Climate change reversal startup Nori raises $4M for its CO2 offsets marketplace

Nori CEO Paul Gambill. (Nori Photo)

Nori, a Seattle-based startup striving to help reverse climate change, announced Thursday that it has closed a $4 million fundraising round.

The seed round was led by New York’s Placeholder, a blockchain-focused venture fund, which was joined by North Island Ventures, Tenacious Ventures, and others, including an unnamed agriculture giant.

Using cryptocurrency, Nori sells carbon credits to individuals and businesses to offset their carbon emissions. The startup, which launched in 2017, pays farmers to use verifiable, sustainable practices that store carbon dioxide, such as reducing the tilling of their soil and by planting off-season cover crops. The marketplace has sold offsets totaling nearly to 13,000 metric tons of CO2, with plans to sell an additional 20,000 tonnes by the end of the year.

Paul Gambill, CEO and one of seven co-founders of Nori, a startup working to reverse climate change. (Nori Photo)

The demand for offsets is seemingly vast. An increasing number of companies are pledging to shrink their carbon footprints, including Microsoft’s vow to become carbon negative and Amazon’s promise to be net carbon zero. Reaching these goals will require investments in carbon-removal programs. Amazon alone has a carbon footprint of more than 51 million metric tons.

CEO and co-founder Paul Gambill said that the new funding will be used to hire employees, add farmers to the platform, and expand their marketplace.

“Climate change is caused by too much CO2 in the atmosphere, and farmers have the potential to store billions of tonnes of CO2 in their soil by using regenerative practices,” Gambill said in a statement. “Our marketplace creates significant financial incentives for them to adopt these practices.”

Farmers that typically participate in carbon programs grow commodity grains such as corn, soy and wheat. Nori features profiles of two farmers selling credits, one in Maryland and another in Iowa. One of the company’s big improvements internally, Gambill said, has been reducing the time needed to enroll farmers on the platform.

Nori raised $1.3 million in a “pre-seed” round earlier this year. The company is a Techstars Sustainability Accelerator graduate and has a weekly podcast featuring conversations with leading voices in carbon removal.

Nori was featured in GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight in 2018.

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Seattle-area cybersecurity startup Polyverse raises $16M

Polyverse CEO Alex Gounares. (Polyverse Photo)

Bellevue, Wash.-based cybersecurity startup Polyverse raised another $16 million to help sell its software used by government organizations, defense companies, and more.

Polyverse’s main product is “Polymorphing for Linux,” which scrambles open-source code without affecting its operation, shielding it from hackers looking to exploit weaknesses in the code.

Polyverse has been validated by the U.S. Department of Defense for mitigating zero-day attacks, intrusions that occur just as a vulnerability becomes public, such as the infamous WannaCry ransomware and hacks of companies including Equifax.

The startup recently signed a partnership with SUSE, the world’s largest independent open source software company. It also sells a Polyscripting for WordPress, which aims to remove the three most common attack vectors against the popular content management system.

Its software runs on-premise, in the cloud, and on IoT devices.

Last year Polyverse made CNBC’s top 100 startups list. The company is led by CEO Alexander Gounares, a former CTO at AOL, CEO of Concurix, and Microsoft executive.

The new funding comes from primarily existing investors. Total funding to date in the 40-person company is $21 million. It recently hired Dr. Ralph Pascualy, the former CEO of Swedish Medical Group, to accelerate its healthcare offering.

Polyverse raised $8 million in February.

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Battery startup Joule Case lands $500K after making key pivot due to the pandemic

Joule Case batteries. (Joule Case Photo)

Joule Case, an Idaho-based battery tech startup producing stackable energy storage units, landed more than $500,000 in funding.

The infusion of capital has helped the 5-year-old company shift from a sales plan that, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, was going to target events and music festivals. in the form of convertible notes.

Now the startup is focused on residential and backup-power customers. That includes food trucks, campers and RV owners, and people looking for home energy backup for solar power and in the case of electrical outages.

“In the day-to-day of trying to keep your business afloat or selling stuff, you have to be flexible and determined to make it happen,” said CEO James Wagoner.

The startup had grown to 12 employees, but had to lay off staff working specifically on the festival-related products. The company, which now has five full-time employees, is hiring for product development and sales aligned with the pivot.

In October, Joule Case was crowned Early-Stage Innovation of the Year from the Idaho Innovation Awards. Pictured are founders James Wagoner (second from left) and Alex Livingston (third from left). (Joule Case Photo)

Using lithium ion and lead acid batteries, Joule Case has created a stackable system that can be added or subtracted to depending on the amount and duration of energy needed. The batteries can replace polluting, noisy gas generators.

Joule Case products are available from the company as well as Camping World and Northern Tool, and the startup recently closed a deal to provide the batteries to a network of more than 500 electrical wholesale distributors.

The latest funding is in the form of convertible notes, debt that can be turned into equity in the future. Investors in the round include Keiretsu Forum and Park City Angels. Joule Case previously raised nearly $1 million from angel investors. The startup says it plans to pursue a Series A funding round in the near future.

As the push toward cleaner energy continues, Joule Case is part of a larger trend to establish the Pacific Northwest a major player in the growing battery tech sector.

There are numerous startups in the space, including Woodinville, Wash.-based Group14, which is using nanotechnology in battery science, and ESS, an Oregon-based manufacturer tackling grid energy storage. Lavle, a Seattle-area company developing batteries for marine and other uses plans, reported that it’s increasing its workforce by more than 50% through the end of the year. Seattle’s Zin Boats is making waves in its pitch to become the “Tesla of the sea.”

The region is also home to institutional battery expertise at the University of Washington and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and government agencies are purchasing batteries for transportation projects including Washington state’s plans to build the world’s largest hybrid-powered, auto-carrying ferries.

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Seattle biotech startup led by Fred Hutch, Adaptive vets raises $16M for rapid drug development tech

Lumen Chief Science Officer Jim Roberts (left) and CEO Brian Finrow. (Lumen Photo)

Lumen Bioscience today announced a $16 million Series B round to help support its novel approach to rapid and low-cost drug development.

The company has come up with a way to produce orally-delivered antibodies and other biologics by using a bioengineered bright green algae called Spirulina. It has three clinical programs to treat gastrointestinal diseases including C. difficile, norovirus, and traveler’s diarrhea.

Lumen CEO Brian Finrow said the company’s technology lowers the cost of biologic drugs by a factor of 1,000 or more.

“With traditional technologies there’s nowhere near enough manufacturing capacity in the world to treat and prevent these diseases in this way, but Lumen’s technology makes it feasible,” he said.

Lumen is led by Finrow, a former senior vice president at Adaptive Biotechnologies, and Chief Science Officer Jim Roberts, the former head of basic sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute. They co-founded the startup in 2017.

The 50-person company has several collaborations with organizations such as the Gates Foundation, NIH, NIAID, Fred Hutch, and others. It is currently working with the Gates Foundation to develop infectious disease drugs alongside fellow Seattle startup A-Alpha Bio.

WestRiver Management and Bioeconomy Capital led the round. Avista Development, Columbia Pacific, and local angels also participated, along with the co-founders. Total funding to date is $68 million.

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Former Amazon, Microsoft engineers raise $120K for Seattle cloud startup Cloudshim

A new startup out of Seattle called Cloudshim just raised $120,000 to help grow the company’s self-serve cloud management platform.

Founded by two brothers who previously worked at Microsoft and Amazon — Lokesh Taneja and Vishal Taneja — Cloudshim aims to help companies manage cloud infrastructure services and track associated cloud costs.

“Most competitor products have gone upmarket, tailoring their product around enterprise requirements,” said Lokesh Taneja. “This has left a void to be filled for customers that just want a simple and quick way to manage their cloud without heavy contractual processes.”

The software currently supports Amazon Web Services users but will soon expand to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Black Lion Ventures was the sole investor in the “pre-seed” round. Cloudshim plans to raise a larger round in the next year. The company employs nine people.

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Tech Moves: Former Amazon VP Brad Porter joins Scale AI as CTO; Seattle startup Ally.io adds execs; and more

Brad Porter, who was until recently the Amazon Robotics leader, will become Scale AI’s first CTO. (Scale AI Photo)

— Brad Porter, the longtime Amazon robotics leader, has surfaced as the first chief technology officer of Scale AI, a San Francisco-based company seeking to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence through its machine learning technology for labeling data.

“As our CTO, Brad will help continue to improve the efficiency and sophistication of our technologies and processes by orders of magnitude, building new tools to continue to accelerate the development of AI systems,” wrote Alexandr Wang, the company’s CEO and founder, in a post Monday morning. “He will manage our entire technology stack, with combined ownership of product direction and engineering, to turbocharge our ambitious technology roadmap.”

Porter joined Amazon in 2007, and in 2014 became a distinguished engineer, an exclusive title given to only a handful of employees. In 2017, he became VP of Amazon Robotics, managing the company’s robotic technology operations in its warehouses and with other high-tech projects.

Alexandr Wang, Scale AI’s CEO and founder, dropped out of MIT to start the company. (Scale AI Photo)

“Will Scale be the next Amazon? Well, it will be for me,” writes Porter in a LinkedIn post today. “I’m joining Alex Wang and the team at Scale as CTO to help bring this vision to reality.”

Wang, who is in his early 20s, dropped out of MIT to found Scale AI in 2016. The company has raised more than $120 million in funding, and is reportedly valued at more than $1 billion.

“In many ways, this is the unsexy part of AI,” Porter writes. “The sexy parts of AI are the fancy algorithms and powerful silicon that allow AI practitioners to build a model that attempts to match the performance of humans. But if you don’t find a way to capture the performance of humans in an accurate and computer-understandable manner, it is extremely hard to build a model that matches that performance.”

Porter’s departure from Amazon was reported by Business Insider on Aug. 14 and subsequently confirmed by the company. Since then, Porter’s former Amazon boss, Dave Clark, senior vice president of worldwide operations, was named to succeed Jeff Wilke as Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer CEO, which resulted in a reshuffling of executives in Amazon’s operations and logistics division.

— Seattle Genetics announced Ted Love has joined its board of directors and Srinivas Akkaraju has resigned after service of more than 17 years. Love currently serves as president and CEO of Global Blood Therapeutics based in San Francisco.

Based in Bothell, Wash., Seattle Genetics produces drugs to fight cancer. It currently has two products on the market, and a third drug for breast cancer treatment that was approved by the FDA in April.

— Seattle startup Ally.io hired Atul Sahai as SVP of strategy and operations and Justine Lyon as SVP of sales. Both have experience at other SaaS startups in the Seattle region.

Sahai was most recently senior director of business strategy and operations at collaborative work management platform Smartsheet. He previously worked at Microsoft, HP and Altair.

Lyon spent more than 10 years at compensation software provider PayScale, most recently as VP of sales.

Ally.io’s software helps companies track and hit their goals. The company raised $15 million last year and won Startup of the Year at the 2020 GeekWire Awards.

— Chicago, Ill.-based Nerdio appointed former Microsoft executive Andy Lees to its board. Nerdio offers solutions for managed service providers on Microsoft Azure.

Lees spent 23 at Microsoft, including a decade in the U.K. subsidiary. He relocated to the tech giant’s Redmond, Wash. headquarters as a corporate vice president overseeing field marketing, North American sales and the Windows phone division among others. At the time of his departure in 2013, he was CVP of corporate strategy.

Robert Matthews (Swiftwater Group Photo).

— Robert Matthews, former Global Head of Integrated Marketing for Xbox, has left Microsoft and launched Swiftwater Group, a strategic marketing firm for brands and nonprofits. 

Matthews spent more than 11 years at Microsoft overseeing marketing strategy for the Redmond, Wash.-company’s global gaming business. Prior to Microsoft, he was head of consumer marketing at Nintendo during the launch of the Wii.

— Aerospace industry veterans Kelly Maloney and Jay Maloney have launched OLI Communications, a new Seattle-based strategic marketing, branding and operations firms. The new venture will provide services to companies in aerospace, space, medical, marine and other industrial sectors.

Kelly Maloney previously served as president and CEO of the Aerospace Futures Alliance and the Washington State Space Coalition. Jay Maloney spent more than 17 years at Boeing, most recently as VP of fleet management. Since departing in 2017, he’s served as president of Maloney Aerospace Advisors.

Sara Gonzalez (Burke Museum Photo).

— University of Washington Associate Professor of Anthropology Sara Gonzalez has joined the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture as a curator of archaeology. She is also an adjunct professor of American Indian studies.

In this new role, Gonzalez will curate and care for the museum’s archaeology collections and collaborate with U.S. Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities on archaeological and museum practices. Located on UW’s Seattle campus, the Burke Museum completed a three-year, $99 million expansion last year.

Editor’s note: This post previously cited Dr. Ekin Yasin’s new role at the UW — her appointment was covered in an earlier Tech Moves.

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Former Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Convoy leaders are building a secretive new Seattle startup

Linda Lian. (Madrona Venture Group Photo)

Four leaders from top Seattle tech companies are working together on a stealthy new startup.

Linda Lian, a former associate at Madrona Venture Group and senior product marketing manager at Amazon Web Services, is leading a group that also includes:

Tom Kleinpeter, most recently a principal engineer at Dropbox who sold a music streaming startup to the cloud giant in 2012.Francis Luu, a designer who spent 10 years at Facebook.Viraj Mody, formerly the engineering director at Dropbox and technical advisor to the CEO at Seattle startup Convoy.

The company is working on tools that help users build digital communities, according to a recent tweet from Lian. Lian declined to provide additional details when contacted by GeekWire.

Lian was previously a product marketing manager on the AWS Lambda team. She spent about a year at Madrona and formerly worked as a financial analyst at cybersecurity startup Lookout, as well as Morgan Stanley.

Mody previously led Dropbox’s Seattle office. He joined Convoy in 2018 as its senior director of engineering, then transitioned into a role advising CEO Dan Lewis. Convoy is building a digital freight network and is one of Seattle’s most valuable tech startups.

Kleinpeter sold two startups: Audiogalaxy to Dropbox and FolderShare to Microsoft in 2005. He spent nearly eight years at Dropbox.

Luu joined Facebook in 2009, working on products such as News Feed, Groups, and others.

We’ll update this story as we learn more about the new company.

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This Seattle startup shifted to a 4-day work week due to the pandemic — here’s what happened

Volt CEO Dan Giuliani. (Volt Photo)

The pandemic is changing the way we think about work — not only where, but on what days.

Seattle startup Volt already shifted to a remote work policy in early March as COVID-19 began spreading across the U.S.

Then, after polling employees about the changing dynamics of a work-from-home lifestyle, Volt switched to a four-day work week.

The result? Higher job satisfaction and the same, if not higher, productivity levels.

“So let’s total this all up,” Volt CEO Dan Giuliani wrote in a blog post. “Less time working + more productivity = happier employees. It’s not rocket science, but it sure is music to my ears.”

After a six-week experiment, Volt permanently switched to its new “Flex Fridays” policy. The company, which sells a fitness training app platform, is giving employees Friday off as long as they do their best to “maintain the productivity levels of a typical five-day work week.”

“We removed 20% of the required time at work and not a single employee felt it decreased the overall level of company productivity,” Giuliani said. “That’s wild.”

Giuliani said the idea came about after he found himself more exhausted on Monday mornings and feeling like he was “wasting” Friday, which used to be a fun and energetic day when his 24-person team was in the office.

“There’s just something different about work and life in 2020,” he said. “Maybe it’s the Groundhog Day feeling of working from home or the accumulating stress of dealing with BOTH a global pandemic and an immensely fraught political climate at the same time. Or maybe there’s a fundamental difference in each hour of remote work as compared to the equivalent hour of work in the office.”

The CEO said he was previously a “four-day skeptic,” but not anymore.

Hi everyone ??

We recently shifted to a four-day work week at @VoltAthletics.

Time in the office went ??

Job satisfaction went ??

And even better… overall productivity went ?? too!

10/10 highly recommend. I wrote about it here: https://t.co/ywaRBEi28r

— Dan Giuliani (@DanGiuliani) August 26, 2020

The idea of a 4-day work week is not new, but has gained momentum this year due to the pandemic. Former presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang is a big supporter, telling Business Insider earlier this month that the 4-day work week could be more important than ever.

Other companies such as TripAdvisor and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt moved to a temporary 4-day work week this year, NBC reported. The shift can also help companies save labor costs.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden in May suggested companies could shift to the 4-day work week to boost the domestic tourism industry.

Microsoft introduced a program called “Work Life Choice Challenge” last year in Japan, shutting down offices every Friday in August to give employees an extra day off each week. As time at work was cut, Microsoft saw productivity — measured by sales per employee — jump by 40% compared to the same period from the year before. Employees were not only encouraged to take an extra day off, they were told to keep meetings shorter (no longer than 30 minutes) and spend less time responding to email, communicating via a Microsoft messaging app instead.

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Convoy hires former Expedia CEO as president and COO as digital freight startup tops 1k employees

Mark Okerstrom, the former Expedia Group CEO, will become Seattle startup Convoy’s president and COO. (Convoy Photo)

Mark Okerstrom is shifting from travel and tourism to trucking, looking to apply his digital commerce expertise to a new marketplace.

The former Expedia Group CEO, who left the travel giant in an executive shakeup last year, is joining Convoy as the fast-growing Seattle startup’s new president and chief operating officer. Okerstrom will oversee Convoy’s finance, operations, marketing, supply and marketplace growth teams, working alongside  CEO and co-founder Dan Lewis.

The announcement comes as Convoy tops 1,000 employees, five years after it was founded by Lewis and CTO Grant Goodale. The company’s digital network is like ride-sharing for freight, matching shippers with truck drivers that have available space. Convoy is one of a handful of privately-held companies in the Seattle region valued at more than $1 billion, raising $400 million at a $2.7 billion valuation in September.

Convoy CEO Dan Lewis. (GeekWire Photo)

In an interview with GeekWire, Okerstrom said he first learned about Convoy early in the company’s history, when he was Expedia’s chief financial officer, sitting in the C-suite next to then-Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Now the CEO of Uber, Khosrowshahi was an early Convoy investor.

That history is very relevant now: Uber competes with Convoy through its Uber Freight business, so much that Khosrowshahi divested his stake in Convoy after he joined Uber, to avoid a conflict of interest. Uber listed Convoy among its competitors, along with Amazon.

“I first started tracking Conroy shortly after it started, because Dara was an investor,” Okerstrom said. “He sat right beside me, and so we would always talk about investments, investment ideas. And so I was super intrigued about what they were doing.”

Convoy has raised $668 million over its lifetime from investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; Code.org founders Hadi and Ali Partovi; former Starbucks president Howard Behar; U2’s Bono and The Edge; among others.

Expedia Group chairman Barry Diller, center, speaks with Dara Khosrowshahi and Mark Okerstrom during a 2016 event. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)

Another Convoy investor is also familiar to Okerstrom: Barry Diller, the Expedia Group chairman, who cited a disagreement over strategy and disappointing financial results for the abrupt departures Okerstrom and CFO Alan Pickerill in December. That was before the pandemic threw the travel market into a tailspin.

After Okerstrom’s departure from Expedia, he was contemplating his next steps when Lewis contacted him.

“Dan just reached out at the right time; I had the background on the business. I hadn’t worked in an earlier stage company before. And yet there were so many interesting parallels between what we had done at Expedia and the opportunity ahead of Convoy. … I just said, ‘I just can’t pass this up. It’s gonna be a blast.’ ”

Okerstrom said he was also drawn by the environmental benefits of creating new efficiencies in shipping.

At some companies, hiring someone with experience as a public company CEO would foreshadow an initial public offering, but Lewis downplayed that notion.

“I don’t think that’s the primary driver here,” Lewis said in response to the IPO question. “If you were to listen in on our leadership team discussions, that’s not the thing that we’re spending our time thinking about right now. It’s how do we build the best business and continue to serve customers in new ways.”

They are spending time on expansion into new lines of business. Lewis pointed to Convoy’s recent launch of a payment service and fuel card for carriers as early examples of the types of programs and initiatives the company looking to roll out. The idea, Lewis said, is to “really think about trucking across multiple modes, but then also start to think about, how do we make the supply chain more efficient in all the places that overlap and interact with trucking.”

Lewis said the company has found in Okerstrom “somebody that can help us think about what that future looks like … across multiple businesses, really expanding to serve our customers.”

The pandemic has been a roller-coaster for Convoy, causing wild volatility in supply chains. The company says it saw demand for trucking surge in March and plunge in April, before rebounding to levels now approaching all-time highs.

The company cut a handful of positions early in the economic downturn, primarily in recruiting, after it reduced its number of open roles for the year. However, Convoy continues to add employees, and it is seeking to fill open roles.

For the record, Okerstrom hasn’t worked in trucking before, but he points out that his wife’s uncles are truck drivers in his native Canada, just in case that does anything to burnish his industry credentials.

If and when Convoy expands there, he said, “I’ll be a family celebrity.”

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Seattle startup Banzai acquires High Attendance to bolster event management platform

Banzai, a Seattle startup that sells event marketing software, today announced the acquisition of Austin-based High Attendance, a similar company that helps clients run events.

Banzai CEO Joe Davy said the deal will help support a rapidly-changing events industry that has shifted online due to the pandemic.

“The last purely offline event has already occurred,” Davy said in a statement. “The future is hybrid events. Every company in the world is now reaching their audiences through hybrid offline, online, and on-demand audience experiences.”

High Attendance will add 10 employees to Banzai’s headcount, which is now north of 80 people. High Attendance CEO Christopher Justice will join Banzai as its new vice president of engineering. Banzai raised a $7 million Series A investment round in March.

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Digital bank startup Copper raises $4.3M to help teens learn how to spend and save money

Copper co-founders Stefan Berglund and Eddie Behringer. (Copper Images)

Can tech help teens spend money smarter? That’s the bet Copper and its investors are making.

The Seattle-based digital bank startup just announced a $4.3 million seed round led by PSL Ventures, the venture capital arm of Pioneer Square Labs. Jack Brody, director of product at Snap, along with Mana Ventures and Western Technology Investment also participated.

Copper is targeting users in the 13- to 19-year-old range with a debit card and app experience that includes parents along the way. The 1-year-old company incentivizes teens to save money by giving cash in exchange for hitting a savings goal or paying back parents on time. They can also earn money by simply passing a quiz about finance.

The app allows for peer-to-peer payments, which makes it easier for parents and kids to exchange money, and offers bank-level security with FDIC protection.

Copper earns revenue by charging a subscription fee to parents whose children use Copper. It also charges a small fee to vendors running payments made via a Copper debit card.

The 11-person company is led by Stefan Berglund and Eddie Behringer, who previously co-founded Snap! Raise, a Seattle-based online fundraising platform for youth groups. They took many learnings from that experience of building trust with the teen/high school demographic and are applying those lessons to Copper. The company cited data that shows how nearly 20% of U.S. teens are not financially literate.

“Our transformative purpose as a company is to build the first financially successful generation,” said Behringer, the company’s CEO. “As lofty as this sounds, we believe the next generation is capable of making financial decisions given the right guidance and believe that a person’s first banking relationship should be created much earlier.”

Behringer said Copper has two competitors — Step and Greenlight — but that they have less than 4% of consumer accounts in the U.S. and target an older demographic.

“Unlike our competitors, we rely on teens introducing Copper to their parents and their parents approving the account,” Behringer said. “We know from our experience with Snap! Raise that this is the most effective way to get teens to actively use something new — they have to want to use it.”

The pandemic is forcing banks to close, which has opened up opportunities for Copper. Parents are finding it more difficult to open their child’s first banking account at a physical bank, Behringer said.

“This reality coupled with the increased friction of cash and the need for financial education for our kids is driving the need for digital banking solutions that provide teens the access they need to not only use money but learn how to spend and save responsibly,” he said.

Cole Morgan, the other Snap! Raise co-founder, remains at Snap! Raise.

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Cloud startup Snowflake reveals financials in IPO filing as it battles Amazon, Microsoft, others

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman. (Snowflake Photo)

Cloud computing startup Snowflake Computing filed for an IPO on Monday, revealing its financial data for the first time as the company prepares to go public.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company said it more than doubled revenue to $242 million in the first half of 2020, with a net loss of $171.3 million, down from $177 million in 2019.

Snowflake’s data warehouse is a specialized type of cloud database built for analytical applications. The company has more than 3,100 customers including Brex, ConAgra Foods, Domino’s, JetBlue, and Nationwide. It has more than 20 offices worldwide, including a Seattle hub, and is one of the most valuable private tech startups in the world.

(Click to enlarge)

Founded in 2012, Snowflake sits in a unique position among other cloud service providers, partnering with giants such as Amazon and Microsoft but also competing against them.

In its IPO filing, Snowflake listed Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform under potential risk factors to the business. All three competitors offer their own data warehousing service.

Snowflake said a substantial majority of its business runs on AWS. From the filing:

“There is risk that one or more of these public cloud providers could use their respective control of their public clouds to embed innovations or privileged interoperating capabilities in competing products, bundle competing products, provide us unfavorable pricing, leverage its public cloud customer relationships to exclude us from opportunities, and treat us and our customers differently with respect to terms and conditions or regulatory requirements than it would treat its similarly situated customers. Further, they have the resources to acquire or partner with existing and emerging providers of competing technology and thereby accelerate adoption of those competing technologies. All of the foregoing could make it difficult or impossible for us to provide products and services that compete favorably with those of the public cloud providers.”

Longtime Microsoft executive Bob Muglia previously led Snowflake as CEO for five years but stepped down in May 2019. Frank Slootman, who ran ServiceNow as chairman and CEO from 2011 to 2017, now leads the company.

Slootman owns 5.9% of the company while Muglia owns 3.3%, according to the IPO filing. The largest shareholder is Sutter Hill Ventures with a 20.3% stake.

Dragoneer Investment Group — a backer of Airbnb, Slack, Spotify, Uber and other giants — led a $479 million Series G round in February and Salesforce Ventures participated for the first time. That round valued Snowflake at $12.4 billion.

Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group is another investors, though it is not listed in IPO documents as the firm owns less than 5% of the company. Other backers include Altimeter; ICONIQ Capital; Redpoint Ventures; and Sequoia.

Snowflake was one of five tech companies to file for IPOs on Monday alone as tech IPOs continue despite the ongoing pandemic and economic crisis. Many companies have traded higher since debuting on the public markets over the past several months.

Software startups that filed for IPOs *today*:
– Snowflake
– Unity
– JFrog
– Sumo Logic

And now: Asana https://t.co/bcnC63kp5E

— Deirdre Bosa (@dee_bosa) August 24, 2020

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Madrona leads $4.9M round for Stratify, a new fintech startup that aims to automate budgeting

Stratify CEO Brian Camposano. (Madrona Venture Labs Photo)

Stratify came out of stealth mode and announced a $4.9 million seed investment round led by Madrona Venture Group.

The company, which started in Seattle but is now fully remote, spun out of Madrona Venture Labs (MVL), the Seattle startup studio backed by Madrona. GeekWire previously reported on the company this past May.

Stratify is led by Brian Camposano, the former CFO at Docker who was an entrepreneur-in-residence at MVL since March. He previously spent 12 years at Deutsche Bank and nearly four years at Concur, the travel expense giant that sold to SAP for $8.3 billion in 2014.

The startup aims to automate the budgeting and forecasting process, replacing legacy software used by various types of companies. It allows for collaboration across various departments and enables a real-time “continuous planning model.” Machine learning is used to identify performance gaps and create revised forecast scenarios.

The idea is to help finance professionals save time on manual and administrative tasks, freeing them up to dig into the numbers and identify key trends.

“Continuous budgeting is an important evolution of the traditional budgeting workflow, as it leverages access to real-time data in order to analyze financial and operational performance in real-time, compare those results to the underlying budget assumptions, address any identified operational issues to optimize performance, and re-forecast the business when business dynamics have changed,” explained Camposano.

Stratify natively integrates with a customers’ core systems of record and can automatically create reports and calculate KPIs based on the financial and operational performance of the business, Camposano said.

Docker CEO Steve Singh at the 2017 GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit. (GeekWire Photo)

Steve Singh is chairman at Stratify. He and Camposano have crossed paths multiple times. Singh helped start Concur back in 1993 and led the company until 2017, before joining Docker as CEO in May 2017. Camposano arrived at the software startup a few months later.

Singh joined Madrona Venture Group, which created MVL, as managing director this past January.

“Intelligent applications are the future of enterprise software and no area is more ripe for this work than the office of the CFO,” Singh said in a statement. “The process of creating, measuring and updating a budget should be continuous, not the current system of heads down work that is often based on complex and breakable spreadsheets.”

Stratify has five employees, including Brian Torrey, a former Adaptive Insights exec, and Venky Krishnan, who was previously at Apptio and Microsoft. The company plans to triple the size of its team over the next year.

Camposano said the pandemic and economic crisis have not negatively affected Stratify. He said the current situation has “highlighted the importance of a tool like Stratify.”

“In particular, the ability to quickly and automatically create new forecast scenarios that reflect changing business dynamics, and our collaboration capabilities that allow distributed management teams to access consistent data sets quickly and easily to ensure all stakeholders are operating with the same understanding of the state of the business,” he said.

Coatue, which announced a $700 million early-stage fund last year, also participated in Stratify’s seed round.

Madrona has made an effort to invest in fintech companies and expand Seattle as a fintech hub.

Other recent MVL spinouts include Zeitworks, led by Seattle startup veterans Ryan Windham and Ben Elowitz, and Simplata, a data security startup led former BMW ReachNow CEO Steve Banfield and former Domain Tools CTO Bruce Roberts.

MVL raised its third fund last year with plans to launch up to a dozen new startups.

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Seattle startup founder on the discrimination-busting advantages of VC fundraising during COVID

Tribute founder and CEO Sarah Haggard, seated, with some of her Tribute and personal support crew, from left to right: Elaine Jones, Tribute advisor; Joanie Parsons, Tribute PR and marketing advisor; Jane Boulware, Tribute business strategy advisor and CEO counsel; and Eileen Kollmeyer, former Microsoft colleague and informal mentor to Haggard. (Tribute Photo)

Sarah Haggard just raised an investment round remotely due to COVID-19 and found advantages compared to doing it in person — particularly given that she is pregnant and due with her first child next month.

Haggard is CEO and founder of Tribute, a Seattle-based mentoring app. She declined to reveal the investment amount, but talked about the unusual process of raising capital during this time.

“While some would say it’s harder to establish relationships while remote, for me personally, it saved me time and money not having to travel,” Haggard via email. “I was still able to build meaningful, trusted relationships through video calls.

“And best of all, I was able to raise while pregnant without it being a point of conversation (or worse, a discriminating factor),” she said. “I’d like to say in 2020 we’re past all of that, but there is still a huge double-standard for women when they go to raise. It’s even more pronounced for women who are pregnant.”

 I’d like to say in 2020 we’re past all of that, but there is still a huge double-standard for women when they go to raise.

More female startup founders have publicly shared their pregnancies in recent years, “blowing up conventional ideas that having a newborn and building a startup don’t mix,” The Guardian reported last year.

A recent survey from All Raise found that 52% of female founders are spending more than seven hours daily on caregiving during the pandemic, compared to 26% of male founders. But despite the discrepancy, female founders report no notable difference in negative impact to their revenue.

“Even with an outsized impact on caregiving responsibilities, the negative impact on business remains the same across groups, suggesting female founders may be more resilient and adaptable to change,” the All Raise report noted.

Haggard has had a busy 2020 already. In June, her pitch won the top prize and $140,000 at the Seattle Angel Conference XVII, making her one of very few female founders to achieve the honor.

The Tribute platform.

Haggard was a senior product marketing manager at Microsoft for more than a decade before launching Tribute in January 2018.

Tribute users create profiles and share professional and personal experiences within their workplace, allowing employees to find colleagues who have faced challenges they’re working through. The app can also match potential mentors and mentees.

One of the challenges of creating mentorships is the concern about the time involved. To solve that worry, Tribute offers real-time, peer-to-peer micro-mentorship that involves a single engagement, or people can sign up for longer term interactions that are managed and scheduled through the app. The idea is to create a more scalable network of support within a workplace.

Tribute users are seeking advice on wide-ranging issues, Haggard said, including professional questions about public speaking, imposter syndrome, promotions and job transfers as well as more personal issues, such as working from home with kids, returning to the workforce after kids, moving cities and listening with empathy.

The startup’s customers include Microsoft, Zillow and the University of Washington.

In March, Tribute hired Danielle Hill, former chief operating officer of the Riveter, to lead its customer success team. The company has moved Sarah Moore, its UX/UI designer into a full time role as its brand and product lead.

Investors in Tribute include Tapas Capital, 5H Values Capital (Geraldine Chin Moody and James Chin Moody), and Barry Russell, senior vice president of cloud at Seattle startup Qumulo.

Tribute was featured in a GeekWire Startup Spotlight last year.

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Seattle-based threat response startup Stabilitas acquired by OnSolve

Stabilitas CEO Greg Adams.

Critical event management company OnSolve today announced the acquisition of Stabilitas, a 7-year-old Seattle startup that sells threat response software.

Stabilitas combines crowdsourced expert knowledge with technology to help alert customers of safety incidents that may affect traveling employees and other assets. OnSolve offers a similar product.

“Joining OnSolve was a natural fit because we are both focused on keeping people and organizations safe,” Stabilitas CEO Greg Adams said in a statement. “Stabilitas’ AI-powered critical event intelligence coupled with OnSolve’s leading global critical communications solutions will take critical event management to the next level.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Past military experience helped drive Adams and his co-founder Chris Hurst to create Stabilitas in 2013.

Adams was a Special Forces Team Leader in western Afghanistan and helped coordinate with various organizations across business, government, and nonprofits. Hurst was an Army Diver and led engineering teams throughout the Middle East, Asia, and South America before running a risk management team at Mercy Corps. The co-founders attended West Point together and were also classmates at the same program at Harvard.

Stabilitas will remain in Seattle and its 15 employees will join OnSolve, which will maintain the Stabilitas brand. The Seattle startup had raised $5 million to date from investors including Tappan Hill Ventures, TFX Capital, CrowdSmart, AoA, Bellingham Angels, Cascade Angels, Pasadena Angles, and the Santa Barbara Angels.

Adams is now chief strategy officer at OnSolve.

Founded in 2017, OnSolve is based in Alpharetta, Ga., and employs 320 people.

“Our customers will now be able to leverage the latest technological advances to more quickly and accurately anticipate, analyze and manage crises to ultimately keep people safe, informed, assured and productive when it matters most,” OnSolve CEO Mark Herrington said in a statement. “This acquisition also enables us to uniquely provide business resiliency and continuity by combining situational awareness, critical communications as well as incident management.”

Factal is another Seattle startup that helps companies protect employees and assets from threats around the globe.

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Hospitality startup Loge raises $15M to weather ‘uncertain times’ and expand to more locations

(Loge Photo)

Hospitality startup Loge, which promotes a love of the outdoors and adventure sports through its hip, motel-style locations, has raised $15 million in new funding.

The company, pronounced “Lodge,” which launched in 2017 and is backed by big names in outdoor recreation, said it received support from longtime investors including Round House, Brighton Jones Investment Partners, Colfam, and numerous individuals. Loge, which raised $4.5 million in 2018, said there were also also a small number of new strategic investors and funds.

Loge plans to use the new cash to ensure long term operational stability through what it calls “uncertain market times.” It is also looking at continued operational innovations and future expansion to more locations.

Loge currently has locations in Westport, Wash., Leavenworth, Wash., Bend, Ore., Mt. Shasta, Calif., and Breckenride, Colo., and caters to surfers, mountain bikers, climbers and more with rooms and camp spaces as well as rental equipment.

The travel industry has been hit especially hard by the coronavirus pandemic as more people stay home and avoid far-flung escapes. Loge reopened in July and promotes the road-trip accessibility of its locations in the Northwest and beyond.

“As we open back up we are more excited than ever to double down on our purpose of ‘helping people find their place by making it easy to connect, get out, and explore,’” Loge CEO Johannes Ariens said in a website post. “In light of the recent pandemic, how this happens is going to look and feel a little different. And that’s OK. We’ve figured out new ways to enable connection, because connection is essential to our survival and the need has never been higher.”

Loge has put together a code of conduct outlining how staff and guests can staff say during the pandemic. All sites have been to shifted to remote check in, with keyless room entry. Guests receive their room entry code via text and gear can be rented online, too.

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Madrona invests in $80M round for online document startup Coda, led by ex-Microsoft and YouTube director

Bay Area-based startup Coda raised a $80 million round led by Kleiner Perkins for its online document collaboration software.

Founded in 2014 and led by Shishir Mehrotra, a former director at Microsoft and Google, Coda brings together documents, spreadsheets, and apps into one platform. It uses “building blocks,” templates, and customizable views, and also connects to other apps such as Jira and Slack. Customers include Spotify, Uber, Intercom, Square, and others.

Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group also participated in the Series C round, investing out of its Acceleration Fund.

“Coda envisions a future where documents are alive and interactive – enabling users to interact with data, to interact with systems, and to automate previously manual processes,” Madrona Managing Director S. “Soma” Somasegar wrote in a blog post. “Coda imagines a world where everybody can be a ‘maker’ and can use Coda to express what they want to and collaborate with others seamlessly.”

Somasegar said the investment in Coda fits into Madrona’s focus on backing companies in the “Future of Work” and “low-code/no-code” areas.

Welcome to the world of documents as powerful as applications – @MadronaVentures thrilled to be a part of the @coda_hq @shishirmehrotra journey #futureofwork https://t.co/7Ssh5FSMQg

— S. Somasegar (@SSomasegar) August 11, 2020

Coda is riding a trend of increased use of workplace collaboration software, particularly in the past several months with remote work amid the pandemic.

Other investors in round include Underscore VC, Renegade Partners, NGP Capital, and Hawk Equity. Greylock, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, and a number of well-known angels previously invested.

“With all these backers joining the maker generation, we’re more equipped than ever to reimagine docs,” Mehrotra wrote in a blog post. “In the past year, we’ve made big progress in making Coda simpler, cleaner, and faster for your team; now you can expect even more.”

Mehrotra co-founded Coda with Alex DeNeui, who sold his previous startup DocVerse to Google. They previously raised a $60 million round for Coda in 2017.

Coda is now valued at $636 million, according to Forbes. The 70-person company plans to double headcount and is growing an engineering team in the Seattle region.

“It’s clear that there is true value in Coda’s vision for the world, that if given the right set of building blocks, anyone can make a doc as powerful as an app,” Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins and an early investor in Slack, Box, Yammer, and other companies, said in a statement. “Today, Coda is more relevant than ever as teams adapt processes and sharpen their workflows.”

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Founded in Seattle, fintech startup Routable raises $12M to streamline business payments

Routable CEO Omri Mor.

Routable, a fintech startup with Seattle roots, came out of stealth mode this week and announced a $12 million Series A funding round.

The 2-year-old company aims to address the pain points related to business invoices and payments by automating accounts payable and receivable processes. It is designed to involve finance, engineering, operations, support, marketing, and sales teams with the same platform. Routable’s software integrates with accounting software such as Xero and Quickbooks.

Routable, originally known as Warren, started in Seattle but is now based in San Francisco after graduating from Y Combinator. Seattle startup vet Omri Mor leads Routable as CEO. Mor previously sold ZIIBRA to Tagboard.

“Companies will be able to build their infrastructures, permissions, and workflows on top of Routable’s business payments platform and Routable is built for the whole team,” Mor said.

Mor co-founded Routable with Tom Harel, the company’s CTO who is based in Seattle. Harel was previously a data scientist at Eat24 and Yelp.

The founders started Routable after identifying roadblocks they experienced while building custom business payment software in their previous roles. The biggest issues were the time it took to process a payment and to add automation, as well as easily sharing segmented payment information across departments.

Mor said the company has been able to scale despite the ongoing economic crisis.

The pandemic has affected VC-backed fintech funding, which dropped to $6.1 billion across 404 deals in the first quarter, the lowest levels in three years, CB Insights reported.

Routable’s investors include Y Combinator, Founders’ Co-Op, Lee Fixel, Box Group, Liquid 2 Ventures, Jason Gardner, Gokul Rajaram, Aaron Schildkrout, Sam Hodges, Immad Akhund, and others. Total funding to date is $16 million.

Routable was part of the University of Washington’s fintech incubator in 2018. The 25-person company has four employees in Seattle.

The Seattle region has a growing cohort of fintech startups, and firms such as Madrona Venture Group are making an effort to expand Seattle as a fintech hub.

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Tom Skerritt’s new Seattle digital media startup launches PNW lifestyle streaming channel

(EVRGRN Photo)

Tom Skerritt wants to help storytellers from the Pacific Northwest share their work with the world.

Tom Skerritt. (Triple Squirrels Photo)

The “Top Gun” star and Emmy Award-winning actor recently launched a new digital media startup called Triple Squirrels, which this month revealed the EVRGRN Channel, a new free streaming channel airing on STIRR.

Skerritt told GeekWire he realized how difficult it is for independent filmmakers to find distribution after spending the past three decades teaching and mentoring creators. So he launched his own platform to help them find audiences and share their work.

“The EVRGRN Channel is my tribute to the Pacific Northwest region’s creative community, as well as a statement about the cultural impact the region has had and continues to have on the arts,” he said. “The EVRGRN Channel, as a result, reflects the authentic PNW persona: resilient, independent, artistic, and adventurous.”

Some of the initial content includes Leslie and Dale Chihuly’s documentary, “Chihuly Outside,” and selections from the Seattle International Film Festival.

Leslie Grandy. (Triple Squirrels Photo)

STIRR is a Sinclair-owned streaming service that launched last year and offers free ad-supported live and on-demand content.

“We chose STIRR as the initial streaming platform as it offered us two ways to deliver EVRGRN content to interested and relevant audiences nationwide — as a linear streaming channel and on demand,” said Leslie Grandy, CEO of Triple Squirrels. “STIRR also provides local, live news programming, which pairs well with our regionally curated catalog.”

Grandy is a Seattle tech industry veteran, having worked in leadership roles for RealNetworks, Apple, T-Mobile, Discovery, and Best Buy.

Triple Squirrels plans to launch EVRGRN on other streaming platforms later this year. It makes money with revenue from ads and sponsorships. The company has two employees and raised cash from a private investor in Los Angeles.

Skerritt previously founded and led another Seattle-based digital media company called Heyou Media, but shut the firm down at the end of 2019.

Skerritt has appeared in dozens of films and series, including “Alien” and “Steel Magnolias.” He studied English at Wayne State University and UCLA. Skerritt has lived in the Northwest since the 1980s.

More people are streaming media due to the pandemic and social distancing mandates. A recent study from Deloitte found demand increasing for cheaper, ad-supported streaming video options such as STIRR, Variety reported.

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Another unicorn in Seattle: Digital remittance startup Remitly raises $85M at $1.5B valuation

From left to right: Remitly co-founders Josh Hug, Matt Oppenheimer and Shivaas Gulati. (Remitly Photos)

The unicorns are sprouting up in Seattle.

The latest newly-minted billion-dollar startup in the Emerald City is digital remittance platform Remitly, which just announced an $85 million funding round that pushes its valuation to $1.5 billion.

Earlier this month file data startup Qumulo became a unicorn with a $125 million round. Other Seattle-area companies including Outreach, Auth0, and Convoy passed the $1 valuation mark over the past two years with new investments.

Remitly is the latest to join the exclusive club. Its mobile technology lets people send and receive money across borders, including immigrants in the U.S. and U.K. who support families back home in countries such as the Philippines, India, El Salvador, and others.

The service eliminates forms, codes, agents, and other fees typically associated with the international money transfer process dominated by Western Union, MoneyGram, and other longstanding providers.

Global remittances have been on the rise for the past two decades and account for 5% of the GDP in at least 60 countries, but are expected to drop by 20% this year due to the economic crisis caused by COVID-19. Even so, Remitly saw customer growth spike 200% year-over-year this past May.

People still need to send money overseas — perhaps even more during the pandemic — but many traditional remittance solutions such as brick-and-mortar providers are closed. There are also fears about leaving the home, or that COVID-19 can spread through the exchange of physical currency (there is little evidence of this).

As a result, more users are turning to services such as Remitly or its competitor TransferWise, which is now valued at $5 billion after another round of funding reported this week that included Seattle-based Vulcan Capital.

The investor interest in both companies reflects the growth opportunity for digital remittances, despite the ongoing pandemic.

There is more than $600 billion sent in remittances every year globally, and 60-to-70% is still sent offline, said Remitly CEO Matt Oppenheimer.

Fresh off his Big Tech CEO of the Year win at the GeekWire Awards, Oppenheimer said the company’s new valuation is a reflection of how large Remitly has grown. Its service allows people to move money from nearly 20 “send” countries to nearly 60 “receive” countries. Remitly has served more than three million customers to date and has thousands of bank and cash pickup partners.

Oppenheimer said Remitly’s robust back-end software has helped create trust with customers, particularly those who might be wary of using an online remittance service. He also noted how the pandemic is affecting immigrants — 75% of migrants work in nations where three-quarters of the COVID-19 cases have been reported, the World Economic Forum reported. Immigrant communities are likely to be “among the hardest hit” by the pandemic, The Washington Post reported.

Remitly CEO Matt Oppenheimer. (Remitly Photo)

“There is a lot of meaning in what we do,” Oppenheimer said.

Remitly is expanding beyond remittances. Earlier this year the company rolled out a new banking service for immigrants called Passbook.

“The funding helps us continue to grow the remittance business, but it also helps us invest in new products and services,” Oppenheimer said, adding that there is opportunity to “solve a lot of customer pain points.”

TransferWise announced last month that it plans to offer investment products. It’s not clear if Remitly plans to do something similar, or even become its own bank.

Remitly is one of many fintech startups aiming to disrupt decades-old financial processes. TechCrunch reported that total funding to fintech startups dropped in 2019 from $40.8 billion to $34 billion as VC firms look to back later-stage companies.

Remitly, ranked No. 3 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest tech startups, has more than 1,000 employees across its Seattle HQ and six other offices in Spokane, Wash., London, Cork, Krakow, Manila, and Managua. It has avoided layoffs amid the pandemic and is hiring.

Oppenheimer helped come up with the idea for Remitly while working for Barclays Bank in Kenya. He founded the company in 2011 with Josh Hug and Shivaas Gulati; the original name for the startup was Beamit Mobile.

Prosus’ PayU led the Series F funding round; PayU also led a $115 million investment in 2017. Existing backers DN Capital, Generation Investment Management, Owl Rock Capital, Princeville, Stripes, Threshold Ventures, and Top Tier also invested.

Total funding to date, which includes a $220 million cash infusion from July 2019, is nearly $400 million.

Despite the pandemic, venture capitalists are pouring money into Pacific Northwest tech companies at unprecedented levels, significantly outpacing the number of deals and dollars invested in the first half of 2018 and 2019, according to a recent GeekWire analysis.

A recent survey of 37 chief financial officers from Seattle-based companies indicates that the city’s tech industry remains strong amid the COVID-19 crisis.

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