Meet the Philly tech founder who was a monk, worked for Meta, and is building tech for local government
FSH Technologies has raised $5.5 million in venture capital in two years and plans to hire.
Lilly Chen, 30, wants people to stop thinking local government software “sucks.”
The cofounder and CEO of Philadelphia-based FSH Technologies once worked at Facebook writing software that trains AI models, lived in a monastery as a teen, and is now on a mission to make local government technology more efficient.
In the last two years, her company has raised $5.5 million from venture capital, and secured a contract with the city’s Department of Commerce.
“We’re so gung ho about local government, which is like a weird thing to say, but it’s true,” said Chen.
The business just moved into a new office at 2400 Market St., where Aramark is headquartered, and opened a smaller outpost in New York City this month. Chen hopes to hire 40 workers by early 2027, adding to the current 12-person staff, to work on contracts the company has already secured. She’s looking for software engineers and client strategists — positions that can come with a starting salary of $150,000 at FSH Technologies, as well as a signing bonus and equity, she said.
The company is “winning government contracts at a clip,” said Chen, who was born in New Jersey and went to college in Colorado. She was working in San Francisco when the pandemic started, and decided to move closer to her parents in Media.
She declined to share how much the company brought in last year in revenue but says “it’s in the millions.”
The Inquirer interviewed Chen on a hot July day over the phone while she enjoyed an ice cream from 1-900-ICE-CREAM. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Why did you start this company, FSH Technologies?
I used to work at Meta ... when I worked there it was called Facebook. I was just very disenchanted with the apathetic nature of tech bros and the real-world impact that technology has on regular people.
FSH technologies is focused on creating software for local government. Why this niche?
I was [thinking about] what is a net positive on society that I can feel very good about, that I think technology is a good solution for. I landed on local government because it’s the one thing that universally everybody in America has to interface with, and the technology is so outdated. If you’ve tried to pay a parking ticket, get a permit, just try to navigate your local municipality, it’s so hard, it’s so complicated. Usually the software doesn’t even exist. It could be a manual paper thing.
In the last year there was a lot of talk in the Donald Trump administration of making the federal government more efficient. You’re talking about efficiency at the local government level. Did any of that narrative impact you?
There was actually no technology involved in the DOGE effort. When you drive real efficiency in government, it’s not rip and burn things. It’s actually getting into the weeds to understand the current process, who’s doing it, how they’re doing it, why they’re doing it, and then iteratively improving and wherever possible digitizing the relative components of that.
It’s not at all just being like, “Let’s just fire these people and see what happens.”
What about the name FSH Technologies? Where does that come from?
I used to be a Buddhist monk. I dropped out of high school when I was 16, and I moved to China and I lived in a monastery….We had a pond where we kept fish, and [my sensei] … would describe to me: “You are the pond, not the fish.”
If you can kind of separate yourself from the immediate feelings and see things as a bigger picture, as a system, you actually have a much more cohesive understanding and view of the problem.
You were a monk?
I was a real troublemaker in high school. I actually ended up getting very sick — I had an autoimmune disease … I was missing a lot of class, I was kind of misbehaving. My mom at one point threw her hands up in the air and was like, “We’re now Buddhists, we are moving to China, we’re going to live in a monastery, we’re shaving our heads.”
Can you tell me more about your work for the Philadelphia Department of Commerce?
We build software for the entire Department of Commerce, actually.
We standardized and unified all their forms into one platform, and then we created business profiles so that businesses would have to input, for example, their EIN number…once, and it’s there. If you put in your revenue, it will show you what you qualify for.
Prior, if you think about a Google form and you fill it out, you don’t actually know if you qualify, because anybody can open the form, anybody can submit it. It creates a lot of bureaucracy on both ends. You, as the business, don’t know if it was worth your time to fill it out, so you just fill it out – or you don’t fill it out. You, as the city, don’t know if this business is eligible, so you just spend time reviewing stuff for people who don’t qualify. Everything becomes slower and like sludge because the interface is really bad for actually streamlining the process.
The city spends so much less time reviewing applications now because they only get access to the ones that are actually qualified.
How are you managing the company’s work with your current staff of 12?
We have actually won a ton of contracts that are coming down the pipeline, but we haven’t started them yet. We have time to staff up, which is what we’re trying to do. If I can hire 50 people, I would.
Why can’t you?
What we do requires two things. One, is a deep passion and empathy for communities, civil servants, public good. You really need to care about the details because if you don’t care about them, you’re going to let people fall through the cracks.
That’s actually kind of hard to find because … people hear government software and they think it’s boring. They don’t necessarily realize how much impact you can have if you care deeply about this boring thing.
The second thing is software skill — the craft of building software that just works is hard.
The Venn diagram of skill and care is hard because a lot of people who are highly, highly skilled in technology end up at these AI frontier labs, which are paying a million dollars in salary.
What do you want the company to look like in five years? What’s the goal?
The goal is being able to have people no longer think local government software sucks.
