Boston Metal

Spun out of MIT in 2012, Boston Metal replaces pollution-heavy techniques to transform metals with electricity. Its molten oxide electrolysis process uses electricity to transform metals from their raw oxide form into molten metal products, creating the potential to decarbonize the massive steel manufacturing industry. In January, billionaire-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures led a $20 million investment round in the company. 

In November, Boston Metal announced a strategic partnership with Canadian minerals company Largo Resources to further advance its molten oxide electrolysis testing. 

Elemental Machines

Founded by life sciences entrepreneur Sridhar Iyengar, the former head of medical device company Misfit, Elemental Machines has quietly exploded over the last two years, at least tripling its revenue year-over-year since 2017. The startup aims to “debug the physical world” by measuring variables like temperature, light and humidity that could impact scientific experiments. Last year, it raised $9 million in a Series A round led by Digitalis Ventures; at the same time, it announced a partnership with Waltham-based PerkinElmer, a diagnostics, life science and industrial testing company.

FutureFuel.io

At nearly four years old, the Back Bay fintech startup is making moves. FutureFuel.io just raised a Series A round worth $11.2 million in March to bolster its mission: to help employees pay back their student debt via a SaaS platform for employer benefits. Co-founder Laurel Taylor, a veteran of Google Cambridge, was inspired to create the startup when even she, with a perfect credit score, could not get a reasonable interest rate to pay the loans she incurred earning her MBA for MIT Sloan. In 2018, FutureFuel.io won the Payment and FinTech category for the 10th Accelerator Pitch Event at SXSW.

Haven

After a quiet launch in 2018, Haven, the health care startup built by the combined forces of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase, unveiled itself with a name in March. With surgeon and writer Atul Gawande at the helm as CEO, the company has hired veteran health care professionals, including now-COO Jack Stoddard, the former general manager for digital health at Comcast and a top executive at health benefits startup Accolade. Meanwhile, Dana Safran, the former chief performance measurement and improvement officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, was hired as the head of measurement. 

Haven’s promise: To create new solutions and change technologies, contracts policy and more in a “relentless” pursuit to make health care better. We’re watching Haven closely as it relocates to Downtown Boston and continues a hiring spree. 

Hydrow

Harvard Square-based Hydrow, a maker of connected rowers that allow users to digitally row with professionals, wants to be the Peloton of rowing. Formerly known as True Rowing, Hydrow was founded in 2017 by former U.S. National Team Rowing Coach and entrepreneur Bruce Smith. In February this year, the startup raised $20 million from L Catterton, a private equity firm that has also backed Peloton, Equinox, CorePower Yoga and Bodytech.

Hydrow has also inked a partnership with Best Buy. In 2020, Hydrow wants to focus on expanding its features with "on the mat" offerings to include strength training/HIIT exercise options. 

Legacy

Legacy, a Harvard i-lab startup offering human sperm cryobanking, bills itself as the “Uber for sperm.” The startup provides an easy and convenient way to deposit, freeze and store sperm, upending the fertility industry. Legacy has made it to MassChallenge and YCombinator and won TechCrunch Disrupt. In June, the company raised $1.5 million in new funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. 

Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, Legacy has offices in Cambridge, London, Toronto and Dubai. Founder Khaled Kteily told BostInno that the company plans to dabble in organic juice rich in vitamins and minerals for the purpose of boosting sperm quality. 

Motif FoodWorks

Ginkgo Bioworks’ latest spinoff, Motif FoodWorks—originally called Motif Ingredients—launched in February with $90 million in Series A funding. Within six months, the company had raised $27.5 million in an extended round of funding and rebranded to Motif FoodWorks. Billing itself as a food ingredients company, Motif FoodWorks wants to develop alternative proteins. It has 15 products in its pipeline with a focus on dairy nutritional products. Earlier this month, the startup announced a partnership with the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, to test and identify new formulations to improve the texture of plant-based meat products through in vitro processing. 

Motif FoodWorks counts Breakthrough Energy Ventures, General Atlantic and Viking Global Investors among its founding investors. Heading up the company as CEO is John McInyre, who previously served as the head of global snacks at PepsiCo and the head of R&D and Indigo Ag.

Neural Magic

Some would argue that the world is being transformed by artificial intelligence. If that is true, Somerville-based Neural Magic has some imperative technological changes to offer. The startup, founded by MIT scientists Nir Shavit and Dr. Alex Matveev, is pioneering a “no-hardware AI” model with its software-only solution. The company’s software processes deep-learning workloads on CPUs, eliminating the need for the specialized hardware usually required for that kind of computation.

Neural Magic’s approach means it has the potential to disrupt, taking on industry heavyweights like NVIDIA, AMD and Asus. The first use case is its “Inference Engine” system, which is being used for real-time recommendation systems and image recognition applications.

Notarize

The public notary platform has come a long way since its founding in 2015. Just last year, Notarize announced its plans to expand to Texas and Nevada, adding to its offices in Boston’s Back Bay and Arlington, Virginia. And in October, the company signed a partnership with cloud storage giant Dropbox to make its online notarization services available to all users of the cloud-based file storage and sharing software. The notarization services will be available through a dedicated extension on Dropbox. In an interview with our sister publication the Boston Business Journal, CEO Pat Kinsel called the deal a “game changer” for Notarize and valued the partnership at “several million dollars.”

Ori

The Boston-based architectural robotics company—already featured as one of 2018’s 50 on Fire in hardware—is attracting the attention of some major players. Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), invested in Ori in September, leading a $20 million Series B round. At the same time, Ori announced that Edwin Hendriksen would become Ori’s president and a board member, joining from WeLive, The We Company’s residential counterpart to WeWork. In June, Ori partnered with IKEA to release a line of robotic furniture for consumers.  Ori now plans to broaden its focus beyond furniture; its next step will be partnering with architects and builders on designing urban housing and affordable spaces. 

Polis

When Kendall Tucker founded Polis in 2015, it started as a door-to-door canvassing app to help politicians keep better track of their door-knocking campaigns during elections. Then, during the 2016 presidential election, Polis ended up working with 109 organizations across the political spectrum and the campaigns of Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson. In February this year, Polis raised its first VC-backed seed round led by Haystack VC, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based VC and PE firm that invested in DoorDash and Instacart. Its next step? Expanding beyond politics to work with the energy, telecommunications and home security industries. 

RightHand Robotics

Somerville startup RightHand Robotics makes autonomous robots that specialize in pick-and-place systems. The five-year-old startup has created a robotic "hand" that can pick up objects of various sizes and textures—a notoriously difficult problem in robotics. Recently, the startup unveiled RightPick2, the second generation of its piece-picking solution capable of lifting up to two kilograms. RightPick2 is also loaded with depth-sensing cameras from Intel and an updated version of RightHand’s vision and motion control software. In October, RightHand Robotics established a subsidiary in Japan, an extension of its partnership with Paltac Corporation, Japan’s largest wholesaler of consumer packaged goods. The Japanese entity, RightHand Robotics GK, will serve the e-commerce market in Japan and the rest of Asia Pacific. 

Skyhawk Therapeutics

Less than two years after launching with $8 million in seed financing, Skyhawk Therapeutics, which is focused on the discovery and development of small-molecule therapeutics that correct RNA expression, has inked deal after deal with major drug companies. In July, Skyhawk scored a $600 million partnership with Merck, under which an undisclosed Merck subsidiary will have exclusive intellectual property rights for cancer and neurological disease treatments. That’s just one more pharma giant to add to its cadre: Skyhawk has also partnered with Biogen, Celgene and Takeda, among others.

Sprout Studios

A concept-to-launch design studio rooted in tech and innovation, Sprout Studios just celebrated its fifth anniversary—and it’s just getting started. Last month, the firm earned a coveted spot on TIME’s annual Best Invention list for an underwater vehicle that detects microplastic content in the ocean, which Sprout Studios created in collaboration with the Cambridge-based lab Draper. Since 2014, the firm has quadrupled in size, with more than 30 creatives at its new headquarters in the South End and more in its Brooklyn, Denver and San Diego offices. In addition to its design work, Sprout Studios is also home to Sprout Labs, an internal incubator for products, brands and experiences invented by Sprout. The incubator expects to spin out five new companies next year.

Takeoff Technologies

Another robotics company, nine miles west of Somerville, is the world’s first robotic supermarket maker. 

Takeoff Technologies, founded by three Harvard Business School alumni, specializes in  grocery-sorting robots meant to reduce the number and size of grocery stores. The company’s model aims to replace big supermarkets with miniature warehouses where customers can pick up their orders after placing them online. Takeoff has announced partnerships with several supermarket chains this year, following on the heels of a $25 million fundraise in September. These include deals with companies like Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize and Woolworths. 

The company is poised to release an advanced version of its micro-fulfillment solution in 2020 that will feature a smaller and cleaner floorspace design, faster order-picking and more storage capacity.

Tulip

The Somerville-based developer of a no-code manufacturing app platform raised a monster Series B round worth $39.5 million in September, led by industry giants DMG MORI, Vertex Ventures, NEA and Pitango. The startup is on the precipice of some serious moves. The Series B round also kicked off an official partnership with DMG MORI, the world’s leading manufacturer of machine tools. DMG MORI customers will be able to customize Tulip apps to suit their machine tools for better productivity on the manufacturing floor. Beyond Boston, Tulip is expanding its presence in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Japan; it just opened a European headquarters in Munich, Germany.

Vinci VR

Founded by Babson College undergrad Eagle Wu, Vinci VR has some heavyweight clientele: the U.S. Air Force, for one. In September, the startup scored a $1 million contract with the Air Force to create next-generation virtual reality training technologies. Wu and his small team are tasked with both developing and deploying their technology into active Air Force units currently training airmen. That follows a previous nondilutive grant from the Air Force to train engineers on aircraft maintenance. Turning his attention to the private sector, Wu is now poised to work with an undisclosed oil and gas extraction company to design a spatial planning simulation for offshore wind turbines. Wu was featured on BostInno’s 25 Under 25 list in 2018, when he was 21 years old. 

Zapata Computing

Armed with an exclusive license to a portfolio of quantum algorithms from Harvard University, quantum computing startup Zapata Computing is also one of the first users of Cirq, Google’s new open-source software framework for quantum computing. The Cambridge-based startup raised $21 million in a Series A round in April. Now two years old, Zapata Computing promises to bring quantum computing solutions to enterprise software. To that end, the company plans to hire talent in quantum physics and computer science, expanding talent in Boston as well as in Toronto and Barcelona.

Zoba

This Mark Cuban-backed Harvard University spinoff uses spatial analytics to better understand the relationships between different phenomena in order to improve the efficiency of cities. Co-founded by Joseph Brennan and Daniel Brennan in 2016, Zoba is predicting the demand for scooters and bikes in particular areas, as scooter- and bike-sharing are quickly becoming staple commodities in cities. 

To support the mission, the company raised $2.9 million in January in a seed round led by CRV with participation from Founder Collective, Mark Cuban and others. Zoba has raised a total of $3.5 million in venture capital. Following Cuban’s lead, Boston venture capital firm Flybridge Capital also poured money in the company. 

ZwitterCo

Founded in 2018, the Boston-based startup is using nanofiltration membranes—essentially, really small filters that work similar to a coin sorter—to separate out contaminants in wastewater. The appeal? Cleaner wastewater means companies can put water down the drain rather than paying for further refinement, saving money. ZwitterCo, which currently works out of Greentown Labs in Somerville, was awarded $1.25 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy in October in support of the Water Security Grand Challenge. The company currently has $1.1 million in debt financing, according to SEC filings.