Who’s Who in Seattle: 15 Emerald City Startups to Put on Your Radar

As the home of some of the world’s most iconic brands (Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, F5 Networks, to name just a few), Seattle metropolis is thriving with creative spirit and innovation. The tech salaries here are the third highest in the US (only San Jose and San Francisco pay engineers more), almost 2% of the local startups receive venture capital funding, which is far above any other metropolis, and the city is one of the best places for young adults to find work. Considering all this, Seattle presents itself as a technological heaven. Let’s prove it!

Here’s our list of 15 most promising startups from Seattle.

1. 98point6

The first Seattle startup we selected is driven by a vision to make primary care accessible and affordable to more people, even those without health insurance. 98point6 brings healthcare to an entirely new level by offering private, text-based diagnosis and treatment via a mobile app. The app comes in two plans, personal and employer-sponsored, and it connects patients with certified doctors who provide remote assistance across the entire spectrum of primary care.

Round of funding: Series C

Founder/ CEO: Robbie Cape

Funding: $86.3 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

2. DefinedCrowd

DefinedCrowd offers an intelligent data platform for enterprise data training and modeling. The platform combines ML and data science with crowdsourcing to help companies improve the quality, scalability, and performance of their AI and NLP applications. The solution aims to greatly speed up the generation of high-quality training data (the startup promises data accuracy of 95-98%) for the users who only need to set up a project, insert their own data parameters, sit back, and watch the magic happen. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Round of funding: Series A

Founder/ CEO: Amy Du, Daniela Braga

Funding: $13.1 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

3. Panopto

Panopto targets businesses and universities with a video content management system for recording, managing, streaming, and sharing online presentations, training and lectures, live events, and other educational content. The platform seamlessly integrates with in-house LMS, CMS, online portals, and other systems, and has native apps embedded for mobile support. It also provides a comprehensive set of tools and functions to cater for all the video needs of its clients, which include Nike, Qualcomm, VMWare, and Kimberly-Clarke.

Round of funding: Private Equity

Founder/ CEO: Eric Burns, William Guttman

Funding: $50.9 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

4. ZipWhip

67% of consumers would rather contact companies by texts about appointments than by email or a phone call. The next Seattle-based SaaS startup, Zipwhip, recognizes this trend, as it enables business text messaging from any device, thanks to the cloud. With this technology, businesses can use the existing toll-free, landline, and mobile numbers to send and receive texts from customers. Zipwhip’s multi-device apps come with powerful texting features and ensure secure communication with data encryption.

Round of funding: Series D

Founder/ CEO: Anthony Riemma, John Larson, John Lauer, Michael Smyers

Funding: $91.1 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

5. Glympse

Glympse helps brands enhance customer interactions and experience with a secure last-mile solution. The technology comes with a mobile app that allows users to easily share their real-time GPS location from any web-enabled devices, and without sign-in. While the application is mainly intended for businesses looking to eliminate the friction and anxiety of product and service delivery experiences, it can also be useful for individuals who would like to share their exact whereabouts with family and friends, e.g., to find them in a crowd, or let them know they are safe.

Round of funding: Series D

Founder/ CEO: Chris Ruff, Bryan Trussel, Steve Miller

Funding: $41.9 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

6. Skytap

Founded in 2006, Skytap is one of the most experienced Seattle startups on our list. The company’s technology helps organizations modernize traditional applications with cloud-native development by migrating traditional workloads to the cloud. To make this process simple, Skytap has abstracted all network complexity from cloud providers and built an environment where the users can leverage templates, clone topologies, and share artifacts, for easy and quick creation of own software-defined datacenter and networks.

Round of funding: Series E

Founder/ CEO: Henry Levy, Steven Gribble

Funding: $109.5 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

7. Pushpay

Here comes a unicorn! Originally from New Zealand but now based in Seattle suburbs, Pushpay is a $1 billion technology business that helps global charities, schools, and faith institutions collect donations via an intuitive mobile app. The app works with all major banks, and it supports various payment methods such as credit cards, debit cards, or direct bank transfers. It is fully secure and PCI compliant and requires all transactions to be verified by a password or a fingerprint before they can be conducted.

Round of funding: Post-IPO Equity

Founder/ CEO: Chris Heaslip, Eliot Crowther

Funding: $100.3 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

8. RealSelf

While 98point6 connects patients with primary care doctors, RealSelf allows people to search through a huge database of top board-certified plastic surgeons and cosmetic treatment providers. The portal is the leading consumer destination in the $32 billion US medical aesthetics market. The website supports its community with unbiased ratings, patient stories, and expert answers to empower users to make confident, knowledgeable decisions concerning their bodies. Although the startup is based in Seattle, it is backed by world-class investors and extends its services nation-wide.

Round of funding: Series B

Founder/ CEO: Tom Seery

Funding: $42 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

9. The Riveter

The Riveter is a female-centered co-working startup and a community platform from Seattle. It was founded in 2016 by Amy Nelson, a working mum who struggled to get back on the career track after maternity leave. Her initiative was a female-forward (though not female-only) workspace built to empower women to work together, cultivate their skills, share knowledge, exchange experiences, and motivate one another to shatter the glass ceiling. Currently, the startup owns several offices on the West Coast, but the plans are to expand to 100 locations across the USA.

Round of funding: Unknown

Founder/ CEO: Amy Nelson

Funding: $22.5 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

10. AppSheet

Mobile app development is a tricky business, but AppSheet can make it slightly less complex with an app maker that requires (almost) no coding. The solution is intended for teams and professionals who need a simple, custom mobile app for project management or customer engagement. The platform allows them to build applications directly from a variety of cloud-based spreadsheets and databases, and expand them with add-on features.

Round of funding: Series A

Founder/ CEO: Brian Sabino, Praveen Seshadri

Funding: $18.5 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

11. Mighty AI

Founded in 2014, Mighty AI is a data management platform that helps vehicle computer vision systems label and recognize objects models. The solution consumes raw data and converts it into high-quality data insights to allow powerful scaling of self-driving technology. It didn’t take long for this unique combination of the latest AI and user experience techniques to get noticed. Lately, the startup was acquired by Uber.

Round of funding: Series B

Founder/ CEO: Daryn Nakhuda, Matt Shobe, Matthew Bencke, Patrick O'Donnell

Funding: $27.3 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

12. Xnor.ai

This innovative, venture-funded AI startup from Seattle grew out of award-winning research conducted at the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Xnor.ai adds a new dimension to state-of-the-art artificial intelligence with a platform that allows companies to run complex deep learning algorithms locally on a range of devices (such as mobile phones, cars, drones, cameras, wearables, etc.). The highly-scalable platform opens up affordable AI opportunities for a variety of industries, such as retail, photography, and consumer electronics.

Round of funding: Series A

Founder/ CEO: Ali Farhadi, Mohammad Rastegari

Funding: $14.6 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

13. LevelTen Energy

The next Seattle tech startup on the list delivers a dynamic, two-sided market that connects PPA buyers and sellers and allows them to transact securely and efficiently. The technology-enabled marketplace extends a range of features such as user aggregation, volume pricing, market performance monitoring, and RFP automation to deliver customized, in-depth feedback to sellers and optimal pricing for renewable energy to buyers.

Round of funding: Series B

Founder/ CEO: Bryce Smith

Funding: $28.3 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

14. Seeq Corporation

Seeq is a Seattle tech startup that develops software for advanced analytics of industrial process data. The Seeq platform leverages innovations in Big Data, Machine Learning, and web technologies to provide users with data-based decision support and insights for the optimization of industrial management in verticals such as oil refineries, pharmaceuticals, and energy production. The company’s founding team includes engineers, data scientists, and executives coming from a variety of top-ranked corporations such as Microsoft, Honeywell, and Insitu.

Round of funding: Series B

Founder/ CEO: Bob Moll, Brian Parsonnet, Jon Peterson, Mark Derbecker, Steve Sliwa

Funding: $35.2 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

15. Pulumi

Our last tech startup from Seattle is Pulumi, a cloud-native development platform. It supports software engineers and DevOps teams with frameworks and libraries to create, deploy, and manage cloud services in the users’ favorite programming languages and environments. Apart from Pulumi SDK infrastructure for coding, the solution also features a web console that delivers scalable CI/CD workflows for teams and a training module where users can enhance their knowledge of cloud engineering, serverless architecture, containers, and more.

Round of funding: Series A

Founder/ CEO: Eric Rudder, Joe Duffy

Funding: $20 M

Follow on: LinkedIn, Twitter

Seattle Startup Scene Is Poised For Growth

Whether it’s due to its coffee culture, luscious greenery, or laid-back vibe, Seattle has a unique appeal that makes young entrepreneurs flock to the city. The expansion of the local talent pool shows no signs of slowing, which made the task of narrowing the list of top Seattle startups down to 15 pretty tough. Nevertheless, we hope we did well! And if you would like to follow the steps of these fabulous companies and build your own startup, just say the word!