Sector: Technology

From the willingness to listen and the ability to innovate in the face of failure, a Boston unicorn is born.

Steve, Aman and Jon were at dinner when they realized the restaurant industry needed a serious tech upgrade. The three MIT grads had met at enterprise software company Endeca, and had been thinking of starting their own company in the mobile commerce space.

The first product they made was a customer-focused mobile payment app, developed in Aman’s basement and launched at a local Boston pub. It flopped.

But that didn’t stop them. They realized that the app was just adding to the restaurant operators’ woes on an already-busy Friday night; servers certainly didn’t need one more thing to juggle. The trio probed further, and discovered that what was really broken was restaurants’ central operating system: the POS. So they shifted gears.

This pivot was critical. Restaurateurs previously reluctant to discuss the mobile payment app would now talk hours about how much they hated their existing POS: they were difficult to operate, poorly serviced, and expensive to fix. Here, indeed, was a big problem worth solving.

Using their background in enterprise software, the team hired restaurant experts and relied heavily on early customer feedback to iteratively build a platform to manage all operations. The platform prioritized mobility, ease of data access and updates, and a better consumer experience.

The company virtually exploded overnight. Two years from being founded, Toast had signed over 1,000 merchants across the United States and grown to over 120 employees, requiring a space upgrade from 7,000 sq ft in Cambridge to 40,000 sq ft at the Hatch Fenway co-working space. In early 2015, Toast brought on Chris Comparato (Acquia, Endeca) as CEO.

Shortly after, they met F-Prime Capital which participated in their first round of institutional round funding, raising $30M; within three years, Toast raised $115mn in Series D funding, and its official unicorn status at a valuation of $1.4bn.

As the company continues to grow, it remains obsessed about customer feedback and hyper-focused about the entire restaurant experience, both cornerstones of its success.

AvantStay

AvantStay delivers exceptional, unique stays for group travelers. The company has built a tech-enabled millennial hospitality brand to be the new standard for group experience. Unlike typical short-term rentals, Avantstay controls the entire guest experience. This allows the company to ensure the quality of a guest’s stay will be consistent across all homes and to deliver hotel-level comfort in an authentic differentiated setting.

Seyond

Seyond (formerly Innovusion) is a leading developer of image-grade LiDAR sensor systems for level 4+ of the autonomous vehicle market. Its unique combination of range, resolution, hardware accelerated sensor fusion, compact size, ease of integration and cost effectiveness makes its products an ideal choice for the most demanding applications.

PharmEasy

PharmEasy is one of India’s largest healthcare delivery platforms. The company helps patients connect with local pharmacy stores and diagnostic centers in order to fulfill their medical needs.

Notable

Notable is an AI powered healthcare company that puts appointments on autopilot. By analyzing historical patterns of practice, Notable proactively automates away hundreds of manual repetitive tasks like adding diagnoses, orders, templates, billing codes, and more.

Nebula Genomics

Nebula Genomics is a human genome sequencing and health big data company on a mission to usher in the era of genomic sequencing by building a large and trusted genomic and health data marketplace for consumers, researchers and the medical community. Using blockchain to ensure that consumers maintain control of their data and are compensated for its use, the Nebula marketplace will aggregate a critical mass of rich genetic information that researchers can analyze in order to accelerate drug development, streamline clinical trials, and usher in the era of truly personalized medicine. Nebula Genomics was acquired by ProPhase Labs in 2021.

Carestack

CareStack™ is a cloud-based platform that combines dental practice management, patient engagement and data analytics.

Simon AI

Simon AI is the first and only enterprise customer data platform with a fully-integrated marketing cloud. Moving beyond the limitations of both categories, Simon’s platform empowers businesses to leverage enterprise-scale big data and machine learning to power customer communications in any channel. Simon’s unique approach allows brands to develop incredible personalization capabilities without needing to build and maintain massive bespoke data infrastructure.

Unison

Unison is the leading provider of home ownership investments, modernizing home financing through long-term partnerships. Unison works with lenders, regulators and institutional investors to integrate home ownership investing into the U.S. housing finance system. Unison HomeBuyer helps purchasers buy the home they want with less debt and risk, typically by doubling the down payment. The larger down payment makes it easier to qualify for a loan, increases buying power, lowers the monthly payment and/or allows a buyer to reserve cash. Unison HomeOwner provides current homeowners with cash to eliminate debt, remodel, pay for school, invest or use as a cash cushion, without the added debt or payments of a home equity loan or HELOC.

Benchling

Benchling is the industry-leading software platform for life science R&D. Purpose-built for biologics, Benchling combines an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN), Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), and a molecular biology design suite into a single, unified, cloud-based platform. It’s trusted by over 200,000 scientists — from pioneering academics and high-growth startups to all of the world’s top 50 biopharma companies.