There’s nothing quite as exciting as watching an innovative, promising startup bust out of stealth mode with a game-changing product and confident backers.
This year, Boston tech saw a slew of young companies hit the ground running with impressive rounds of seed funding and much fanfare. Here are five startups that made a splash emerging from stealth mode in 2018 — and we expect you’ll hear a lot more from them in 2019.
In mid-November, DUST Identity launched out of stealth mode, raising $2.3 million in seed funding in the process. The startup, whose technology was developed at MIT, created the first unclonable security tracking solution for hardware authentication using nanodiamonds, or diamond particles so small that they are measured in nanometers. The startup developed its core technology under a DARPA-funded program and turned it into a commercial product for modern supply chain and manufacturing security. Today, DUST is working with some of the U.S. government’s biggest agencies as well as tech leaders in supply chain and business operations to protect their most critical assets.
After a year in stealth mode, Forge.AI emerged in early December with an impressive $11 million Series A round under its belt. The Cambridge-based company is on a mission to make sense of unstructured data — aka 80 percent of the world’s data — like social media posts, news reports and SEC filings. Forge.AI plans on helping businesses make use of it all through AI, leveraging natural language technologies and a proprietary self-learning knowledge graph. Their most recent investment was led by Underscore VC with participation from Accomplice, Boston Seed Capital, Imagination Capital and Project 11 Ventures. Co-founder Jennifer Lum said the investment will be used to aggressively grow the team and ramp up product development.
Perceptive Automata, provider of human behavior prediction software for autonomous vehicles, emerged from stealth mode in July 2018 with $3 million in seed funding in the bag. In October, the Somerville-based startup raised another $16 million, led by JAZZ Venture Partners. Perceptive Automata’s software uses behavioral science to help vehicles “think” like humans, pedestrians and other motorists so that automated cars can drive predictably, and safely, on human-dominated roads. The funding will be used to recruit talented engineers to enhance Perceptive Automata’s human intuition AI software and to grow the company’s product development and customer implementation teams.
Highly secretive robotics company Berkshire Grey emerged from stealth mode in early December 2018, announcing that it had been quietly deploying AI-enabled robots at more than 100 retailers and fulfillment centers. Customers using these smart robotic systems can automate tasks like picking, packing and sorting for e-commerce, retail and logistics. And according to Berkshire Grey, the robots are way faster and more accurate than humans. Today, the BG team sits at 100 people, and the startup told Built In Boston they expect to triple in 2019.
Want an attacker’s perspective on your business? Randori can give you one. In October 2018, cybersecurity startup Randori emerged from stealth mode with a hefty $9.75 million in funding led by Accomplice Ventures, with participation from .406 Ventures and Legion Capital. The company says it has created the industry’s first “nation-state caliber attack platform” that can simulate real cyberattacks on customers, providing real-time feedback into how prepared enterprises are, and more importantly, how attackers perceive their security infrastructure. The funding will be used to scale the Boston-based company’s engineering and product teams.
