Startups in Boston to Follow in 2023 and Beyond
There are over 4,000 tech companies operating in the city and one quarter of them are in biotech.
The capital of Massachusetts is the largest biotech hub in the world and a major US tech hub for artificial intelligence, 3D printing, cybersecurity, and machine learning. Boston startups are known for fostering a tech community in which successful entrepreneurs help new biz in making the first steps. Giants like GE are partnering as the first customers for some of the new tech companies in the city. On top of that, tons of live events make Boston the perfect place to expand professional networks.
When it comes to higher education, Massachusetts hosts some of the best research universities. In 2021, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked 4th in terms of the number of issued patents – 402 – twice more than Stanford University; Harvard University produced 154 versus MIT’s 100 Nobel Prize laureates; and 25% of MIT students graduate Course 6 (Computer Science). In effect, tech startups can choose employees from a pool of the most talented people out there.
Top Boston Startups to Watch in 2023
Here is our list of the most attractive Boston startups that chose this location and make the most of it. The list was created on the basis of recent funding rounds and our own research.
Circle
Founded Date: 2013
Total funding amount: $1.1 billion
Latest valuation: $400 million
Industry: Banking, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Financial Services, FinTech
Mission: Helping businesses and developers harness the power of USDC for payments and commerce
Circle is a Boston startup with some of the highest investor engagement. They started with peer-to-peer payment technology and now manage USD coin (USDC), a digital dollar also known as a stablecoin, that launched in 2018. The USD coin was pegged to the US dollar until March 2021, when Circle confirmed that 3.3 billion USDC was at risk because of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
The company offers an internet platform based on blockchain technology with Circle Pay which enables users to send money globally quickly and easily. In effect, anyone can buy and sell cryptocurrency assets. Circle Trade provides crypto-coins and offers OTC trading services. The Boston startup offers its users Circle Account for accessing, storing, and managing USDC and Euro Coin. The users can access them near-instantly and put them to work globally.
Insurify
Founded Date: 2017 May 6, 2013
Total funding amount: $129.6 million
Latest valuation: $100 million
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Auto Insurance, Home Services, Insurtech, Life Insurance
Mission: Helping people quickly and easily save money on insurance
Insurify, located in Cambridge, near Boston, created an online insurance marketplace where customers can compare offers and easily do the shopping without wasting time on phone calls, exchanging emails, and huge expenses. It specializes in car insurance.
The platform provides personalized recommendations using artificial intelligence, language processing, and chatbots. Insurify aims to automatically deliver the best offers for their clients and acts as a virtual agent, performing predictive analyses.
Indico Data
Founded Date: 2013
Total funding amount: $30.4 million
Latest valuation: $22 million
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Data Services, Enterprise Software, SaaS, Machine Learning
Mission: Transforming unstructured data into actionable insights for the business
Indico Data is one of Boston’s startups focused on creating solutions based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Their flag product is Indico Unstructured Data Platform™, which helps businesses to automate, analyze and apply documents, emails, images, videos, etc. to enterprise workflows. The platform enables software like RPAs, CRMs, ERPs, and BI solutions to work with unstructured data, giving rich insight, and automating document management.
Document processing starts from the massive, pre-built database, then the platform incorporates transfer learning and AI enables models trained on one task to deal with others. Of course, the technology requires thousands of documents to train on to give 95% accuracy.
ROME Therapeutics
Founded Date: 2017
Total funding amount: $127 million
Latest valuation: $77 million
Industry: Biotech, Health Care, Pharmaceutical
Mission: Driving even the most intractable cancers and autoimmune diseases into sustained remission
The startup develops novel therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases, which are based on repeatome research.
ROME Therapeutics combines in one team world-class experts in oncology, immunology, machine learning, virology, and theoretical physics. They cooperate with top academic labs and focus on "repeats" (repetitive sequences of nucleic acids) in DNA in their research. This is a completely different approach to existing work on drug discovery based on modulating proteins and genetic instructions encoding them (they account for 2% of the human genome). Since the repeatome makes up more than 50% of the human genome, using advanced technology greatly speeds up research. Proprietary data science tools are aimed at helping to identify disease, prepare prognoses, and predict responses to existing and novel repeat-targeted therapies.
Customers.ai
Founded Date: 2018
Total funding amount: $5 million
Latest valuation: $5 million
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Sales Automation, Marketing
Mission: Generating qualified leads and sales pipeline for the businesses
Customers.ai is a B2C outbound marketing and sales automation platform that helps reach the perfect customers with a promotional, targeted message in a cost-effective way.
The tool uses demographic and interest-based search, which enables clients to add anonymous website visitors interested in buying products, and launches automated outreach emails and text messages driving conversions.
Customers.ai uses a search engine to access the base of more than 200 million verified shoppers.
Genialis
Founded Date: 2017
Total funding amount: $15.5 million
Latest valuation: $13 million
Industry: Bioinformatics, Biotechnology, Health Care, Medical
Mission: Develop effective drugs to make more targeted treatment decisions for better outcomes
They combine biology expertise with artificial intelligence. Genialis provides a biomarker discovery platform that models underlying disease biology. They build and train their biomarker models on multimodal data to uncover high-confidence drug targets.
Genialis delivers pharma companies biomedical data with advanced analytics to help them in developing more effective drugs and predict patient response.
The latest funding will finance expanding ResponderID™ and collecting clinically validated biomarker models. The tool, powered by machine learning technology, is able to read the status of NGS-based biomarkers from a single assay. It gives results that show researchers a comprehensive molecular portrait of patient disease. In effect, it can provide pinpoint diagnoses for virtually every cancer patient.
Aldena Therapeutics
Founded Date: 2022
Total funding amount: $30 million
Latest valuation: $30 million
Industry: Biotechnology, Therapeutics, Dermatology
Mission: Changing the paradigm by discovering and enabling the delivery of nucleic acid therapies in conditions with a high burden to patients
Aldena Therapeutics is a private biotech startup founded by Medixi with Georgia Tech and University of Massachusetts scientists. They invented siRNA-based treatments for skin conditions. The research is led by Thibaud Portal as CEO with a Scientific Advisory Board chaired by Nobel Prize Laureate Craig Mello, and has the potential to transform the treatment of multiple dermatological diseases like atopic dermatitis, vitiligo, and psoriasis.
Aldena Therapeutics' approach is based on post-transcriptional silencing of disease-related genes through siRNA (small interfering RNAs), specific to their target mRNA. siRNA sequences against validated targets and bound chemical motifs created by Aldena are proprietary elements of its core technology.
Assured Allies
Founded Date: 2017
Latest valuation: $65 million
Industry: Health Care, Insurance, Service Industry
Mission: Develop technologies for long-term care industry leaders and insurance companies
Assured Allies is responding to the pressing issue of an aging population that is projected to require long-term care over the age of 65.
Their solution integrates and supports older adults by combining science-based innovations. It aims to solve problems related to physical, mental, and financial well-being, as well as concierge support.
How? The startup created the platform NeverStop addressed to people 55+. It helps to define health risks, predict them, and introduce dedicated insurance based on sophisticated actuarial modeling and product design. It also delivers personalized wellness plans based on a large database of aging populations.
Assured Allies also offers an engagement program for older adults using insights into behavioral psychology and gamification.
VerAI Discoveries
Founded Date: 2020
Total funding amount: $15.4 million
Latest valuation: $12 million
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Clean Energy, Mining Technology
Mission: Accelerating the global zero-carbon transformation by discovering the minerals essential for a sustainable future
The green energy transition relies on the availability of critical elements such as Copper, Cobalt, Nickel, and Lithium. As the production of minerals declines significantly, the lack of natural resources is quickly becoming a major blocker to a greener future. The Artificial Intelligence Platform created by VerAI is a “generator” of mineral assets. It detects mineral deposits in unexplored and covered terrain, where mine drilling is not possible. The creators of the solution declare that it will unlock a $100B opportunity by changing the way of discovering mineral deposits. Moreover, this methodology shortens the time to succeed from years to months, and helps to reduce 90% of costs.
Vend Park
Founded Date: 2015
Total funding amount: $25.4 million
Latest valuation: $21 million
Industry: Information Technology
Mission: Unlock the true value of your parking asset with a fully digital parking access and revenue control system
Vend Park developed an end-to-end SaaS management and payments solution for business and individual clients at the same time. Its purpose is to make it easier to use car parks.
The app makes the customers' experience hassle-free – your smartphone becomes your ticket. Whole parking management is automated in cloud infrastructure. Signing into the app requires a phone number to start and validate parking. The solution saves the driver’s time, streamlines the back office processes of the parking owner, and maximizes net operating income.
Electra Vehicles
Founded Date: 2015
Total funding amount: $25.4 million
Latest valuation: $21 million
Industry: Automotive, Cleantech, Energy Storage, Machine Learning, Renewable Energy
Mission: Supplying energy storage design, control, and analytics solutions to the mobility sector
Electra Vehicles, Inc. has set itself the goal of improving the battery pack range, lifetime, and charging performance.
For this purpose, the company has created EVE-Ai™ 360 Adaptive Controls – a product that is built into electric vehicles and connected to the cloud. Thanks to this solution, it is possible to manage battery control strategies using predictive machine learning algorithms.
Electric vehicle fleets use EVE-Ai™ Analytics, an app for managers, to improve battery performance in real time.
The company also equips battery engineers with a database of over 300 cells. Simulations can export to modeling software. The startup's products significantly support the development of the electric vehicle industry.
FireCompass
Founded Date: Jan 2019
Total funding amount: $7 million
Latest valuation: $7 million
Industry: Big Data, Cyber Security, Information Technology, Internet, SaaS
Mission: Providing continuous and proactive security
FireCompass is a SaaS solution for continuous automated red teaming (CART) and attack surface management (ASM). It automates indexation, recon, and attacking, continuously scanning the entire internet. The tool uses the same techniques as hackers and allows organizations to measure, assess, and manage their IT attack surface using Firecompass's portal.
The AI-based tool automatically discovers an attack and identifies blind spots in the security program. Furthermore, it launches multi-stage attacks on the company's attack surface to recognize the breach and attack paths.
Asimov
Founded Date: 2017
Total funding amount: $205 million
Latest valuation: $175 million
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, Software, Therapeutics
Mission: To radically advance humanity’s ability to design living systems, enabling biological technologies with outsized societal benefit
The last tech company I present on the list declares that they create "computer-aided design of biology." To achieve this goal, Asimov provides tools for programming living cells. They integrate a few fields: mammalian synthetic biology and design, with machine learning.
Asimov also built the first commercial CAD platform for biology. The startup offers proprietary gene circuits for manufacturing cell lines and provides a computational platform encouraging researchers from pharmaceutical companies to develop their own cell lines.
Why is it worth knowing the best startups from Boston?
The review shows how important the influence of the scientific business environment is in building startups. Boston is a city of highly specialized staff, which is invaluable for the development of companies.
Many technological companies from this city are significantly pushing forward biotechnology, offering solutions at the intersection of biological sciences, medicine, and technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its graduates play a great role in advancing the most cutting-edge business projects that build on university research.
