Lilly Chen’s FSH Builds Software for School Meals and Public Records

FSH Technologies is taking aim at a part of public services that rarely draws much attention: the paperwork and disconnected systems behind school meals, permits and records. Co-founder and CEO Lilly Chen’s path to that work ran from a monastery to Colorado College and Facebook, but her business premise is practical: understand why a process is slow before deciding which software to build.

Philadelphia-based FSH develops tools for public-sector operations, including K-12 food services and records management. Chen said the company has raised $25 million, including a $20 million Series A that came together in about a week. Its early revenue and small team show the other side of the opportunity: public-sector sales can take time, and building around established procedures demands patience.

From illness to an unconventional education

Chen was 16 when repeated hospitalizations for Graves’ disease left her frustrated with the care she was receiving through Medicaid. Her mother proposed a radical change: leave school and become a monk. Chen spent about two years in that role, first ordained in the United States and later living for several months at a monastery in China.

She continued taking thyroid medication while at the monastery. Without internet access, she meditated, ate food grown on site or brought by nearby villagers, and reread the books she had brought with her. As her health became more manageable, a conversation with another monk helped her reconsider what came next. Asked why she wasn’t in college, Chen realized she felt well enough to return to school.

Back in the United States, she homeschooled herself and entered Colorado College without a high school diploma. She turned 20 during her first year and graduated in 2019 with a double major in mathematics and economics. Along the way, she briefly played Dota 2 professionally and competed against game-playing bots developed by OpenAI.

After an initial job in Boston, Chen joined Facebook as an engineer, building infrastructure used to train AI models. The role gave her experience with large-scale technical systems, but she eventually wanted to work on problems she considered more directly tied to people’s everyday lives.

Early backing before the business was settled

Chen left Facebook without a startup concept ready to go. She said concerns about the company’s role in enabling the organization of violence led her to conclude that she couldn’t keep working at a large tech company. Her immediate task was to decide where her programming skills could serve work she believed mattered.

An introduction through Envision, a student-run accelerator for founders from nontraditional backgrounds, connected Chen with venture firm Contrary. The firm backed her in 2021, before she had settled on the business that would become FSH. Chen said the investment gave her room to explore what to build, while her account of the problems she wanted to solve helped persuade investors despite the absence of a polished company pitch.

FSH took its current shape in 2024. Jason Chen, the Contrary investor who first backed Lilly Chen, later joined the company as chief operating officer. Contrary led the seed financing. The $20 million Series A included Lachy Groom, General Catalyst, Ramp, Scribble Ventures, Operator Partners and Basis Set Ventures, according to Chen.

Why the underlying process matters

FSH’s focus reflects Chen’s view that administrative delays often stem from more than dated websites. Information may sit in separate departments, while changing a service can require input from communications, technology teams and other stakeholders. A chatbot layered over such a process, she argues, can leave the causes of delay untouched.

Her approach draws on a question from monastery life. While feeding koi, Chen was asked by the head monk whether she thought she was the fish or the pond. After choosing a fish that resembled her, she heard the reply: “You’re the pond, not the fish.” Chen took it as a lesson in examining the whole system, rather than focusing on one part in isolation.

That perspective shapes FSH’s work in school food services, where administrators coordinate meal planning, nutrition details and reimbursement requirements. The company also works on records and archive management. Paper files can still require residents to travel to an office to retrieve documents, and digitizing them involves questions about how information is organized and found.

FSH uses AI for functions including optical character recognition, translation and natural-language search. Chen describes those capabilities as tools within the software, rather than a chatbot or agent expected to run an entire service. The distinction matters for workflows that depend on information spread across teams: automating one interaction won’t necessarily resolve problems in the process behind it.

Patient sales and a measured pace

Winning public-sector contracts takes time. FSH brought in less than $100,000 in revenue in its first year, Chen said. At the time of the interview, the company had roughly eight or nine employees and had made additional offers. The figures capture a business still early in its sales cycle, even as its latest financing provides room to grow.

Chen’s management style also reflects her time as a monk. She’s skeptical of startup norms that treat sleeping at the office or working extreme hours as proof of commitment. Her motto for the team is, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” The idea is to study the people, departments and procedures involved, then act quickly once the problem is clear.

Her own route depended on institutions and backers willing to look beyond a conventional résumé: a college that admitted her without a diploma and an investor who supported her before she had a defined company. For FSH, the next measure will be whether careful attention to administrative workflows can translate into broader adoption across services that have been slow to change.