Underscore VC

We're psyched to see how David Forlizzi will fuel growth at Salsify! Best of luck to David, Piyush Chaudhari, and the rest of the Salsify team. 💪

Congratulations, Hue team! Closing a $4.5M seed round is no small feat 🎉 Wishing you even more momentum as you continue turning customers into your biggest advocates.

Welcome to the Salsify team, David! David Forlizzi brings over two decades of experience in financial leadership roles across public and private companies, including Vercode and Infovista. We are excited to see how he accelerates growth at Salsify.

Hi Marley is nominated by the New England Venture Capital Association in the Hottest Startup category at the #NEVYs24! We're proud to stand among top innovators in the region and can't wait to see who takes home this year's honor.

There’s nothing sweeter than when amazing tech comes together 🧁 We’re just two months into our partnership with OpenTable, and wow, what a journey it’s been!  HUNDREDS of operators now leverage the Slang.ai + OpenTable integration to automatically book, modify, and cancel reservations. All made possible with voice AI phone handling. And we’re not stopping there! We’re already working on advanced special notes functionality, additional language support, and new signature voices. We will continue to push the boundaries of what voice AI can do to elevate the guest experience. A huge thank you to the incredible team at OpenTable for the collaboration and commitment to creating unforgettable hospitality experiences. Together, we’re transforming how restaurants connect with their guests. Here’s to the ongoing journey of building the future of hospitality! 🥂 P.S. – When cupcakes meet innovation, you grab a selfie! CC Susan Lee 🎯

📈⚖ Clockwork is building FP&A software for professionals, by professionals ⚖ 📈 It's W7 / Q4 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Clockwork, a startup creating a platform for growing businesses who need access to powerful financial tools but didn’t have the resources or time to invest..until now. Founder & CEO Fady Hawatmeh started his career at Boeing, working on FP&A (financial planning & analysis) and strategy for the aerospace giant. During his tenure he built a library of financial models for family & friends back home in St. Louis. These were entrepreneurs short on time who were running restaurants (like his dad!), small businesses, and consulting firms who needed help with FP&A.  Eventually, he built his own outsourced CFO consulting firm based on the demand of 100s of Excel spreadsheets building models on models for clients. Their bootstrapped business became Clockwork, an FP&A software platform built for growing, resource constrained entrepreneurs because none of the other solutions in the market (now competitors) offered anything close to what was needed for small business owners. Clockwork is democratizing FP&A for the 30M+ small businesses in the U.S. who need better tools to scale their operations so they can spend more time with customers. Their GTM focus is on companies without CFOs as those roles tend to be the last executive role a company hires. The team will be adding conversational AI tools into their platform in 2025 to enable leaders to use prompts to elicit data and analysis with “smart alerts” that will flag certain trends and even use industry benchmarking data to guide actions. In addition to their AI roadmap items, they will be adding more integration partners. Their vision is to become the Workday for companies “you’ve never heard about”. Peter Zotto, the former Co-Founder & CRO of Profitwell, has joined Clockwork as COO to help fine tune their foundational operations to scale. Having the addition of a COO who has “been there and done that” with a playbook that aligns well with Fady’s vision should help the team accelerate into 2025. Clockwork already has 1000s of users on the platform and doubled their revenue growth each quarter in 2024 without adding headcount, backed by Underscore VC, G20 Ventures, and more. Fady recently moved the company to Boston from Chicago where all new hires will work to build a generational company with the surrounding talent and network to make it happen. We’re glad to have you building here in Boston! Operators to Know: -Matt Cronan, Director of Engineering  -Adam Grant, Sr Software Engineer -Shelby Martinez (Churney), Director of Customer Success & Onboarding  -Manasa Priyamvada Mannava, Sr. Software Engineer -Kyle Saechao, Software Engineer If you're interested in learning more, including the key roles Clockwork is hiring for, the full post is linked in the comments And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

Calling all AI researchers, operators, technologists! Curious about turning your research into a tech startup? Thinking about life as a technical founder? Join Underscore VC on December 11th in Boston for a coffee chat where researchers and innovators connect to discuss spinning research into successful companies. Grab a coffee, meet like-minded people, and explore the journey from lab to launch! Learn more and apply to join: https://lu.ma/0bw3qj7y

📈⚖ Clockwork is building FP&A software for professionals, by professionals ⚖ 📈 It's W7 / Q4 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Clockwork, a startup creating a platform for growing businesses who need access to powerful financial tools but didn’t have the resources or time to invest..until now. Founder & CEO Fady Hawatmeh started his career at Boeing, working on FP&A (financial planning & analysis) and strategy for the aerospace giant. During his tenure he built a library of financial models for family & friends back home in St. Louis. These were entrepreneurs short on time who were running restaurants (like his dad!), small businesses, and consulting firms who needed help with FP&A.  Eventually, he built his own outsourced CFO consulting firm based on the demand of 100s of Excel spreadsheets building models on models for clients. Their bootstrapped business became Clockwork, an FP&A software platform built for growing, resource constrained entrepreneurs because none of the other solutions in the market (now competitors) offered anything close to what was needed for small business owners. Clockwork is democratizing FP&A for the 30M+ small businesses in the U.S. who need better tools to scale their operations so they can spend more time with customers. Their GTM focus is on companies without CFOs as those roles tend to be the last executive role a company hires. The team will be adding conversational AI tools into their platform in 2025 to enable leaders to use prompts to elicit data and analysis with “smart alerts” that will flag certain trends and even use industry benchmarking data to guide actions. In addition to their AI roadmap items, they will be adding more integration partners. Their vision is to become the Workday for companies “you’ve never heard about”. Peter Zotto, the former Co-Founder & CRO of Profitwell, has joined Clockwork as COO to help fine tune their foundational operations to scale. Having the addition of a COO who has “been there and done that” with a playbook that aligns well with Fady’s vision should help the team accelerate into 2025. Clockwork already has 1000s of users on the platform and doubled their revenue growth each quarter in 2024 without adding headcount, backed by Underscore VC, G20 Ventures, and more. Fady recently moved the company to Boston from Chicago where all new hires will work to build a generational company with the surrounding talent and network to make it happen. We’re glad to have you building here in Boston! Operators to Know: -Matt Cronan, Director of Engineering  -Adam Grant, Sr Software Engineer -Shelby Martinez (Churney), Director of Customer Success & Onboarding  -Manasa Priyamvada Mannava, Sr. Software Engineer -Kyle Saechao, Software Engineer If you're interested in learning more, including the key roles Clockwork is hiring for, the full post is linked in the comments And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

Big news coming out of TetraScience and NVIDIA!

Looking forward to sitting down today with Karey Barker, Ya Tung, Jenny Fielding and Andrea Hippeau - a great group of LPs and GPs - to talk about what we are seeing in the venture landscape in this market.