Blog

Sector: Technology

Mihir Shah

Mihir Shah is a veteran technology leader with over 30 years of experience in financial services and technology. He recently retired from Fidelity Investments, where he held several key leadership roles, including Chief Technology Officer (CTO), CIO – Enterprise Head of Data & Analytics, and Head of Enterprise Architecture. His core area of expertise is developing and executing on large, complex data and platform initiatives.

As CTO, Mihir led the modernization of Fidelity’s Asset Management platform, which now enables $5.6 trillion in assets under management. As Chief Data Officer (CDO), he spearheaded the development of a firm-wide, cloud-based data warehouse, unifying all data products into a single analytics platform. Earlier in his career, he played a pivotal role in enhancing Fidelity’s customer experience platforms, leading the rollout of CRM, Customer360, and Campaign Management by developing a unified data architecture for customer-facing channels.

Before Fidelity, Mihir led large-scale projects across the UK, Argentina, Singapore, and the US. He was the lead architect at Churchill Insurance in London, a pioneering startup in the UK insurance industry, and began his career at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), contributing to its early growth.

In his post-retirement career, he is a Venture Partner at F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Europe and India. He also serves as an Advisor in Residence to EY and is on advisory boards of numerous companies including Snowflake, Writer, Reltio, Skyflow, Promethium and Finbourne. He remains engaged in academia as an Industry Fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management.

BlackDuck

BlackDuck secures and manages open source software worldwide, eliminating open source security vulnerabilities & license compliance pain. BlackDuck was acquired by Synopsys in 2017.

A Fidelity Ventures investment. Fidelity Ventures was a venture capital investment group affiliated with F-Prime until 2010.

mindSHIFT

mindSHIFT is one of the largest IT outsourcing and cloud services providers. The company has supported our clients with tailored and trusted technology solutions for more than 15 years. From day-to-day IT to major systems modernization, count on mindSHIFT’s technology expertise and personalized customer care for all of your IT needs. mindSHIFT was acquired by Roche Company in 2014.

A Fidelity Ventures investment. Fidelity Ventures was a venture capital investment group affiliated with F-Prime until 2010.

From the willingness to listen and the ability to innovate in the face of failure, a Boston unicorn is born.

Steve, Aman and Jon were at dinner when they realized the restaurant industry needed a serious tech upgrade. The three MIT grads had met at enterprise software company Endeca, and had been thinking of starting their own company in the mobile commerce space.

The first product they made was a customer-focused mobile payment app, developed in Aman’s basement and launched at a local Boston pub. It flopped.

But that didn’t stop them. They realized that the app was just adding to the restaurant operators’ woes on an already-busy Friday night; servers certainly didn’t need one more thing to juggle. The trio probed further, and discovered that what was really broken was restaurants’ central operating system: the POS. So they shifted gears.

This pivot was critical. Restaurateurs previously reluctant to discuss the mobile payment app would now talk hours about how much they hated their existing POS: they were difficult to operate, poorly serviced, and expensive to fix. Here, indeed, was a big problem worth solving.

Using their background in enterprise software, the team hired restaurant experts and relied heavily on early customer feedback to iteratively build a platform to manage all operations. The platform prioritized mobility, ease of data access and updates, and a better consumer experience.

The company virtually exploded overnight. Two years from being founded, Toast had signed over 1,000 merchants across the United States and grown to over 120 employees, requiring a space upgrade from 7,000 sq ft in Cambridge to 40,000 sq ft at the Hatch Fenway co-working space. In early 2015, Toast brought on Chris Comparato (Acquia, Endeca) as CEO.

Shortly after, they met F-Prime Capital which participated in their first round of institutional round funding, raising $30M; within three years, Toast raised $115mn in Series D funding, and its official unicorn status at a valuation of $1.4bn.

As the company continues to grow, it remains obsessed about customer feedback and hyper-focused about the entire restaurant experience, both cornerstones of its success.

AvantStay

AvantStay delivers exceptional, unique stays for group travelers. The company has built a tech-enabled millennial hospitality brand to be the new standard for group experience. Unlike typical short-term rentals, Avantstay controls the entire guest experience. This allows the company to ensure the quality of a guest’s stay will be consistent across all homes and to deliver hotel-level comfort in an authentic differentiated setting.

Seyond

Seyond (formerly Innovusion) is a leading developer of image-grade LiDAR sensor systems for level 4+ of the autonomous vehicle market. Its unique combination of range, resolution, hardware accelerated sensor fusion, compact size, ease of integration and cost effectiveness makes its products an ideal choice for the most demanding applications.

PharmEasy

PharmEasy is one of India’s largest healthcare delivery platforms. The company helps patients connect with local pharmacy stores and diagnostic centers in order to fulfill their medical needs.

Notable

Notable is an AI powered healthcare company that puts appointments on autopilot. By analyzing historical patterns of practice, Notable proactively automates away hundreds of manual repetitive tasks like adding diagnoses, orders, templates, billing codes, and more.

Nebula Genomics

Nebula Genomics is a human genome sequencing and health big data company on a mission to usher in the era of genomic sequencing by building a large and trusted genomic and health data marketplace for consumers, researchers and the medical community. Using blockchain to ensure that consumers maintain control of their data and are compensated for its use, the Nebula marketplace will aggregate a critical mass of rich genetic information that researchers can analyze in order to accelerate drug development, streamline clinical trials, and usher in the era of truly personalized medicine. Nebula Genomics was acquired by ProPhase Labs in 2021.

Carestack

CareStack™ is a cloud-based platform that combines dental practice management, patient engagement and data analytics.