MGMT Boston

Welcome Mikey Shulman, Co-Founder & CEO at Suno on this episode of 🔥The Lantern 🔥 Suno is building a world where music is more valuable and a bigger part of the lives of billions of people. Their team believes in a future where music is in a central place as the most culturally relevant form of media. 🔍 Where is Suno focused on heading into 2026? 🔎 They definitely have an aggressive roadmap for 2025 and 2026. Zooming out, you’ll see the Suno team try to make music more engaging and more social to connect people through music. The team is also working on new "power tools" to give users increased control over music creation as well as new engaging experiences where you can explore music and discover things that you’d never thought possible! Moving into 2026, they’re thinking about the next 100 million people who will use Suno. What can they build for them? How will those people want to use the platform? And how can they make them fall in love with music? 🎵 How is Suno changing the music industry? How are they building for consumers and artists? 🎵 Suno is changing how music gets made (technology has always done this!). They’re changing who gets to make music, expanding the pie and growing the number of people making music. The team is also changing the speed with which music evolves and pushing music forward. Having it reflect culture faster, discovering new genres, new forms, and things people haven’t event thought of before. 🔍 What have been Mikey’s key learnings scaling this startup? 🔎 Everything is downstream from who you get to work with. That includes the velocity with which you can ship products, the success of the company, and also the personal enjoyment of coming into work every day super energized. Mikey cares as ton about who’s on the ship and steering them toward their goals. 🎙️ How can we learn more about Suno? 🎙️ Come find Suno in Cambridge, New York, and LA (Venice). Check them out on the web - Suno.com. They’re on the app stores on mobile, too! Or shoot them a note at hello@suno.com. This is Suno from MGMT Boston in September, one of our leading AI startups here in Boston!

Episode 15 of the Fall Coworking Chronicles has us traveling to Link Ventures, Part 1… We caught up with Daniel Blundin from Link Ventures, Brian Elliott from Blitzy, and Joel Rosen & Alek Loconzolo from BindIQ on this segment… Link Ventures is out to build the #1 venture capital firm in the Boston area for AI and technology companies. If you’re working on hardware or AI, they’re recruiting some of the brightest minds in the city to come work on these problems. Daniel Blundin, Venture Developer at Link Ventures shares… Talent really differentiates Boston. It’s the densest talent cluster in the world and working with really bright founders is his favorite part of the role. Their office, located in the heart of Kendall Square, is centralized between all the best schools in the city. Daniel is excited about the immediate impact of AI within the Enterprise. Consumer is coming (beyond ChatGPT)! And a huge shout out to EverQuote (former Link Ventures portfolio company) for being a helpful consultant as their companies grow. Brian Elliott, Co-Founder & CEO at Blitzy shares… Blitzy is an enterprise grade autonomous code generation platform. A lot of the SDLC (software development) AI platforms help developers become more productive, but Blitzy brings AI across the entire development lifecycle, doing large batch scale development across large enterprise codebases (think 20M lines of code!). Kendall is one of the most innovative square miles in the world. From Akamai to Google, there are incredible partnerships in walking distance. Startups? We should also pay homage to the past and the people who have made Boston a great startup city - Dharmesh Shah at HubSpot, Robert Blumofe at Akamai Technologies - who have set such a strong foundation. Now it’s our turn to build the next generation of anchor companies! Joel Rosen & Alek Loconzolo, Co-Founders at BindIQ share… BindIQ is building conversational Voice AI for the insurance space, streamlining the data collection process in call intake. Customer service agents spend a lot of time and money doing repetitive call intake with data collection. Bind IQ assistants can streamline that process and escalate to human agents when needed, working with initial design partners. Check out Prim AI in the Voice AI enterprise space and Soshi, another Northeastern alumni company! The fall tour continues with MGMT Boston. Thanks to Rho and Will Panarello for supporting this series!

Huge thanks to Matt Crane, MGMT Boston and the Lantern for this feature. Grateful for the opportunity to share our story at TruLeague!

Welcome Brad Matthiesen, Head of Engineering at Suno on this episode of 🔥The Lantern 🔥 Suno is building the future of music right here in Cambridge. Brad and his team are helping people get more value from music, in a lot of different ways, on the technical side of the house. 🤩 Why is Brad excited about leading engineering at Suno? 🤩 Suno is known for its foundation model research and ability to take a prompt and turn it into a song. If you’re a builder and like to do awesome things, especially around music, there's no better place to be right now than Suno. 🔍 What are Suno’s growth plans heading into 2026? 🔎 After the fundraise in March of 2024, the team has grown pretty rapidly over the last year and a half, closing in on 100 team members with almost half of the team in Cambridge. They’re planning to grow pretty rapidly into 2026 and add ~50 engineers over the next year (with 30+ roles open currently). Growth will come across the platform & infrastructure team, machine learning (research & inference), product, engineering, and full stack web & mobile development. Suno has basically every kind of engineer…except for mechanical or chemical engineers 🤔 What is the opportunity Brad & his team are chasing at Suno? 🤔 Suno is built from end to end, starting with foundation model research, all the way to a consumer tech application used by millions. These types of opportunities don’t usually exist in Boston (or most places!). The opportunity to build an enduring product, company, and brand is pretty immense. Every new hire is meaningful and intentional. You’re going to be able to leave a lasting impact! 🤔 How do new team members come in and make an immediate impact? 🤔 Suno has a high trust environment with a lot of autonomy where learning & growth is really important. New team members are expected to start making contributions quickly. Two interns this past summer even launched a new radio feature that shipped to production! From a learning & growth perspective, Brad likes to tell his team “we don’t have to solve tomorrow’s problems today but we have to put ourselves in a position to solve them by the time tomorrow comes” The Engineering team has a series called Dev Tea once a week on Friday where a member of the engineering team teaches the rest of the team something in a TED talk type format. This series has even expanded to include Data Tea, Manager Tea, Music Tea, and Book Tea. High trust, autonomy, and a hunger for learning has created a great cultural environment for their team and the talented people they’re looking to have join and make an immediate impact. More from Suno coming in this month of September, one of our leading AI startups here in Boston!

Episode 12 of the Summer Coworking Chronicles takes us to MassRobotics, Part 2.. We caught up with Collin Taylor from Revolute Robotics, Jay Park from Luminous, Elizabeth De Zulueta from ZuluSolar, and Marita McGinn from MassRobotics on this segment… Collin Taylor, Co-Founder & CEO of Revolute Robotics shares.. Revolute Robotics builds robots that go where other robots can’t go. They’ve built a drone that drives on the ground and then flies through the air. When it’s driving on the ground it uses 1/10th of the energy so they can go places other drones can’t access and where rovers can’t reach because they don’t have the mobility. MassRobotics and the community brought the Revolute Robotics team to Boston from Arizona. What startups should we be watching? Nexterity, Inc. - using robots for pipe bolting and unbolting Cleo Robotics - making small drones that can reach hard to access places Mito Robotics - automated cell culturing for intensive lab processes Jay Park, CRO at Luminous shares.. Luminous is building fully electric, AI-enabled robotics system for the utility scale community and distributed generation DG solar construction site. Their flagship product, LUMI, is a ruggedized platform that puts solar modules on racking infrastructures, autonomously. What does Jay love about building in Boston? It’s a wonderful ecosystem where everyone is committed to growing and collaborating together in clean tech and beyond! Velocity, speed, and interaction is what’s needed to make things happen in this industry. Elizabeth De Zulueta, Co-Founder & CEO at ZuluSolar shares.. ZuluSolar is an all-in-one control box that makes solar installation cheaper, simpler, and safer. What startup should we be watching? Luminous! An amazing company (referenced above) working on commercial solar farms. They’re great people with amazing systems! Marita McGinn, Director, MassRobotics Accelerator shares.. MassRobotics has 70, square feet of robotics space, kind of like a technical coworking space, with everything a roboticist and entrepreneur would need to iterate on their physical prototype. They have a CNC machine, 30 robot arms, and 100 residents at MassRobotics to make it easier for robotics startups to build, scale, and find customers. In Boston we have the best technical talent! Marita loves working with technical minds who need help with customer discovery, financial modeling, etc. What startups should we be watching? Apparel Robotics is building a robotics system that incorporates a gripper and cutting machine for fabric manipulation. With all the tariff news changing the ways consumers purchase and get their stuff, and the U.S. being the #1 consumer of clothing, we need more infrastructure to support building that demand here in the U.S. For any investors listening, Marita will connect you! The summer tour is rolling right into the fall with MGMT Boston. Thanks to Rho and Will Panarello for supporting this series!

What if I told you one of the most important companies of the AI era is building right here in Cambridge? I’m talking about Suno. For thousands of years music has been a medium for storytelling. History, folklore, comedy, drama, love and every emotion in between has traveled across the ages through music. We’re entering a new era. With AI we have new tools to turn any idea into a song. Suno is... -A startup that has been used by 50M people to make music -GRAMMY award winning artists use their platform -Artists have used their platform to sign record deals With $125M from Lightspeed, Matrix, Founder Collective and others... Anyone with an internet connection using their platform can make any song you can imagine with a text prompt, voice note, or music of your own. In September MGMT Boston will be bringing you content from this rapidly growing startup. This is an important company to know if you're building in Boston. This is Suno. Tune in!

Episode 11 of the Summer Coworking Chronicles takes us to MassRobotics, Part 1.. We caught up with... -The Co-Founder of MassRobotics, Joyce Sidopoulos -Brian Hart, Co-Founder & CEO at Black-I Robotics, Inc. -Xinyu Wang, Co-Founder & CTO at Mito Robotics -Colleen Cronin Anderson from MassRobotics on this segment… Joyce Sidopoulos Sidopoulous, Co-Founder & Chief of Operations at MassRobotics shares.. MassRobotics is building the world’s largest innovation center for robotics. It's THE hub that people from all over the world come to because it’s where innovation in robotics happens Joyce loves the community! It’s filled with innovators, mentors who want to give back, and successful robotics companies & CEOs who return to collaborate. 👀 What should we be watching? 👀 Joyce is seeing startups in the warehouse & logistics space. There's also been a surge in healthtech, agriculture, and construction. Brian Hart, Co-Founder & CEO at Black-I Robotics, Inc. shares.. His team is building a robot worker that can move around a warehouse, pick up heavy boxes, and create a mixed case palette in real time. Their robot can put together a full mixed palette of 100 items and get it to a loading dock in ~18 minutes. Brian has built robotics companies in the Boston area for almost 20 years and leverages its ecosystem. At MassRobotics he’s been able to share information with companies using similar technology (but non-competitive) like vision systems, custom grippers, etc. 👀 What startups should we be watching? 👀 On the consumer side, look at Nutra Spin. It’s a smoothie in a can without the mess In robotics, check out Luminous Robotics, which is picking up solar voltaic rays and building solar farms with robots. Xinyu Wang, Co-Founder & CTO at Mito Robotics shares.. They're building an AI-powered intelligent robot for lab automation, focusing on cell culture. Cell culture is a manual task that's repetitive and takes up a lot of scientists times, freeing them up to focus on discovery work. Boston is the heart of both robotics and biotech, which the Mito Robotics team loves! What startups should we be watching? ReviMo is building an autonomous wheelchair. Elderly care and human support is a great use case for robotics and Aleksandr's work is worth people’s attention! Colleen Cronin Anderson at MassRobotics shares.. Colleen is responsible for building the community together and putting on events to make more connections. Their biggest event is coming up September 27th…The Robot Block Party in the Seaport. There will be tons of robots, interactive exhibits, and a robot parade! Be there!! 👀 What startups should we be watching? 👀 1.) Luminous Robotics recently was awarded a huge contract with the Australian government. 2.) Cleo Robotics just announced their new DD1 drone. Two exciting announcements (and startups) to share! The summer tour continues with MGMT Boston. Thanks to Rho and Will Panarello for supporting this series!

Welcome Chris Munford, Founder & CEO at Nethopper on this episode of 🔥The Lantern 🔥 Nethopper is an enterprise AI platform for emerging enterprises (~30-1000 employees). Their platform integrates with your work data and can help make your workers’ lives easier & more productive. 🔍 How are customers using Nethopper in 2025? 🔎 What do people use ChatGPT for? You can use it for (almost) everything! Nethopper has an HR company who makes handbooks for customers, saving weeks of data entry, and back & forth assembling custom manuals across differing federal & state regulations. A financial customer who conducts audits, needing to pouring over thousands of pages of documents, leverages Nethopper to help search through volumes of data & assemble insights. 📈 What is the progression of how customers can leverage AI in the workplace today? And what are the more complicated use cases to come? 📈 When customers get started, they begin “walking themselves down the path”. The search and insights phase works great today and content generation is working pretty well today too. Agentic AI - creating whole multi-step workflows - is coming next! 🤔 What are Chris’ top learnings watching enterprises adopt AI while building Nethopper? 🤔 Security is a top learning. 80%+ of IT leaders report that AI tools are adopted without proper security assessments. With ChatGPT and other AI tools today, we’re largely bringing our data to AI. When we move data outside of the enterprise, that can cause unintended risks & consequences. We should be bringing AI to the data instead and preserving enterprise security. Don’t let any dinosaurs off the island! That's what Nethopper is for! 🤝 Who are great fits for Nethopper and how can people get started? 🤝 Smaller enterprises (~30-1000 employees) who have smaller IT teams, outsourced IT, or don’t have internal data teams are often great fits. In ~2 weeks Nethopper can get customers started with a private AI system for their workplace. Depending on the data sources, they’ll continue to add those so, after a few weeks, most of your company's data is integrated. Within 2-3 months their current customers are seeing positive ROI after integrating Nethopper Enterprise AI. More to come on how Nethopper's customers are leveraging AI in the coming weeks!

Episode 10 of the Summer Coworking Chronicles takes us to the Harvard Innovation Labs, Part 2.. We caught up with Linh Pham, Siddharth UR, and Danny Rodriguez from Lexi, Jashin Lin from Growbie, and Umer Iqbal from Harvard Dating on this segment… Linh, Siddharth, and Danny from Lexi share.. Lexi is short for lexicon. They are a healthcare startup team focused on expanding language access for non-English speaking patients in the U.S., leveraging AI to provide instant, accurate and secure medical interpretation. 30M patients in the U.S. don’t speak English and face higher medical error rates, longer hospitalizations, and pay thousands more per visit. They’re already live with design partners learning how to support clinical workflows. Lexi launched the industry’s first voice AI translation for Haitian Creole to support care for Haitian migrants. What does the Lexi team love about building in Boston? The ecosystem of HBS and the iLab, learning from peers and mentors who have been here in this space for a long time, learning what to do and not to do. It’s been a great experience! 👀 What startups should we be watching? 👀 Laptis is building a platform in the substance use disorder space, helping people get quicker access to hospitals and clinics. Resonately is trying to optimize workflows for audiology clinics. They are both teams of great people! Jashin, Founder at Growbie shares.. Growbie is the first career platform that focuses on teaching networking skills to international students and first generation working professionals. They are building an EdTech and community type platform. What does Jashin love about building in Boston? Their focus is international students and this is such a vibrant university city from MIT to Harvard to Boston University and beyond. It’s a fantastic market to start building their business 👀 What trend should we be watching? 👀 With AI, Jashin and her team (and she encourages others) to think about how to build leaner to focus on the most important problems at hand, like customer acquisition, for example. Umer, Co-Founder at Harvard Dating shares.. Harvard Dating is changing how dating is done, starting with college campuses, bringing human connection to the center of dating. No swiping, no matching, they set the date up for you! What does Umer love about building in Boston? It’s a great pool of people - talent, excitement, and the iLab support and community - have been remarkable for the Harvard Dating team. 👀 What startups should we be watching? 👀 Kiku - a speech therapy app - definitely worth checking out! The summer tour continues and is brought to you by MGMT Boston and Rho!