Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help thousands of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups, founders, and local builders putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
July Presenting Partners:
TLDR:
Chris Nelson, CRO at HYCU - the modern AI & data protection company helping enterprises protect, back up, and recover data across on-prem infrastructure, native cloud, and SaaS applications
Derek Bugley, CEO at Vardera - building the computer vision layer for collectible commerce, meeting retailers, marketplaces, and eComm platforms at the point of sale
Thanks to Nevin Stevens at Google Cloud & Peter Zotto at Trove for the intro
Neeraj, Director of Research at Blitzy - Neeraj’s team has one job: prove the Blitzy platform works on the hardest software engineering tasks on the planet
Episode 2: Code & Cobblestones - optionality, startup org charts & trends from around the startup ecosystem
Thanks to Justin Obey at Obey Creative for the partnership
Founder & Operator Night - apply to join us Downtown on Wed, 7/22 to hear Startups pitch to Operators as they enter hypergrowth, co-hosted by TNT & Ryan Smith with Day.ai, GrowthFactor, Nebulock, Civic Roundtable, VoiceRun, Lexi, etc.
Thanks to Ryan Smith for spearheading
MGMT Life Sciences Launch - we’ve got a new vertical here at MGMT. Tune in!
MGMT Boston 2026 Startup Partners: Blitzy / Suno / HYCU / OnRamp / WHOOP
We’ll be creating media all year alongside these standout teams! More to come!
Around the Hub on MGMT Boston’s News Feed:
Other Resources:
Code & Cobblestones - alongside my co-host, Will Lehmann at Step Function, we’re going to be bringing you the here & now from top founders & builders here in Boston - Thanks to Justin Obey at Obey Creative for all the hard work getting this off the ground
Open Market and The Art of The Possible - once upon a time in Cambridge, 30 years ago, a buzzy Web 1.0 startup went public with $1.8M in trailing revenue. These are their lessons for the age of AI
MGMT Boston Operators Club - a community and opportunity engine for 125+ Boston based up & coming venture backed operators
Boston Tech Big Board - 2026 Startups to Watch
Welcome Chris Nelson, CRO at HYCU on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥
HYCU is the modern AI & data protection company helping enterprises protect, back up, and recover data across on-prem infrastructure, native cloud, and SaaS applications.
HYCU’s platform is built on an open, secure, and flexible architecture, with no reliance on hardware or a single provider.
🔍 What is HYCU building with the AI tailwinds behind the business? 🔎
Chris says the strategy hasn’t changed in 10 years, but AI has supercharged it.
Beyond the customer experience, AI is transforming how teams actually use data protection data, repurposing it and surfacing real insights from what that data is telling them.
💡 Everyone in the space says “resilience.” How does HYCU actually deliver it? 💡
For Chris, true resilience means cleanly protecting data, having it in the right place at the right time, and being able to recover it when it matters most.
HYCU delivers that through independence and mobility, no hardware dependence, no single location or provider, plus choice around source and target data and a real data sovereignty story.
It comes down to the architecture of the platform, something competitors can’t claim.
🤔 What should CIOs know before signing a multi-year agreement in this space? 🤔
Future-proofing. There are a lot of legacy players bolting acquired platforms together to chase these problems.
Chris urges buyers to look long and hard at whether solutions are truly integrated, easy to use, and fast to deliver time to value.
🤝 How can we help HYCU grow? 🤝
Hardware shortages are real, and CISOs and CIOs are facing a whole new set of problems that didn’t exist a year ago. HYCU offers a flexible, scalable, secure platform, the market leader in native cloud and now native SaaS.
If you’re building your backup and recovery plan for the rest of 2026 and beyond, check them out!
You’ll be hearing from HYCU this summer at MGMT Boston, rapidly scaling right here in Boston
Welcome Derek Bugley, CEO at Vardera on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥
Vardera is building the computer vision layer for collectible commerce.
Anytime a card, coin, or comic gets graded, identified, and authenticated today it's done by a person. This process can take months and costs real money.
Vardera does it in under a second, with a higher degree of accuracy.
🏗️ What is Vardera building in 2026? 🏗️
Vardera meets retailers, marketplaces, and eComm platforms at the point of sale.
Their team has already turned down multiple acquisition offers in the last 6-12 months and are rapidly approaching their Series A milestones.
Their image recognition platform photographs a video game, trading card, or comic in store then identifies it and returns a price and grade instantly so the store can issue credit or resell.
Listing on eBay, Whatnot, or TikTok? Vardera serves as the point of reference in real time, even during live auctions. They're also building fraud and counterfeit detection for returns on the back end.
Boston has a rich sports collectible legacy, and the incumbents are pausing submissions to grading bodies like PSA and PCGS. The faster the team builds, the faster they can get to scale with large marketplaces and the brand name retailers they're already working with.
🤔 What would Derek share with other founders in the AI era? 🤔
AI aside, spend time building in the hardest spaces and problems.
Don't shortcut it, and don't fall into the hype of companies raising money. Spend time with good people building really hard things.
🤝 How can we help Vardera? 🤝
Some of the world's best computer vision and machine learning labs are in Boston.
Vardera is hiring! If you're interested in learning more about how to authenticate and grade collectibles, reach out and meet the team.
Welcome Neeraj Deshmukh, Director of Engineering and Head of Research at Blitzy on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥
Blitzy is building autonomous software development for the enterprise, orchestrating thousands of AI agents to ship tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of production ready code in one shot
🧠 What does Blitzy Research actually do? 🧠
Neeraj's team has one job: prove the platform works on the hardest software engineering tasks on the planet.
They put Blitzy against every major player in the space through public benchmarks, and they've been hitting it out of the park.
After a standout SWE-bench Verified run last year, Blitzy set the world record on SWE-Bench Pro with a 66.5%, beating the next closest score by 7.4 points, independently verified by Quesma.
⚙️ How does Blitzy orchestrate thousands of agents at once? ⚙️
The magic is their infinite code context layer.
Agents spawn other agents on an “as-needed” basis. And because Blitzy represents your entire codebase (even 100M+ lines) as a knowledge graph, each agent only follows the relevant parts it needs.
No agent gets overwhelmed, and there's no ceiling on the cumulative context Blitzy brings to a task. Think of it as a super-powered engineer on your team who understands your entire codebase whether you're adding a feature, refactoring, or changing the architecture.
As Neeraj proudly shared “We use Blitzy to implement Blitzy"
🏋 What problems does the research team work on? 🏋
The team is growing fast, and there's real work to do: evaluating new frontier models against Blitzy's internal benchmarks, designing novel evaluation problems, and building new platform capabilities with the agent orchestration framework.
Researchers here don't just publish, they ship directly into the platform.
🤝 How can we help Blitzy grow? 🤝
Six months ago Blitzy was a third of its current size, and the Kendall Square team is still hiring aggressively across research and engineering.
If you're a PhD or senior engineer in Boston who wants to work on frontier agentic systems at the newest unicorn in the ecosystem, reach out to Neeraj and the Blitzy team.
Here at MGMT Boston we’ll be going inside Blitzy all summer long to learn how this championship team is being built, rapidly scaling in Kendall Square
Why "optionality" is now the most important word in your AI stack, and what the Fable shutdown taught enterprise leaders
What a startup org chart looks like 12 months out, and why design now comes in at hire one through ten
How Lovable opened software building from 25 million developers to nearly everyone, with a go-to-market team growing fast in Boston
Why WHOOP's focus is its advantage in physical AI at a $10B-plus valuation
A hedge fund rule from Adage Capital that applies to building any company: take risk only where you have an edge
Why the new "haves" in a K-shaped economy are defined by skill, not capital
Timestamps:
00:00: Cold open: the phone screen that went sideways
02:59: Quick hits: Fable, Mythos, and the kill switch
07:09: Lovable, vibe coding, and opening the aperture
12:06: WHOOP, focus, and Physical AI
15:41: The main topic: what a company looks like in 12 months
17:42: Org charts, design, and enterprise sales in the AI era
29:34: Closing takeaways and how to plug into Boston tech
Any feedback for us? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups, founders, or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.