From Monastery to GovTech: Lilly Chen’s Unconventional Road to Building FSH

Lilly Chen, a former monk turned tech founder, announced that her Philadelphia-based company FSH Technologies has closed a $20 million Series A round, bringing total funding to $25 million. The capital, led by General Catalyst and joined by investors such as Ramp, Scribble Ventures and Operator Partners, will be used to expand software that streamlines routine government functions, from school food service administration to public records management. Chen’s story is notable not only for the size of the raise but for the path that led her from a monastery in China to a venture-backed GovTech startup.

Chen’s early life was marked by chronic health challenges. Diagnosed with Graves’ disease as a teenager, she spent several years hospitalized before her mother suggested a move to China to become a monk. Chen left high school, spent roughly two years in monastic life, first ordained in the United States and then living in a Chinese monastery without internet access, and used the period to focus on meditation and intensive reading. When her health stabilized, she returned to the United States, homeschooled herself and enrolled at Colorado College without a traditional high school diploma. She graduated in 2019 with a double major in mathematics and economics, and during college briefly pursued a professional career in the video-game title Dota 2.

After a short stint in Boston, Chen joined Facebook as an engineer building infrastructure for training artificial-intelligence models. The experience gave her a solid technical foundation, but the events of January 6 2021, when she watched the U.S. Capitol attack while attending a remote all-hands meeting, prompted a moral reckoning. “I realized that I couldn’t work for Big Tech anymore,” she recalled, and began searching for work that aligned with her values.

A connection through Envision, a student-run accelerator for non-traditional founders, introduced Chen to venture firm Contrary. Contrary’s partner Jason Chen wrote her first check in 2021, even before she had a formal pitch. The seed financing, led by Contrary, gave Chen the runway to experiment with ideas. In 2024, Jason Chen rejoined the venture as chief operating officer of FSH, underscoring the firm’s confidence in her vision.

FSH’s product strategy focuses on the “unsexy” side of government operations that receive little attention from Silicon Valley. The company builds platforms that help school districts coordinate meal planning, nutritional data and reimbursement, and it creates tools for managing paper-based records that still require in-person retrieval. While FSH incorporates AI for optical-character recognition, translation and natural-language search, Chen emphasizes that the technology is a utility rather than a replacement for human workflow. Her monastic lesson, being the pond rather than the fish, guides this systems-first approach, encouraging her team to examine why information is fragmented before deciding what software to build.

The raise positions FSH to tackle a market that is both large and resistant to change. Chen acknowledges that selling to government agencies demands patience and deep understanding of bureaucratic processes, but she believes the combination of technical expertise and a mission-driven mindset will allow FSH to gain traction. For founders coming from non-technical or unconventional backgrounds, Chen’s journey illustrates how personal purpose, disciplined learning and strategic investor support can converge to address entrenched public-sector problems.