictive mobile metrics.
Jose Seara
Jose Seara is the founder and CEO of DeNexus, a Boston-based company that quantifies cyber risk for operational technology and industrial control systems. A naval and marine engineer by training, he spent nearly two decades building critical infrastructure and renewable energy companies across Europe and North America before pivoting to cybersecurity. He started DeNexus after discovering, as an energy operator, that he could not measure his own company's cyber risk or insure against it. His DeRISK platform turns technical threat data into financial metrics that boards and insurers can act on.
Matt Barba
Matt Barba is the co-founder and CEO of Placester, a Boston-based SaaS platform that gives real estate agents and brokers websites, IDX/MLS integration, CRM, and marketing automation. He started coding as a kid, worked as a Boston real estate agent while at BU, built a widely used WordPress real estate plugin called Builder, and launched Placester in 2011 with CTO Frederick Townes. The company raised roughly $115M across rounds from NEA, Romulus Capital, and Techstars. Barba appeared on the Swanepoel POWER 200 list of top real estate industry leaders in 2015, 2016, and 2017.
Matthias Hofmann
Matthias Hofmann is the co-founder and CEO of Eyebot, a Boston-based company building self-serve vision-test kiosks that deliver a 90-second refractive exam and pair users with a tele-optometrist. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, did postdoctoral optics work at Harvard Medical School, and was an early engineer at MIT spinout EyeNetra before starting Eyebot in 2021 with Jack Moldave. In August 2025 Eyebot raised a $20M Series A led by General Catalyst.
Sam Ryan
Sam Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of Zeelo, a smart bus platform that runs shuttle routes for frontline workers and independent schools across the UK and US. He founded the company in 2016 with Barney Williams and Dani Ruiz after selling their student ride-share app JumpIn to Addison Lee, and has since grown Zeelo into a business moving roughly 150,000 riders a month with a fleet of more than 10,000 vehicles.
Tom Aley
Tom Aley is the co-CEO and co-founder of Aidentified, a Concord, Massachusetts wealth-network-intelligence platform that stitches together roughly 275 million consumer and 75 million professional US profiles so financial advisors can see who they already know who happens to be worth a lot of money. He runs the company with his twin brother Darr Aley, and it is not their first exit together: they built Generate (acquired by Dow Jones/News Corp in 2008) and backed NetProspex (acquired by Dun & Bradstreet). Before founding companies he was a corporate venture investor for Reed Elsevier's $8 billion media arm, an SVP at Dow Jones, and a board member on eleven companies. In June 2024, FactSet made a strategic $12.5 million Series B investment in the company.
Yair Frastai
Yair Frastai is the co-founder and CEO of VerAI Discoveries, a Boston-based company using proprietary AI to find concealed mineral deposits buried under covered terrain. A former Israeli Intelligence special operations officer and Israel Defense Prize recipient turned mining-sector executive, Frastai built VerAI in 2020 with longtime partner Amitai Axelrod to attack what he calls mining's biggest problem: only 1 in 1,000 exploration projects ever becomes a mine. VerAI reads raw geophysical signals from deep underground with machine learning, and has raised roughly $39 million to date, including a $24M Series B led by Insight Partners in 2025.
Marty Kolewe
Marty Kolewe is a chemical engineer turned food-tech founder and the CEO of Foodberry, a Boston company that reverse-engineers fruit skin to make edible, plant-based coatings that keep fresh food fresh without plastic. Trained at Johns Hopkins, UMass Amherst, and MIT's Langer Lab, he traded a career in drug delivery for one in snacks, betting that the science behind a peach's peel could reshape how the world packages and eats food. Under his leadership Foodberry has amassed 20-plus patents, closed a $15 million Series A, and lined up partners from a dairy-free ice-cream maker to the global owner of Babybel.
Matthew Carey
Matthew Carey is the co-founder and CEO of Teradar, a Boston deep-tech company building a solid-state automotive sensor that sees in the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, the sliver between microwaves and infrared. His pitch is blunt: combine radar's ability to punch through fog and rain with lidar's crisp resolution, then make it cheap enough to bolt onto a Ford Focus. After a friend died in a car crash that no existing sensor could have prevented, Carey teamed with terahertz specialist Gregory Charvat and chip architect Nicholas Saiz in 2020. In November 2025 the company left stealth with a $150 million Series B and claims to be validating its tech with five global automakers.
Ricky Ashenfelter
Ricky Ashenfelter is the co-founder and CEO of Spoiler Alert, a Boston-based B2B software company that helps major food and CPG brands sell, discount, and donate excess and short-dated inventory before it becomes waste. He co-founded the company in 2015 with Emily Malina while earning his MBA at MIT Sloan, building on earlier work in sustainability consulting at Deloitte and the U.S. EPA. Under his leadership Spoiler Alert works with global brands like Nestle, Kraft Heinz, and Danone, and has helped keep more than 500,000 tons of product out of landfills. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs list in 2017.
Ali Merchant
Ali Merchant is the founder and CEO of iQ3Connect, a Woburn, Massachusetts company building a web-based, ultrafast XR platform that lets enterprise teams step into shared 3D spaces for design review and training straight from a browser - no heavy installs, no specialized hardware required. An MIT-trained aeronautical engineer with a Ph.D. in turbomachinery, he spent two decades building high-performance 3D design and simulation software for aerospace before turning a decade-plus of MIT research into a platform that aims to make immersive 3D as easy to build as a slide deck and as collaborative as a video call.
Alicia Tulsee
Alicia Tulsee is the founder and CEO of Moxie Scrubs, the direct-to-consumer apparel brand for nurses she built out of the Harvard Innovation Labs, and now Moxie360, an AI workforce platform aimed at nurse burnout and retention. A daughter of Trinidadian immigrants raised in Queens, she sold costume jewelry at a flea market at 19, talked her way into marketing jobs in India, and stitched together an unconventional path that ended in an economics degree from Harvard. She is not a nurse herself; she built a brand for them because nurses cared for her dying father, and she designed Moxie 'for nurses, by nurses' by collaborating with the people who wear the clothes. She raised about $2.4M in pre-seed funding in 2022 and was named to the Forbes Next 1000.
Andrew Kieve
Andrew Kieve is the co-founder and CEO of Tolemi, a Boston civic-technology company whose BuildingBlocks platform stitches together the messy, siloed property data that cities sit on and turns it into maps and insights officials can actually act on. Originally launched as OpportunitySpace in 2013 and rebranded after a 2017 run through Y Combinator, Tolemi now helps state and local governments fight blight, enforce housing codes, and protect affordable housing across dozens of American cities. A Stanford and IESE graduate and former Innosight consultant, Kieve has spent more than a decade convincing governments that the answer to neighborhood decline is hiding in their own databases.
Anj Fayemi
Anj Fayemi is a Lagos-raised, MIT-trained mechanical engineer and recording rapper (Solstice Fayemz) who turned his own frustration releasing a second album into Rivet, an AI-driven CRM that helps artists and creators find and grow their most loyal fans. As co-founder and CEO, he interviewed 200+ artists, went through Techstars Boston, raised a $500k pre-seed led by Drive Capital, and built a platform used by roughly 1,400 creators that stitches together data from Instagram, Shopify and Eventbrite to surface the fans most likely to show up and buy.
Benjamin Pleat
Benjamin (Ben) Pleat is the CEO and co-founder of Cobu, a Boston-based resident-engagement platform that turns apartment buildings into actual communities. After watching his extroverted mother feel isolated in a well-appointed Manhattan building - and learning that apartment owners bleed money to roughly 50% annual tenant churn - he built a company on a simple bet: a single friend in your building makes you 30%+ more likely to renew your lease. A Harvard economics grad who passed through WeWork's growth team and Goldman Sachs' real estate private equity group, Pleat now leads a company that has powered community in tens of thousands of apartment homes by getting neighbors into the same room for poker nights, potlucks, and chef dinners.
Morgan Moncada
Morgan Moncada is the co-founder and CEO of Neru Health, a Boston-based vertical AI company that automates patient support and resupply for durable medical equipment providers and specialty clinics. After more than a decade building life-science startups, he spun Neru out of Harvard's Blavatnik Life Science Fellowship in 2023 with co-founders Maria Grebenshchikova and Catherine Tadina. The company's clinician-trained voice and text assistant, Nora, now supports tens of thousands of patients around the clock - cutting operating costs and lifting therapy compliance for the providers that deploy it.
Remen Okoruwa
Remen Okoruwa is the co-founder and CEO of Propexo, a Y Combinator-backed Boston startup building a unified API for property management software. Pitched as 'Plaid for commercial real estate,' Propexo lets engineers connect to legacy systems like Yardi, RealPage and Entrata in days instead of months. An Iowa kid who studied engineering at Harvard, Remen took a winding road through McKinsey, a churn-fighting data startup, product leadership at HubSpot, and a rent-payments venture before landing on the unglamorous but enormous problem of moving property data. He now powers integrations behind more than half of the NMHC Top 15 managers.
Sachin Johar
Sachin Johar is the Co-Founder and CEO of SecLogic (SecLogic.ai), a Boston-based cloud security company that builds a cyber risk orchestration platform for multi-cloud environments. After roughly two decades inside the enterprise security and networking world - including a long run at Akamai Technologies and earlier strategy roles at Tata Communications and Intellisys - he co-founded SecLogic in late 2020 to attack a problem he watched companies struggle with from the inside: cloud sprawl creating invisible attack paths faster than security teams could close them. SecLogic's products, CyberQ SHIELD and CyberQ ORO, pair cloud security posture management with organization and human risk orchestration. The company raised a $300K pre-seed round in 2021 led by Spanache.vc with India Accelerator.
Sahil Agarwal
Sahil Agarwal is the co-founder and CEO of Enkrypt AI, a Boston-based startup building a security and compliance control layer for enterprise generative AI. An applied mathematician with a PhD from Yale who once modeled the chaotic motion of Arctic sea ice, he now leads a team that red-teams large language models to find where they break - work that made headlines when Enkrypt published research showing DeepSeek-R1 was 11x more likely to generate harmful content than its rivals. He met co-founder Prashanth Harshangi during their PhD years at Yale, and together they raised a $2.35M seed round to make AI safe enough for Fortune 500 deployment.
Salem Karani
Salem Karani is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Tristar AI, a Boston-based startup building an AI-native computer vision platform for real-time quality monitoring and human-machine interaction on factory floors. Raised inside his family's plastic film manufacturing business, he turned a childhood spent around production lines into a company that helps manufacturers cut scrap, reduce waste, and improve uptime. Tristar's models read human motion at a kinematic level, letting them drop into new factories without retraining. The company raised a $3.15M seed in June 2024 led by Las Olas Venture Capital and TenOneTen Ventures.
Veera Anantha
Veera Anantha is the co-founder and CEO of Constant Therapy Health, a Boston-based digital therapeutics company whose AI-powered app helps people living with stroke, traumatic brain injury, aphasia and other neurological conditions rebuild speech, language and cognitive skills. A trained engineer and physicist with a PhD from Northwestern and a degree from IIT Bombay, he spent years building products at startups acquired by Apple and Motorola before turning to brain rehabilitation. Under his leadership the platform has delivered well over 100 million therapy exercises, creating what is described as the largest real-world brain rehabilitation dataset, and he champions AI that is accountable and explainable enough for healthcare.
Vishal Punwani
Vishal Punwani is the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, a generative-AI virtual workplace platform born at Harvard's Innovation Labs. A medical doctor turned founder, he traded clinical medicine and a stint at the World Health Organization for the question of how distributed teams keep a culture alive when nobody shares a hallway. He and his two co-founders, who first met playing World of Warcraft as teenagers, set out to borrow what video games solved decades ago - presence, spontaneity, belonging - and bring it to remote work. In October 2021 the company raised a $15M seed round led by Talis Capital, counting Tinder among its early customers.
Abraham Parangi
Abraham Parangi is the co-founder and co-CEO of Akkio, a Cambridge, Massachusetts AI company that builds no-code predictive and generative analytics for media agencies and businesses. A Cornell-trained computer scientist who has worked on everything from missile guidance systems to iPhone ad technology, Parangi co-founded Akkio in 2019 with the goal of putting machine learning in the hands of people who do not write code. The company has raised $18M, including a $15M Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures in 2023, and now powers AI media-planning systems used across the global advertising ecosystem.
Amaury Ciurana
Amaury Ciurana is the co-founder and CEO of REEV, a wearable-robotics company building intelligent motorized orthoses for people with neurological gait disorders. A French aerospace engineer trained at ISAE-SUPAERO and the X-HEC entrepreneurship track, he relocated to Boston in 2023 to lead REEV's US expansion. The company pairs DREEVEN, an AI-powered robotic knee orthosis, with REEV SENSE, a wearable gait-analysis system, and has raised roughly $14M total including a $9.2M round in 2025.