Bullish on Boston!

TechCrunch Conference April 25

Author

Michael Morgenstern
April 16, 2024

Happy Tuesday Brex community,

With the upcoming TechCrunch conference happening on April 25 in Boston, it’s a great opportunity to highlight that tech startup hub, which is sometimes overshadowed by NYC & SF, but is consistently in the top 3 cities in terms of VC funding, both from a total dollars & number of deals.

As a reminder, some of the household names that came out of the Boston startup scene & are public companies:

  • HubSpot: Founded in ‘06, HubSpot is a leading inbound marketing and sales platform. The company went public in ‘14 and now has market cap of ~$33B

  • Akamai Technologies: Founded in ‘98, Akamai is a leading content delivery network (CDN) services provider, with a market cap of ~$15 billion.

  • Wayfair: Founded in ‘02, Wayfair is an e-commerce company specializing in home goods. The company went public in ‘14 and has experienced rapid growth, with a market cap of ~$7B

  • DraftKings: Founded in ‘12, DraftKings is a leading fantasy sports and online sports betting company. The company went public through a SPAC merger in ‘20 and with a market cap of ~$21B

Boston is a great place for tech startups due to its strong ecosystem that combines top-tier universities, a highly skilled workforce, access to capital, and a supportive network of accelerators and incubators. Some of the sectors that Boston excels in: healthcare, biotech, fintech , robotics, AI, security, climate tech, crypto, etc. We continue to be bullish on Boston!

If you are a Founder or VC, we will be in town on April 25, here are the details on the mixer we are hosting.  

P.S. Good luck to the Boston Celtics in the upcoming NBA playoffs!

Growing together, Shai Goldman

Upcoming Events:

  • Brex Supper Club (VC Platform Summit) Miami 4/16

    Designed as a conversational dinner specifically for heads of platform

    Apply Here Brex Host: Michael Morgenstern 

  • Pups & Lattes with Brex 4/17 in LA

    Bring your fur baby and hang with founders and investors building Seed/Series A+ companies.

    Apply Here Brex Host: Anshul Shah

  • Startup Grind Founder & VC Happy Hour 4/23 in Redwood City

    Designed as a happy hour post Startup Grind to debrief the day's content and learnings.

    Apply Here: Brex Host: Jason Mok

  • Brex Founder & VC Mixer 4/24 in SF

    Designed as a mixer for founders and VCs overlooking one of the cities best views

    Apply Here Brex Host: Anshul Shah

  • 43North x Brex Female VC Happy Hour 4/24 in NYC

    Designed to be an intimate and focused session

    Apply Here Brex Host: Erica Wenger

  • Founder and VC Happy Hour 4/25 in Boston

    Designed as a curated group of Founders and VCs.

    Apply Here Brex Host: Shai Goldman

Startup of the Week 🤩 

Santiago Aparicio is the Co-founder and CEO of Ontop.

Ontop is a SaaS global payroll solution that helps companies build international teams easily. With their top-notch platform, you can seamlessly initiate the process of building your global team with just a few clicks, managing and paying your international workforce, no matter where they are located around the globe. Ontop enables you to make payments in under 5 minutes, create and sign contracts, easily customize, filter, and update the details of your team members in mere seconds, ensuring efficiency and accuracy in your HR operations.

Ambassadors Perspective:  Ontop is aligning perfectly with scaling companies as they expand globally. In a market where quick market capture is essential for rapid success, Ontop's efficient platform and channels are making it a standout startup to watch. Their ability to streamline global payroll processes not only simplifies international team management but also accelerates the operational scaling of businesses aiming for global reach.

Venture Capitalist Spotlight 🤩 

 Ryan Pruitt is a Managing Director at Ocean Azul Partners

Ocean Azul is an operator-led VC firm helping entrepreneurs bring innovative technology solutions to market. Ocean Azul’s focus is on Seed to Series A stage B2B software and deep tech companies using applied AI, robotics, and/or connectivity technologies to solve new challenges created by emerging technologies and trends or disrupt established industries ready to adopt new technology.

Ocean Azul was founded in 2017, and has since raised approximately $54 million across two funds (OA Fund I and OA Fund II), which has been invested into 40 portfolio companies. Ocean Azul focuses 75% of each fund into U.S. companies, and the remaining 25% into the Israeli start-up ecosystem, where we have deep ties and strong relationships. Ocean Azul was recently named a Top 10 Deep Tech Venture Capital Firms in the U.S. and continues to leverage their industry and tech experience to bring value to their portfolio companies and limited partners.

Before joining Ocean Azul, Ryan had a successful 10-year career at Deloitte that started in his hometown of Miami, Florida and took him all the way to Sydney, Australia, where he lived and worked for 7 years.

Connect with us

The financial stack that scales with you. 🤩 Trusted by 1 in 3 US startups, Brex allows you to manage your spend from MVP to IPO. Interested? Sign up here using the referral code NEWSLETTER and get 25,000 bonus points, $5K AWS credits, $2.5K OpenAI credits and up to $150K in SaaS discounts.

Don’t hesitate to reach out,🦾!

Startups Team @ Brex