Sure, the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the big guns aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming startups, Built In has launched The Future 5 across eight major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five tech startups, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. You can check out last quarter’s round-up here.
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Boston is a hotspot for some of the buzziest industries in tech, from healthcare to Amazon aggregation, and many of the leading companies in these spaces have been thriving amid the pandemic. The city is also full of entrepreneurs who are busily building fresh businesses from the ground up — a difficult task even when there isn’t a health crisis turning every facet of normal life upside down.
Against the odds, this handful of founders have risen to the various challenges thrown their way over the last 18 months, and are growing businesses that are sure to shape the future of work, entertainment, and everything in between.
Cheft (Event Tech)
When the idea for Cheft was first conceived, the vision was for it to be a way to book chefs for private dining events. It was all set to launch in April of 2020, but then, of course, the pandemic hit, removing all likelihood of in-person private dining events for the foreseeable future.
Joshua Schneider says he and his co-founder Jeff Israel figured the path of least resistance was to use the network of chefs it had built and pivot into virtual cooking classes, mainly as a B2C model — so consumers could book these classes on their own. And, at the outset, Cheft saw quite a bit of success, but again, Schneider and Israel worried the model wasn’t sustainable long term.
So, the startup is in the midst of shifting into its third iteration: corporate team building events with a focus on healthy eating and living a more inclusive lifestyle. While still using its network of professional chefs, Cheft is working with companies to provide their employees with a mix of live and virtual events, as well as on-demand video content.
How do you keep these conversations and that interaction alive? I think that’s what food and cooking can do.”
“The main point of focus has been health and wellness. So our chefs will create menus and cooking demos of accessible and easy to cook healthier meals,” Schneider told Built In, adding that the other focus is on DEI since it can provide cooking classes that specifically celebrate or highlight a given culture or region.
“It’s hard for me to speak about it as a middle-aged white guy in the suburbs of Boston, but where I do think I can poke holes is, unfortunately, when companies talk about diversity and inclusion, it’s often a checklist,” he continued. “How do you keep those conversations and that interaction alive? I think that’s what food and cooking can do.”
To date, Cheft has built up its network to about 40 chefs, about 12 of whom it uses on a regular basis. Looking ahead, Schneider says he would like to grow that network as well as build the larger business here in Boston, and grow as a new entrepreneur. Interestingly, Schneider has no culinary experience at all. He is a licensed attorney who had been working in corporate marketing for a decade when he co-founded Cheft on the side. While he seems to have managed to do something pretty incredible — launch and grow a new startup at an incredibly difficult time for the industry — he says he still has a lot to learn.
“There’s so much opportunity in Boston that I don’t want to just build this company on my own and say, ‘Hey, I happen to live in Boston.’ I also want to be as active as I can be in the community, trying to learn from others who have had deeper experiences than I do,” he said. There’s a lot that I can learn. And then hopefully there will be opportunities for me to give back as well.”
Dispense (Cannatech)
In just a few short years, cannabis has gone from largely illegal to a multi-billion dollar operation here in the U.S. As of today, recreational pot is legal in 18 states, plus the District of Columbia, and medical-use cannabis is legal in 36 states. But, as long as the drug remains federally banned, different states are going to have different rules and regulations, which can make running a cannabis business pretty tricky, says Boston entrepreneur Kyla Moore.
That’s why she and her co-founder Tim Officer have created Dispense, an e-commerce and order management platform designed specifically for dispensaries.
Interestingly, Dispense didn’t start out in the cannabis industry. It grew out of another local startup Moore co-founded with Officer called Tabel List, which served as a ticketing, reservation and guest management platform for businesses in hospitality. Like so many other businesses in the space, the company had to get creative amid the pandemic, so it began working with a cannabis dispensary in Illinois to help manage their customers. Eventually, the dispensary kept asking for more and more features, and Dispense was born.
“That was when we realized that there’s really a need for this. They were just so starving for good technology to really help them operate, and it clearly wasn’t available to them,” Moore told Built In. “[In the cannabis industry], there are a lot of points of sale, a lot of brands, but very little technology that actually focuses on the needs of the retailers and their customers. That’s where Dispense comes in. We partner with retailers to give them the tools to operate more efficiently and to create better customer experience.”
I had a baby girl on a Thursday and signed a term sheet on the following Monday. It was really exciting.”
So far, the model seems to have really taken off. Dispense has processed more than half-a-million orders across five states in a matter of months, and the company recently closed on a $2 million seed round. And this has all been done with just Moore and Officer working full-time — while Moore was also, for some of the time, pregnant.
“Actually when we were raising our seed round I was in my third trimester, pitching to investors,” she said. “I had a baby girl on a Thursday and signed a term sheet on the following Monday. It was really exciting.”
Looking ahead, Moore says Dispense is working to grow beyond just its core team of two, further innovate its product, and continue growing its user base.
humanID (Privacy Tech)
The internet seems to have been taken over by bot accounts — Facebook alone blocks billions of them quarterly. While these fake accounts are great at automatically generating content, which is effective when it comes to things like marketing and political activism, they are also at the center of the ongoing fight against the spread of misinformation when it comes to hot-button issues like presidential elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We’re talking about millions of accounts around the world that look like real human beings,” Cambridge-based entrepreneur Bastian Purrer told Built In. “These accounts upload content, or follow people, or comment, or retweet in order to get that content seen by more people and also believed by more people, creating social proof. That has a massive, massive effect on our society.”
That is why he and his co-founder Namik Muduroglu created humanID, an open source anonymous login service that both blocks bot networks and protects users’ privacy.
We should feel safe to express our opinions, but we should also speak with one voice and only one voice.”
In practice, humanID replaces the typical trappings of the login process like emails, passwords and Google reCAPTCHA (that exercise that proves you aren’t a robot) with an online identity that is completely anonymous and private, meaning no data gets stored permanently on the website being logged into. Users simply have to verify their unique phone number, which humanID immediately deletes. This ensures that whatever site the user is logging into doesn’t receive any personal identifying information, but rather a unique identifier that cannot be traced back to the user themselves.
It also limits the user to one account, making it much harder to create millions of automated bot accounts. The goal, says Purrer, is to create “protection, safety and privacy on the one hand, but also accountability,” likening it to the U.S. election process.
“When we vote, we take it for granted that everyone just has one vote, and that one vote is anonymous and secret,” Purrer said. “We believe the same should be true for society in general. We should feel safe to express our opinions, but we all should speak with one voice and only one voice.”
Interestingly, humanID is a nonprofit, is open source, and all of its code is publicly visible — a decision the founders said they made in order to ensure long-term trust with their users. The startup is also volunteer-driven, and has attracted talent from some of the top universities and tech organizations in the world. It recently received the Harvard Innovation Award, and has attracted thousands of users to date.
Moonbeam (Entertainment Tech)
When you say the name Paul English around Boston, most people will probably think of travel. English is considered an early pioneer in the city’s travel tech industry, having co-founded popular online travel agency Kayak back in 2004 and business travel startup Lola in 2015 (which recently announced it is being acquired by Capital One). Now, he’s switching gears completely and taking on the billion-dollar podcast industry with a new startup: Moonbeam.
English is a “heavy duty” podcast listener, favoring popular shows like Freakonomics and more hidden gems like Poetry Unbound. However, he says he’s always found it difficult to discover new content or maintain ongoing relationships with the shows he already likes. English calls these two problems “discovery and interaction,” and he tackles both of them with Moonbeam.
When they first open the Moonbeam app, users are greeted with a short audio clip of a given podcast, and if they don’t like it they can just swipe up and listen to a different one, sifting through before they land on something that interests them. Every time a user likes, shares, skips or chooses to listen to a given podcast, Moonbeam’s machine learning system improves, with the aim of providing increasingly better suggestions over time. English likens the model to popular social media platform TikTok.
I want to become the favorite podcast player for a large number of people, and I want people to become addicted to it the way I’m addicted to it.”
“I’m obsessed with TikTok,” he told Built In. “It kind of figures out what you want just by how you interact with it, and we’re trying to do the same thing for podcasts...The idea is, the more you use Moonbeam, the better it will be at discovering content for you.”
While perhaps best known for his contributions to the travel industry, English has been a serial entrepreneur for decades, launching startups in security and e-commerce as well. At the center of all these companies is design.
“With each new challenge I take on, it’s always about getting better and better design. Can I design something that is really fun and incredibly fast with really good transitions and very subtle animations? And I think we’ve done a pretty good job [with Moonbeam],” he said. “I want the app to be known for its design. I want to become the favorite podcast player for a large number of people, and I want people to become addicted to it the way that I’m addicted to it.”
Troav (Delivery Tech)
As friends attending Harvard, Harshal Singh and George Moe were always tinkering with ideas and building small projects. One of those projects was a small brick-and-mortar rental store out of their dorm. When the pandemic hit, they and the rest of Harvard’s student body were forced to leave campus and go back home, so they had to take their ad-hoc “store” online.
“We realized that, for small businesses across the entire world, shipping is this huge, huge barrier to entry that makes e-commerce more challenging, that makes it more frustrating. It makes the experience for their customers a lot less seamless,” Singh told Built In. “Shopping online should be as easy as shopping in person. And a big part of that is being able to get your products as soon as possible and right when you need them in a seamless and easy way.”
So, he and Moe decided to create Troav, a last-mile delivery startup that can get food, snacks and non-prescription drugs like Advil and Tylenol to a customer’s door in just five minutes. In the months since its launch, it has already delivered thousands of orders around Boston and has plans to expand soon.
Shopping online should be as easy as shopping in person.”
Of course, Troav is entering a space that is already pretty crowded, with companies like Uber, Amazon and DoorDash continuing to expand their last-mile delivery businesses. A similar startup called DOMI was even featured in last quarter’s Built In NYC Future 5. But one of the things that sets Troav apart is its treatment of its drivers. Singh says the startup pays its drivers a living wage of $20 an hour, regardless of how many deliveries they make. The goal, says Moe, is to create a “positivity loop” for drivers, the customers and the business at-large.
“Faster deliveries means that we can do more deliveries. More deliveries means that we can carry more value. More value means we can invest more in our team, and a better team means we can make faster, better deliveries,” Moe told Built In.
Troav currently has a team of about 25 drivers, along with five full-time employees. For now, it is only making deliveries around the Boston area, but Singh says it will likely expand into new markets in the near future, which means it will need to add more delivery drivers and members to its tech team.
