#13 - Saas Ventures (New Format!)
A bi-weekly newsletter containing curated entrepreneurial focused content for students, founders and friends.
Welcome to this week’s StartOP newsletter! Each edition will now focus on a few startups all in a specific industry, including one that is fundraising. Check out further resources we have linked throughout and make sure to subscribe!
The format of the newsletter is the following:
1-2 startups that are currently raising funding
1-2 additional startups in the same industry
10+ internship and job opportunities at Boston-based startups
Lots of resources throughout
Enjoy!
Fundraising Venture
Founder: Kevin Sun
Dex is a personal customer relationship management (CRM) tool that helps you stay connected to those important to you. Founder Kevin Sun, a Harvard alumnus, saw how his friends struggled to use basic spreadsheets or to keep up with database systems like Airtable and Notion to manage relationships and contacts. Dex is designed to offer an alternative solution to traditional relationship trackers as a top lightweight CRM (implemented as a Chrome extension) to pull important data from social media accounts such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. Through seamlessly integrating with the user’s calendar, Dex is able to automatically keep track of your daily interactions.
Personal CRMs are becoming more popular as the landscape continues to rapidly grow. To learn more, listen to a podcast discussion with Kevin on personal CRMs and check out Dex’s recent integration with Superhuman. After their early growth since Y Combinator’s S19 cohort, Dex is looking to raise additional funds. Kevin can be contacted at kevin@getdex.com.
Later-Stage Venture
Founders: Drew D'Agostino & Greg Skloot
Crystal, founded by Northeastern alumni, is a Chrome extension that analyzes anybody’s personality allowing you to effectively communicate and interact with people online. Crystal can use writing, such as LinkedIn descriptions, to match people to personality frameworks such as DISC. This analysis is called Personality AI, and the collected information can then be used to make better reach outs, sales pitches, or any other type of interaction. Crystal has raised a Series B round from Salesforce, HubSpot, Birchmere Ventures, and CEB Ventures. To learn more, read about how to use Personality AI in your emails or about how to make a good first impression.
Seed-Stage Venture
Founders: Amy Spurling & Sarah Bedrick
Compt is stipend management software that helps companies create, manage, and streamline stipends to employees working in in-person or remote environments. With ever-changing modern working conditions, the traditional perks of a gym membership or free apparel no longer meet many employees’ needs. Compt offers a vendor-less approach to stipends, where employees and the HR personnel don’t need to redeem perks at specific sellers to provide their employees with weekly, monthly, or yearly perk stipend that can be spent on books, home office supplies, gym memberships and more. Through integration with team-management tools like Slack, Compt is able to easily integrate into companies’ current workflows while still being IRS-tax compliant.
Compt has also recently raised a seed round from Slack and Harlem Capital. To learn more, read about how companies such as Webflow use Compt for their employee perks and follow Compt on LinkedIn.
Opportunities
Internship
Remnote - Software Engineering Intern
Algorand - Developer Products Intern
Full-time Positions
Crystal - Full-Stack Software Developer
Remnote - Frontend Software Engineer
3PlayMedia - Various Positions
About the Author
Alex Marley is a junior majoring in electrical engineering and economics at Northeastern University. Currently he is the Vice President for the Huntington Angels Network, External Relations Lead for Generate, researching neural interfacing devices at Northeastern, an electrical engineer for Paradigm Hyperloop, and the founder of the StartOP newsletter. Alex is also working part-time as an electrical engineer at Notch Technologies and was a venture analyst for Wiase Capital.