The Massachusetts economy, supported by strong health and high technology industries, has been recovering faster than the overall U.S. economy. The October jobless rate (8.1%) fell to its lowest level in over a year - a full 1.5% below the national average - and the state has added almost 50,000 new jobs since January. For today’s post, I thought I’d put the spotlight on a small but vibrant segment of the Massachusetts economy: high tech startups.
Below is the top 10 startups with open jobs in the Boston area. The ranking is based on both the perceived potential of the company, and the breadth of job openings. A special thanks to Tom Summit, TalentGraphz founder and local job market expert, for his suggestions in producing this list.
Sonian (Needham)
Sonian provides archiving solutions that help mid-market customers manage search, compliance, e-discovery and storage management. Their primary product is Sonian Archive, an email archiving product that provides a secure and highly available archiving solution for all major messaging servers, including Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise, and IBM Lotus Notes. The company also has additional archiving solutions, all based on a platform that leverages Amazon cloud services. Sonian made Mass High Tech’s October five startups you should watch list.
Latest investment: $5.6m series A in 2009 from Prism VentureWorks and Summerhill Venture Partners
HubSpot (Cambridge)
HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah to provide search engine marketing solutions to small and medium businesses. The software as a service product allows you to manage the marketing process, from acquiring qualified visitors to turning leads into customers. HubSpot is sort of the SalesForce.com of marketing automation. Dharmesh also writes the very popular local blog OnStartups.
Latest investment: $16m series C in 2009 from Scale Venture Partners, Matrix and General Catalyst
DynamicOps (Burlington)
DynamicOps produces Virtual Resource Manager, IT automation software that allows business units to rapidly create and deploy on-demand IT services for public or private clouds. The product accelerates the delivery of computing resources, optimizes utilization of infrastructure, and minimizes the cost of managing your infrastructure needs. The company has the somewhat unusual heritage of being a spin out of the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse Group - so I may be on shaky ground in classifying them as a startup.
Latest investment: none
PatientKeeper (Newton)
PatientKeeper provides physicians an easier way to work with information, including writing prescription, charging for services, and accessing patient electronic records. The company’s mission is to allow physicians to spend less time dealing with paperwork and more time with their patients. The product provides a software solution for physicians to automate their work, from financials to daily work flow.
Latest investment: $13m investment in 2009 from Flybridge, New Enterprise Associates, Lighthouse Capital Partners and J.H. Whitney
Acquia (Woburn)
Acquia provides products and services that help organizations build social websites by leveraging the open sourced Drupal social publishing system. Their product, Drupal Gardens, enables the rapid development of scalable and flexible websites. They are positioned as sort of the Red Hat of the rapidly growing Drupal community.
Latest investment: $8.5m series C from North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners
The Echo Nest (Somerville)
The Somerville-based Echo Nest was co-founded by Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman, two former MIT PhDs who met at the MIT Media Lab. The company has built a platform it refers to as a “musical brain”, that reads and listens to music and music trends. The platform provides analytics to support developers of music applications.
Latest investment: $7m series B in 2010 from Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital
Vertica (Billerica)
Vertica was formed in 2005 to commercialize the technology behind Michael Stonebraker’s research in column-oriented databases. The company is focused on providing an analytic database for enterprise data warehousing, and is well positioned in the rapidly emerging analytics and warehousing markets.
Latest investment: $16.5m series B in 2007 from Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer, Highland and New Enterprise Associates
Bullhorn (Boston)
Bullhorn provides an integrated applicant tracking and customer relationship management system for the staffing and recruiting industry. The solution includes email, calendaring, applicant tracking and sourcing. The company has made Deloitte’s 2010 Technology Fast 500 for four consecutive years.
Latest investment: $26m in 2008 from Highland Capital and General Catalyst
Care.com (Waltham)
Care.com provides a trusted place for families and care providers to connect. The service enables users to find the best possible care based on detailed provider profiles, background checks and reviews of care providers. The site provides services for children, seniors, pets and the home.
Latest investment: $20m series C in 2010 from New Enterprise Associates, Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures
Brightcove (Cambridge)
Brightcove was founded by Jeremy Allaire, former CTO at Macromedia and founder of Allaire. The company provides a comprehensive software platform to enable the delivery of high quality video experiences. The platform provides support for content management, distribution and syndication, streaming and mobile support.
Latest investment: $12m series D in 2010 from Accel Partners, General Catalyst, Hearst Interactive Media, Maverick Capital, Brookside Capital
Parting Words
If you haven’t noticed lately, the startup job market is heating up in Boston. According to my favorite local job hunting site, TalentGraphz, there are 350+ open jobs for software engineers, 100+ for quality assurance engineers, and over 100+ for sales in Boston high tech startups. There are also early signs that the startup job market may be more immune than usual to the traditional holiday slow down. If you are on the market or considering a change, take a look at our local high tech startups.
You can follow these companies at @sonian, @hubspot, @DynamicOps, @acquia, @echonest, @Vertica, @BullhornLive, @CareAtCare, @brightcove