Expect the unexpected.
That’s the response Hyannis Port Research’s (HPR) CEO Anthony Amicangioli gave to WatersTechnology when asked how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected his Boston-based company in the past few months. HPR builds Capital Markets Infrastructure with a technology that powers the electronic trading stacks of global investment banks, clearing firms, asset managers and more with a comprehensive suite of hardware and software solutions. And with the volatility of the market in the past six months, let’s just say Amicangioli’s company has been busy.
Few could have expected what would happen to the world at the start of 2020, let alone to the marketplace. But HPR was prepared. The company had previously tested its operational systems to 10 times its normal capacity to assure it could handle any black swan event. Then the pandemic struck, and its daily transactional volume skyrocketed by nearly 9 times.
“To the extent that there are any silver linings in a pandemic, we did meet the challenge,” Amicangioli said.
He isn’t alone in that sentiment. While COVID-19 has halted business across many industries, some were well-positioned and prepared to thrive. Below are four Boston-area companies who’ve seen an increase in business during the pandemic, including one that’s now participating in COVID-19 vaccine trials.
The pandemic has transformed the retail industry to online, which has placed a greater emphasis on handling demand in warehouses. That’s where Locus Robotics comes in. Its autonomous robots work collaboratively alongside workers, allowing them to pick 25 times faster with near-100% accuracy. And now, with e-commerce thriving, it’s looking to improve on that experience.
In August, the Wilmington, MA company announced a partnership with Balloon One, a UK-based provider of software and supply chain applications for distribution, manufacturing and e-commerce companies. According to a press release from Locus Robotics, “The partnership will provide customers with a more efficient, cost-effective solution to meet the dramatically increasing demand for e-commerce fulfillment, further driving the adoption of the innovative warehouse technologies offered by both companies.”
“As e-commerce continues to explode across all channels, warehouse fulfillment has become a critical part of the economy,” said Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics, in the release. “Our partnership will deliver cutting-edge robotics technology to Balloon One customers and drive significant operational efficiency and productivity gains, and a faster time to value.”
HPR has seen a sharp uptick in demand for its services with the increased volatility of the marketplace due to the pandemic. Now, the company is looking ahead.
In a July interview with WatersTechnology, Amicangioli explained that HPR is looking to expand Unimus — a platform that unifies their clients’ capital markets infrastructure tech stacks. The company is also rolling out a new bot.
“Currently, we’re in the market access gateway space, but we’re looking now at expanding that to include virtually any infrastructure that touches a trade, and one example of that is data,” Amicangioli said. “We already have a deployed client on our market data product — which we call Databot — and there will be more on that coming this year. If it doesn’t fit traditional cloud providers’ frameworks — in other words, if you can’t export it to Google or Amazon — then HPR wants to be the provider to help clients move that technology to a scalable-service architecture.”
Imagine if your company’s product could detect whether a person has COVID-19? Well, that’s what WHOOP is doing. Just ask professional golfer Nick Watney. In June, Watney noticed his respiratory rate was elevated via his WHOOP, a wrist-worn heart rate monitor that tracks health data. So he got tested, and the results came back positive.
It’s an example of a larger study WHOOP conducted with researchers in Australia to learn if changes in respiratory rate could be a reliable indicator of COVID-19. The results? WHOOP’s algorithm could indeed distinguish between healthy and infected individuals — before and during the onset of symptoms. And that’s not all they’re doing. Recently, the company partnered with G42 Healthcare to participate in an innovative Phase III COVID-19 vaccine trial.
“The continuous biometric monitoring offered by WHOOP will help volunteers evaluate any changes to their health and help researchers vastly increase their understanding of the vaccine's impact,” said Will Ahmed, WHOOP Founder and CEO, in a press release. “This partnership represents the future of healthcare: using continuous monitoring and artificial intelligence to better understand the effect of drugs, vaccines and other treatments.”
6 River Systems is best known for its creation and licensing of “Chuck,” a robot that uses machine learning and AI to help streamline productivity in warehouses. The company was acquired by Shopify for $450 million in September 2019, and just like Locus Robotics, it’s now thriving due to the e-commerce boom.
“The install base continues to grow, the number of deployed systems continues to grow,” co-CEO Jerome Dubois said to VentureBeat. “And that’s because people are looking to put more and more automation in their buildings. The effect of the pandemic has actually caused an even more difficult time for the warehouse operators to source labor to work in their buildings.
“So they’re looking to put more automation in, as opposed to less, to obviously be able to support their service levels and the volumes that are being placed on them.”
