7 Stories of Inspiration From Northwest Tech Startups

unnamedOne of the best parts of being in the heart of the Northwest’s tech community is watching innovative companies take off. We hope the presenters at New Tech events inspire you in your career to do great things.

Part of what inspires us is to watch their levels of success grow and grow. It’s hard to keep up with all the good news coming from so many of our alumni presenters, but here are a few highlights:

CirkledIn just won the Gold Stevie® Award of “Female Entrepreneur of the Year. Cirkledin also won three Silver Stevie® Awards for the “New Product and Services of the Year”, “Startup of the Year”, and “Company of the Year” categories in the 13th annual Stevie® Award for Women in Business.

City Bldr has raised $1.3M funding from angel investors and made a couple of pivots and name changes in it’s short history. These updates have led to building a fast-growing company with enterprise customers including one of the largest builders in the US. They launched in Seattle and have so far expanded to Portland, SF, LA, Orange County and San Diego.  The future looks bright for them with 340 developers and thousands of property owners using CityBldr to find extra value in their properties.

Atlas Informatics has launched its beta after raising over $20M and making a couple of pivots and the experience is fantastic. Try it out to be able to search everything across your devices, desktop and apps. It’s saving me time and making me wonder how it took this long for this leap in search technology to happen.

LiteSprite In addition to being the inaugural recipient of the Seattle Health Innovators Imagination Award, Litesprite received a System for Health award for it’s work with Madigan Army Medical Center. Sponsored by the U.S. Surgeon General, U.S. Army Medical Command’s System for Health Incentive Program provides financial awards to recognize research ongoing within the military to bring innovation for active duty soldiers and their families to develop resilience. They are the first video game to receive such a distinction. Their clients include insurance companies, clinics, and schools nationally. And their first customer is now an investor.

ReachNow started out as a much nicer and better option than car2go. They’ve expanded from Seattle to having airport service, adding Portland and Brooklyn to their territories, and becoming a new competitor to Lyft and Uber. Not bad for launching in April.

Poke Radar for Go was created and launched in July, presented at New Tech Seattle and Eastside in August, and was acquired by Glu Mobile in September. They saw the opportunity when Pokemon Go came out, pushed out an app almost overnight, became a Top 5 app almost instantly, and were bought all in less than 90 days. Outlier? Yes, but they also showed us that impossible is just a concept.

OfferUp has raised $130M in the last few months to bring their total funding to over $221M. Additionally they are a Top 3 app in the shopping category with $14B+ in transactions this year, 23M+ downloads, and a Geekwire App of the Year award. Top that off with their generous community-minded founders creating a fantastic event space opened up to the community for events including New Tech Eastside, Startup Grind, Android Developers and others. …and I’m partial because I’ve used the app many times to successfully sell items that my family wasn’t using to others who are now enjoying them.

Hopefully learning a little about how our friends and neighbors are succeeding and helping others gives you reason to celebrate being a part of our community. Please share your stories with others so we can celebrate and inspire one another.

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