Today officially marks the final day of Seattle Startup Week, but that doesn’t mean entrepreneurship and innovation will be taking any pause as we wait for next year’s event. If anything, Seattle’s tech ecosystem will continue to grow to new heights and be bigger, faster, and stronger by the time Startup Week rolls through next year.
I can say that with confidence because I spent a lot of time amongst the Seattle locals, discussing the future of their city. Specifically, I heard a lot of chatter about up and coming companies – alongside established names – who will bear the burden of responsibility for strengthening the Seattle ecosystem both internally and externally moving forward.
Whenever I heard Seattle Startup Week attendees talking about their favorite companies, I would jump in and start writing down their recommendations. After all, who better to talk to about this than the people who actually live in Seattle and intimately know the city?
Upon review, my list was beyond long – having too many recommendations is always a good problem to have though. So, I pared it down to 20 companies that the Seattle community thinks we should all be paying attention to:
PayScale
PayScale links individuals and businesses to a salary profile database of 54 million individual salary profiles via crowdsourcing and data technology. It’s all in an effort to help people actually discover what they’re worth and for companies to pay their employees adequately. In this way companies can attract the best talent and get the most from them.
Intrepid Learning
Their mission is to create the world’s most engaging learning technology to make an actual impact in the world. The Intrepid Learning platform empowers you to reach everyone in your organization with effective, efficient, and deeply engaging learning solutions like consumer grade design, intuitive layouts, built in social feature, gamification, and applied learning.
Bizible
Bizible is pioneering the marketing attribution space by offering an easy to use SaaS product to help online marketers answer the simple question “what’s working” in terms of real ROI, revenue, and closed sales. The team’s mission is to make every marketing dollar profitable for their customers. Since graduating from Techstars in 2012, Bizible has been able to accelerate growth for hundreds of companies from education to technology to manufacturing.
Crema
Crema is reinventing the way people discover, buy, and enjoy coffee. The monthly subscription service delivers the coffee directly to your door, but there’s also an element of education built in. Not only do they source coffee from roasters who care, they emphasize getting to know the people who cultivate your coffee.
Ghostruck
Add photos of your items and specific details of your move, find out exactly how much it will cost to complete the job, and then book the move. From there, Ghostruck does the rest by sending a professional to your location to help out. They want to make moving, for anybody, scary simple.
SIREN
On Siren, women share their profile photo only with men they choose. This small step gives needed privacy and eliminates objectification. When men receive a Siren connection, they know she’s interested. It’s an asymmetric model that benefits everyone. Neither over sharing nor static, this open ended feature allows for real personalities to unfold by creating natural conversation starters to spark unpredictable chemistry.
Rover
Whether you need a dog sitter, a dog walker, or daycare, Rover connects pet parents with people who’ll treat their dogs like family. And with over 92 percent of the population living within a short drive of one of the 40,000 sitters who’ve listed their services on Rover, it’s easy to find a sitter you and your dog will love. As the stats show, a stay is booked on Rover every minute of every day.
Louder Rewards
Louder Rewards let’s Seattle sports fans earn gear, game tickets, and player jerseys just for keeping up with the team. They consolidate the team’s and players’ news, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and give users points when they stay caught up with everything happening in the teams’ worlds.
Grove Labs
The Grove Ecosystem, intelligent and ecologically sound, is an all encompassing environment that learns with you, collecting data and optimizing for flavor, freshness, and yield. It’s designed to look beautiful in the home, grow fresh and flavorful food, and engage and inspire you, your family, and your friends. The Ecosystem also harnesses beneficial bacteria, fish, and plants in a natural cycle to reliably grow delicious produce in a space the size of a bookshelf.
Socedo
Socedo is a simple and effective web app for lead generation and relationship management on Twitter. Get more leads, conversions and brand advocates for your business as Socedo discovers the social prospects that match your custom criteria, then further qualifies them via predefined engagement workflow.
Peach
Peach wants to make lunch easier for working professionals so they can get back to changing the world. It doesn’t feed these professionals just any food, but the best local lunches restaurants have to offer. Also, restaurants can reach beyond their neighborhood to an entire city, where thousands of hungry people are looking for a more convenient lunch. Peach pairs great food with great people, for lunch and beyond.
Haiku Deck
With Haiku Deck, anyone can create a flawless presentation and share it with their networks, without huge files and bulky attachments. Haiku Deck is rooted in a few basic principles: keep it simple by limiting your text and focusing each slide on one idea, make it beautiful by using full bleed images to tell your story and tapping into one-touch themes, filters, and formatting, and, most of all, have fun.
Commerce
They take care of the messy ecommerce platforms, payment processors, and shipping providers to standardize the way developers interact with complex infrastructures to power shopping experiences and Buy Now buttons in apps, social streams, advertising, and simply anywhere merchants want to sell products.
Algorithmia
Algorithmia was born in 2013 with the goal of advancing the art of algorithm development, discovery and use. As developers, the team believes that given the right tools the possibilities for innovation and discovery are limitless. Today they build what they believe to be the next era of programming: a collaborative, always live and community driven approach to making the machines that we interact with better.
Glowforge
Glowforge is a 3D laser printer – a desktop laser that uses a beam of light the width of a human hair to cut, engrave, and create beautiful and amazing products. If you’re not a designer, you can choose a design from dozens of categories like personal electronics, jewelry, toys, furniture, leather goods, lighting, containers, and art.
Booster Fuels
Booster wants to eliminate the gas station errand permanently. Park in any spot in your company lot and request a Boost, then let them know when your work day ends. From there you simply pop your fuel door open and the team will take your car and fill it up. Their mission is to protect your time from mundane chores so you can focus on what drives you.
Remitly
Remitly is a mobile payments service that enables consumers to conveniently make person to person international money transfers from the US. Their online service eliminates the forms, codes, agents, extra time, and fees tied to the traditional money transfer process. Remitly is a licensed money transmitter currently operating in 46 states, including DC, and sending millions of dollars to thousands of customers each month.
Area 360
In 2012, Area360 launched an innovative mobile platform, STQRY, currently being used by arts and cultural organizations across the globe to bring their content and stories to life. Drawing on their abilities to connect rich digital content to physical locations across the globe, the team continues to transform onsite areas by linking mobile and location technologies to help hospitals, airports, government, businesses, and others to easily build and deliver amazing visitor experiences.
Azuqua
Azuqua believes data and process integration have to be simple for business to be agile, fast, and customer-centric. The Azuqua platform eliminates coding with unique no-code integration that is easily implemented by business users, yet protected, managed and secured for IT. Further, Azuqua empowers the Responsive Enterprise by offering a cloud-native integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that supports both IT’s need for governance, security and oversight and line of business users’ desires for self service process optimization.
iTraq
iTraq is a hybrid cellular and GPS tracking device that can be found anywhere in the world where cellular service exists. In addition to cellular tracking technology, iTraq includes enhanced GPS tracking to offer more precise location information whenever needed. Simply attach iTraq to a bicycle or boat, place it in the pocket of your child, or even attach it to your luggage, and find it even if your bags traveled to another country or continent.
This article is part of a Startup Week content series brought to you by Chase for Business. Startup Week is celebration of entrepreneurs in cities around the globe. Chase for Business is everything a business needs in one place, from expert advice to valuable products and services.
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