How do you know something is a hot topic on the internet? By the number of times it's googled, duh!
Going by that benchmark, one of the hot topics in the startup universe over the past year was 'startups in stealth.' The term 'stealth mode startups' was tagged as a rising topic with over 140 percent increase in queries over 2018. In its new report, ‘Stealth Capital Report,’ San Francisco-based Brex, a company that offers corporate credit cards to startups said that about 3-5 percent of companies in the startup market are in stealth mode attracting over $1.43 billion in two years.
While machine learning, robotics and autonomous vehicles were touted as three major areas with most stealth startups, the Brex analysis identified fintech and healthcare as attracting most stealth capital, compared to AI and security that ranked in the top 40th percentile of stealth VC investment. If you're a longtime reader of BostInno, you're probably familiar with the eleven stealth startups we were watching in 2018.
But as we wrap up the year, listed below are startups that made a splash by emerging out of stealth in Boston.
Berkshire Grey
This secretive robotics startup that was under the radar since 2013 finally emerged out of stealth and revealed that it is working on a variety of machines that can automate huge chunks of the e-commerce logistics operation. The startup was founded by the former chief technology officer of iRobot Corp. Tom Wagner, and has backing from investors like Khosla Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Canaan Partners and former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt.
Carrot
In October this year, third-time entrepreneur Stuart Levinson launched Carrot, a leadership communication tool that provides what Slack doesn't, by taking a top-down approach to leadership communication. On Carrot, team leaders and C-suite executives can post announcements and updates via Slack. Carrot is Stuart Levinson’s third startup in communication technology. His first company, Venetica was a content integration software that was sold to IBM in 2004. His second company, messaging tool TalkTo, was sold to photo-sharing and messaging company Path in 2014.
DUST Identity
A Boston startup that makes diamond-based authentication system emerged out of stealth mode in November with $2.3 million in seed funding. DUST Identity uses a coating of tiny diamonds to create a unique, invisible I.D. on any item. The startup said that the round was led by Kleiner Perkins. New York-based New Science Ventures, London-based Angular Ventures and Cambridge, Mass.-based Castle Island Ventures also participated in the round.
Forge.AI
After more than one year in stealth mode, Forge.AI, analytics and artificial intelligence company came out of stealth with $11 million in Series A funding in December this year. Co-founded by Jim Crowley, Jennifer Lum and Jack Crowley, the company streamlines data feeds thanks to both natural language understanding technologies and its proprietary self-learning knowledge graph.
Larissa Technologies
Larissa Technologies, a startup launched out of MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund, emerged from stealth in December 2018. The startup uses artificial intelligence to create one-minute-long animated videos with post-surgery instructions to reduce misunderstanding between doctors and patients who don’t speak English well. Larissa's two of three co-founders – Arthur Celestin and Jon Van Ornam – are resident physicians at Beth Israel and MGH who teamed up with Erdem Yilmaz, an MIT-trained engineer.
Perceptive Automata
Perceptive Automata, a Somerville-based startup that builds software that teaches autonomous vehicles to watch humans as humans do, emerged out of stealth mode in July this year with a $3 million seed round from First Round Capital and Slow Ventures. The startup's CTO Sam Anthony is a vision scientist who studies human predictive behavior. And one of the co-founders, David Cox, is a vision science and a computer science expert who puts this research into action (in software) with machine learning tools.
Randori
Boston-based Randori, a startup that claims to be the “industry’s first nation-state caliber attack platform,” founded by Brian Hazzard, who was one of the first employees at Waltham-based cybersecurity startup Carbon Black emerged out of stealth mode in October with $9.75 million seed funding led by Accomplice Ventures, with participation from .406 Ventures and Legion Capital. The startup will develop an attack platform that will launch ‘real attacks’ on companies, emulating advanced hacks and threats companies face today.
TideLift
TideLift, a startup that aims to “make open source software work better for developers and users emerged out of stealth in May this year with backing from General Catalyst that led a $15M Series A round in the company. TideLift’s CEO and co-founder, Donald Fischer was also a venture partner at General Catalyst. Its other co-founders include Havoc Pennington, a former senior software architect at Continuum Analytics; Jeremy Katz, a former staff software engineer at Google; and Luis Villa, a former Wikimedia Foundation employee.
WaveSense
WaveSense, a Somerville-based startup that makes navigation systems, came out of stealth mode in August to unveil a product for self-driving vehicles. The product is a patented military-proven ground-penetrating radar that helps self-driving vehicles stay in-lane. The MIT-born startup’s technology continually scans the subsurface soil layers, rocks and road bedding about 126 times per second and compares the scans to its onboard image database to determine the exact vehicle position in relation to the road.
Vyasa Analytics
Newburyport-based deep learning startup Vyasa Analytics came out of stealth in January 2018. The startup's deep learning software platform is meant primarily for companies in life sciences and health care. Founded by Dr. Christopher Bouton, a life scientist and neurobiologist, the company is named after Vyasa, a revered figure in Hinduism who is considered to be the author of the epic, Mahabharata.
