These are tough times for the innovation economy in Massachusetts. The challenges include a venture capital funding slump, almost no appetite from stock markets for initial public offerings and a White House bent on removing most federal support for sustainable energy production.
So, picking a group of a dozen Massachusetts leaders of the innovation economy — which I define as tech, biotech, climate tech and other emerging sectors — wasn’t easy. Especially since I wanted to focus on people who weren’t just in survival mode, but moving their organizations forward despite the headwinds.
I assembled my own initial list and then sought nominations from a set of 35 well-connected executives who work in those industries. (None of these nominators appear on the list, to avoid conflicts.)
Noubar Afeyan, CEO and Founder, Flagship Pioneering
Noubar Afeyan (Courtesy of Flagship Pioneering)
If you want to know where some of the most significant swings in biotech will be taken over the next few years, follow the money to a red brick building on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge. That’s where Noubar Afeyan and more than 500 of his colleagues have a war chest of several billion dollars to hatch new companies based on cutting-edge science.
Already, they’ve launched companies like Moderna, Foghorn Therapeutics and Syros Pharmaceuticals — all publicly traded. In 2024, Flagship raised another $3.6 billion to invest, allowing it to create another 25 or so more.
Flagship has been able to attract top talent to these companies, ranging from the former CEO of Ancestry.com to a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
And lately, Afeyan has been talking about the potential that will arise when we combine human intelligence, nature’s intelligence and artificial intelligence — a trifecta he calls “polyintelligence.” Taking advantage of all three, he has written, could result in a “modern-day renaissance.”
Will Ahmed, CEO, Whoop
Will Ahmed (Courtesy of Whoop)
Whoop’s illuminated logo looms over Fenway Park’s Green Monster, and the users of its fitness monitoring wristband include Cristiano Ronaldo, Tiger Woods and Patrick Mahomes. Not bad for a company founded in 2012 by Ahmed and two other Harvard undergrads. (Ahmed was a co-captain of the school’s varsity squash team.)
In May, Whoop launched the 5.0 and MG (medical grade) versions of its wristband, with longer battery life and features like blood pressure and cardiac health monitoring.
The company was valued at $3.6 billion after its most recent funding round, though it remains privately held. Ahmed is a frequent host of the Whoop podcast, which has featured guests such as “White Lotus” creator Mike White and golfer Rory McIlroy.
The big question for Ahmed: can he build a global brand, compete with players like Apple and Google-owned Fitbit, and eventually take Whoop public?
Jeremy Allaire, CEO, Circle
Jeremy Allaire (Courtesy of Circle)
One company that could go public as soon as the markets warm up to IPOs is Circle, the Boston-based issuer of the USDC stablecoin, a kind of cryptocurrency. This so-called “digital dollar” is designed to maintain a $1:$1 relationship to U.S. currency, and it’s fully backed by cash or short-term U.S. treasury bonds, with regular audits, to bolster investors’ trust.
CEO and founder Jeremy Allaire has been an advocate for digital currency regulation, in Congressional testimony and in other public appearances, making him a buttoned-down exec working in a crypto landscape that can at times feel like the Wild West.
“In many respects, Circle has for a long time been under intense public scrutiny,” Allaire wrote in a letter that accompanied Circle’s IPO filing last month. “Becoming a publicly traded corporation on the New York Stock Exchange is a continuation of our desire to operate with the greatest transparency and accountability possible.”
The company reported growing revenue ($1.7 billion) but declining net income ($157 million) for 2024.
Alexis Borisy, Co-Founder and Chairman, Curie.bio
Alexis Borisy (Courtesy of Curie.bio)
It’s rare for a biotech investment firm to rent billboards in MBTA stations and along highways looking for promising founders. But that was the approach that Curie.bio took in 2024.
Curie has raised nearly $1 billion to help launch new biotech companies, and the company has an in-house team of 100 support personnel who can help with recruiting and interpreting experimental data, enabling the startups it funds to move faster.
Alexis Borisy has been the founder of more than a dozen biotech companies that have either gone public or been acquired. While he says he isn’t sure whether the billboard campaign led directly to investments, he says that it produced more than 5,000 proposals from entrepreneurs, which have led to 27 investments so far.
Most of those companies, Borisy says, remain in stealth mode, but they are working on treatments for conditions such as ALS, cancer, asthma and Huntington’s disease.
Despite the general anxiety afflicting much of the life science industry in 2025, Borisy says, “The science is still amazing, and the need for transformative products for unmet medical needs remains.”
Tye Brady, Chief Technologist, Amazon Robotics
Tye Brady (Courtesy of Tye Brady)
If you’ve received an Amazon package recently, there’s a pretty good chance that one of Tye Brady’s robot minions helped make that happen. Not only does Amazon design all of its warehouse robots in Massachusetts, but it manufactures them here, too — more than 750,000 bots so far.
Brady said at a recent panel discussion that “there’s no such thing as 100% automation … it will never exist.” Instead, he’s a believer in making human-robot interactions safer and more seamless.
Amazon Robotics has about 250 job openings, and earlier this month, it announced a new robot, Vulcan, that has a sense of touch, so that it can better handle objects made of different materials.
Another Amazon executive worth an honorable mention here: Rohit Prasad, the company’s Lexington-based head scientist for artificial general intelligence, and the former top scientist for the Alexa intelligent speaker. He worked on improving that product’s ability to respond to commands and questions, but when I asked my Alexa what Prasad does at Amazon, its response was, “Sorry, I don’t have an answer for that.”
Amazon, as a company, has been similarly mum about Prasad’s recent contributions.
Yvonne Greenstreet, CEO, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
Yvonne Greenstreet
(Courtesy of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals)
In 2024, Alnylam launched a new RNAi therapy for a rare heart condition, reinforcing its leadership in RNA-based medicines.
Since Yvonne Greenstreet took over as CEO in January 2022, Alnylam’s stock has been on a tear — up more than 80% — and the former GlaxoSmithKline research executive has doubled the number of products that the company is working on. These could help treat Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and hypertension.
Alnylam was also the top-ranked Massachusetts company on last year’s list of “Best Workplaces for Innovators,” compiled by Fast Company magazine.
Reshma Kewalramani, CEO, Vertex
Reshma Kewalramani (Courtesy of Vertex)
In January, Vertex received FDA approval for a new non-opioid pain treatment, Journavx, which blocks pain signals before they reach the brain.
Analysts who track the company expect that single product to generate more than $100 million in revenue this year, and triple that in 2026.
Reshma Kewalramani has been at the company since 2017, and has helped expand the company’s line of drugs for cystic fibrosis, as well as launching, in 2024, the first gene-editing-based treatment for sickle cell disease, Casgevy.
Future drugs being developed by Vertex aim to treat kidney disease, neuropathic pain and type 1 diabetes.
Sally Kornbluth, President, MIT
Sally Kornbluth (Courtesy of MIT)
Just over a decade ago, the late MIT professor Ed Roberts calculated that MIT alumni had started more than 30,000 active companies that employed 4.6 million people and generated nearly $2 trillion in annual revenue.
That makes the university not only a powerful economic engine for Massachusetts, where it employs more than 17,000 people, but for the country as a whole. With the federal government cutting its research funding under the Trump administration, President Sally Kornbluth finds herself playing defense, with up to one-quarter of the university’s revenues at risk.
Under Kornbluth, MIT has signed on to lawsuits seeking to block funding cuts initiated by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. And Kornbluth has defended the importance of foreign students and professors to the university, writing that “MIT is an American university … but we would be gravely diminished without the students and scholars who join us from other nations.”
A not-exactly-comprehensive hiring freeze was announced in February, and more belt-tightening is likely on the horizon. But Kornbluth will need to be creative (and diplomatic) to steer the state’s most important school through turbulent waters.
Another MIT-affiliated person worth an honorable mention on this list is Katie Rae, CEO and Managing Partner of Engine Ventures, a venture capital fund created by MIT that supports so-called “tough tech” startups that require longer development times. In its portfolio are companies working on more energy-efficient ways to produce steel and cement, for instance, as well as the fusion power startup Commonwealth Fusion.
In 2024, The Engine collected $398 million in additional capital — the bulk of it from investors other than MIT. With its 10th birthday approaching in 2027, and more than $1 billion in total assets under management now, it’d be good for Engine Ventures to be able to point to a big-money acquisition or initial public offering that returns some money to its coffers. (One company backed by Engine Ventures, Zapata AI, both went public and shut down last year.)
Bob Mumgaard, CEO, Commonwealth Fusion
Bob Mumgaard (Courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion)
The promise of fusion energy is a nearly limitless, clean and safe source of power. Fusion — the same reaction that powers the sun and other stars — produces no greenhouse gases, uses fuels that are abundant (like hydrogen from water), and doesn’t leave behind long-lived radioactive waste.
While a whole set of startups are trying to design workable fusion reactors, none has attracted more funding than Devens-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems, spun out of a lab at MIT. The company has raised more than $2 billion from investors like Emerson Collective, run by Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs; Google; Engine Ventures; and Bill Gates.
Bob Mumgaard, who earned a doctorate in Applied Plasma Physics and a master’s in Nuclear Engineering from MIT, is overseeing the company’s efforts to show it can build a reliable fusion power source. But it won’t happen overnight.
In late 2024, Commonwealth Fusion announced plans to independently finance and build the world’s first commercial fusion power plant in Virginia, targeting the early 2030s as a date to be online and connected to the power grid.
Andy Ory, CEO, QuEra Computing
Andy Ory (Courtesy of QuEra Computing)
Some of the biggest tech companies in the world — including Microsoft, Google and IBM — are trying to make quantum computing useful.
Many believe that quantum computers will be able to create far more accurate models and predictions related to weather, human disease, or stock market dynamics than today’s computers.
One of the startups that has been making waves amidst the whales of the field is Boston-based QuEra Computing, founded in 2018 by a group of professors from Harvard and MIT, and run by Andy Ory, a serial entrepreneur who grew up in Worcester.
QuEra raised $230 million earlier this year and is working with the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke to install one of its quantum computers there for academic researchers to use.
As of yet, there’s no timeline for the installation of that machine, says Yuval Boger of QuEra.
Stuart Schreiber, CEO, Arena BioWorks
Stuart Schreiber (Courtesy Arena BioWorks)
When Michael Dell, the (now former) owner of the Boston Celtics, an early Facebook backer, and an heiress to the Subway fortune, band together to put half a billion dollars into a new science lab in Cambridge, you can bet it will attract some attention.
Situated midway between Harvard and MIT, Arena has been hoovering up talent from places like Pfizer, Merck and the Broad Institute — including Stuart Schreiber, the chemist who is running the show.
Arena aims to do basic research and then form companies to commercialize it, and two goals are to better compensate the scientists they hire and to move things from the lab into the market as quickly as possible.
Schreiber says the lab has 80 staffers and focuses on “drug discovery efforts in oncology, immunology and brain health. We are exploring new directions in metabolic disease and lung disease, among others.” He says there is also a plan in place to leverage artificial intelligence technology to better understand the underlying mechanisms of disease and how new drugs might address them.
Daniela Rus, Director, MIT CSAIL and Co-Founder, Liquid AI
Daniela Rus (Courtesy of Liquid AI)
Daniela Rus is a robotics researcher who, since 2012, has been running MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
In 2024, she co-authored the book “The Mind’s Mirror: Risk and Reward in the Age of AI,” making the optimistic case for AI as a “cognitive amplifier” that will drive progress — though also acknowledging the risks of misuse, and stressing the need for ethical guidelines.
Rus is also a co-founder of Liquid AI, a company developing a more efficient approach to running powerful generative AI systems that it calls LFMs, or liquid foundation models.
In December 2024, Liquid AI raised $250 million in funding, led by AMD Ventures, which valued the company at over $2 billion. Liquid AI is building out its team at offices in Cambridge and San Francisco.
In a recent keynote at the Robotics Summit and Expo in Boston, she told the audience that AI is moving from “saying” (chatbots) to “showing” (producing audio and video) to “doing” (interacting with things in the physical world).
