Catalant Brand Guidelines: From HourlyNerd at Harvard to “Consulting 2.0” in Boston

A business-school course, a marketplace and a new name.

Catalant started life under a far more playful name. English Wikipedia says the company, styled HourlyNerd, was launched in 2013 as part of a Harvard Business School course, and names its founders as Rob Biederman, Patrick Petitti, Peter Maglathlin and Joe Miller. The company’s own about page puts it more simply: Catalant “was born at Harvard Business School in 2013.” Harvard Business School also published a teaching case titled “HourlyNerd” in January 2016, according to English Wikipedia’s further reading.

The idea was a marketplace for business expertise. Companies posted projects, and independent consultants and small consulting firms bid for them. Consultancy.uk described the mechanics in July 2017: customers upload project details and wait for individual professionals and boutique consultancies to bid, then choose using the expert’s résumé, proposed terms and a star rating left by earlier clients. The same report added that the platform’s algorithms also take account of how long clients spend looking at a consultant’s profile when ranking them. Consultancy.uk described the two co-chief executives, Biederman and Petitti, the latter a former Booz Allen Hamilton consultant, as wanting to offer a more personal and efficient service than clients would get from a traditional management consultancy.

English Wikipedia says its seed round, in September 2013, was led by the investor Mark Cuban, who still appears among the backers listed on the company’s about page.

Catalyst, brilliant, talent.

The rename is the clearest piece of brand history Catalant has published. In a release dated 25 July 2016, the company announced that HourlyNerd had rebranded as Catalant, a name it said combined “catalyst,” “brilliant” and “talent.” The release said the new name came with “a complete brand transformation,” including a new logo and the tagline “Accomplish More”. The small-business side kept the old name for a time, operating as “HourlyNerd powered by Catalant,” while the parent became Catalant Technologies. The same release said the rename followed a Series C round led by General Catalyst Partners. At that point, the company said, its network held more than 27,000 experts, and machine-learning algorithms matched business leaders with a suitable expert within minutes of uploading a request for proposal; it named GE and Pfizer among the organisations using the platform to centralise how they sourced outside talent.

The thinking behind the name has survived a decade of change. The current about page still opens on a gloss of the word, “Catalyst + Brilliant,” gives a pronunciation guide (“cat-ah-lent”) and says the company acts “as a strategic catalyst for businesses.” The 2016 release said the new identity was meant to support the company’s efforts to show businesses new ways to find, hire and connect with experts.

Growth followed in steps that independent trade press recorded. Built In Boston reported in June 2017 that a Series D round had been co-led by Highland Capital Partners and General Catalyst, and that the company then connected organisations with more than 40,000 experts from its Seaport office. In October 2018 Consultancy.uk reported that Catalant had opened an office in London, its formal launch in the UK, with a network it put at more than 50,000 independent consultants and 1,000 boutique firms. In April 2021 Consulting.us reported a further investment led by Morningside Group, following a Series E round in 2020, and said the marketplace then listed more than 70,000 experts and 1,000 boutique consultancies.

Design and documentation.

Tech-talent networks and developer marketplaces sell access to people, so their identities lean on a few recurring ideas: the size of a pool, the reach of a map and the rigour of a test. Andela says its network speaks more than 300 languages and that more than 650 organisations have built with it; Turing’s website counts more than 5 million domain experts. Such figures are the companies’ own, and they move quickly: in December 2021 Turing told TechCrunch it had 1 million engineers and developers, and in March 2025 it said it worked with some 4 million coders.

Vetting usually gets a name of its own. Turing called its platform the “Talent Cloud,” and Andela later launched the Andela Talent Cloud. English Wikipedia describes Andela’s technical, soft-skills and leadership assessments feeding a “match fitness score,” and Andela has bought assessment and practice tools such as Qualified and Codewars, which it presents as a source of behavioural data from millions of developers.

The matching itself tends to be described as a sequence. TechCrunch wrote in 2021 that Turing used AI to source, evaluate, hire, onboard and then manage engineers remotely, and in the same year described Andela as evaluating technical and soft skills before matching engineers with the teams they fitted most closely.

Corporate pages put founders, investors and milestones up front. Andela’s about page runs a dated timeline of funding rounds, cohorts and acquisitions, illustrated with photographs of its own events, and introduces its leadership team; Turing’s company page lists its two co-founders by title. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, separating dated reporting from what the company says about itself.

From marketplace software to “Consulting 2.0”.

The product has moved further than the name. Consulting.us reported in April 2021 that, after the rename, Catalant had expanded into software and services for work planning, resource management, and insights and reporting, and that in 2020 it launched a software-as-a-service platform to help organisations manage their strategic project portfolios. English Wikipedia describes the platform as a place where clients post projects, receive bids, interview and select experts, track the work and pay, and says Catalant’s software lets companies draw on several talent pools at once: their own employees, alumni and retirees, and outside consultants and firms.

Today the company presents itself differently again. Its website calls Catalant “fit-to-purpose consulting” and frames its offer as “Consulting 2.0”, built on four short phrases: Fit to Purpose, Flexible Engagements, Fast to Impact and Fair Value. The menus are organised like those of a conventional consultancy, by industry and by capability, from operations and M&A integration to digital and AI work, and the site highlights a “Forward Deployed Experts” offer that, the company says, places domain experts alongside AI engineers. It says it has worked with more than 3,900 businesses in over 20 countries. Pat Petitti is listed as chief executive and co-founder, and English Wikipedia places the company in Boston.

The website’s structure follows the same line. Alongside the capability menus it carries case studies, research articles and a news section, while the marketplace software sits behind separate log-in and sign-up links for clients and experts.

For a design guide, Catalant shows how a start-up name can be swapped for a coined word that carries its own explanation, and then kept steady while the business underneath changes. Compare Toptal, another network that matches companies with independent specialists, and Braintrust. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a deep ink and an amber accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Catalant’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.