New funding: Thoughtexchange announced a $20 million Series B investment round led by Information Venture Partners with participation from Yaletown Partners and Seattle-based Voyager Capital, which invested for the first time.

Company background: The 140-person startup, based in the small town of Rossland, B.C. just north of eastern Washington, bills itself as a “crowdsourcing intelligence platform.” It is used by leaders at hundreds of companies such as Allstate and American Airlines to gather answers from employees to various questions. “People want to actively help solve the challenges their organizations face and invest in a greater mission. That goes beyond participating in the odd focus group or survey,” CEO Dave MacLeod said in a statement. “Crowdsourcing technology is attracting attention and capital because it helps leaders do their job better.”

How it works: Employees answer questions in real-time using the company’s software. Thoughtexchange applies AI to help find what’s most important to groups of people ranging from 10 to 100,000; individuals can also learn from one another. The system improves over time as it learns to ask more impactful questions.

Why Voyager invested: This is the firm’s fifth investment out of its new $100 million fund and is the latest example of its new focus on Canada. “We tracked the company for almost a year before investing as its corporate business ramped,” Voyager Managing Director Bill McAleer told GeekWire. “They have a great culture led by [MacLeod] and have been growing at a rapid pace.” McAleer will join the company’s board.

New funding: Shipium landed a $2 million seed round led by PSL Ventures, the venture arm of Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs, GeekWire has learned. The 4-person company is staying quiet about what exactly it is building, but an interview with co-founders Jason Murray and Mac Brown — and their previous work at Amazon and Zulily — reveals more.

Founder background: Murray spent nearly two decades at Amazon, most recently running supply chain teams and overseeing thousands of employees as a vice president. Brown is also an early Amazon employee — the co-founders started three days apart from each other in 1999 — and later joined Zulily, where he was vice president of supply chain and fulfillment software for the Seattle online retailer.

Murray and Brown are experts when it comes to fast shipping. They know that outside of giant retailers such as Amazon, most e-commerce brands don’t have the same capability to offer that perk to their customers.

Enter Shipium, which aims to make two-day fulfillment possible for any online retailer.

Target market: “It’s pretty simple: anyone who is in e-commerce that isn’t Amazon,” Murray said, when asked about Shipium’s potential clients. The startup is working with pilot customers in the direct-to-consumer fashion apparel segment, and is also in talks with a larger consumer electronics company.

Murray declined to provide details about how Shipium works with retailers — does the startup simply offer software? Do they own warehouse space? Are they facilitating the entire supply chain process? For now, the company describes its product as “supply chain optimization and data processing as a service.” Its products include delivery experience APIs; fulfillment network performance; customer delivery dashboards; and shipping insights.

Here’s more from the company’s website:

“We live in a world of degrees — you don’t have to choose between expensive fast shipping or inexpensive slow shipping. A middle ground exists enabling you to provide a faster shipping experience than you are offering today, but without cutting into your margin to do it. Some companies we work with are focused on faster delivery experience at their current cost and others are focused on maintaining their current shipping performance but at a lower cost. Our technology enables you to make better trade-offs between speed and cost and — above all — deliver on the promises you make to your customers.”

There are similar startups attacking the same problem — for example, Seattle startup Flexe provides companies with “pop-up” storage space, matching online retailers with warehouses that have excess capacity.

But Murray said given Shipium’s “unique approach,” there isn’t a direct competitor on the market. “We are all about improving sales conversions through shipping fees, and reducing shipping cost for our partners,” he said.

E-commerce trends: The timing for something like Shipium certainly seems ripe. Online shopping on Cyber Monday hit a record $9.4 billion, according to Adobe’s analytics arm, a 19 percent bump over last year.

Since Nov. 1, consumers have spent more than $81.5 billion on holiday shopping online, up 14 percent over last year’s pace. For the full year, Adobe expects holiday spending to reach $143.8 billion, up from $126 billion last year.

Meanwhile, Amazon has set expectations for 2-day shipping, leaving other retailers scrambling to keep up — or face the possibility of losing business. A recent UPS report found that 43 percent of consumers consider delivery costs as an “important factor” when buying products online. A Pitney Bowes 2018 e-commerce study found that half of U.S. retail customers now expect 2-day shipping.

“Consumers have come to really expect a certain level of service on the supply chain side — that’s where we are excited about being able to help a lot of other brands do an excellent job with fulfillment,” Brown said.

Murray added that there are also tons of unique products offered to different market segments.

“We want to make sure the product is not encumbered by bad logistics,” he said. “We’re trying to offer a logistics solution that gives retailers an even playing field.”

Investor perspective: “Retailers of all sizes face overwhelming supply chain challenges in the age of Amazon,” Julie Sandler, managing director at PSL Ventures and Pioneer Square Labs, said in a statement. “Shipium offers unique and powerful leverage for e-commerce companies all over the country, and we frankly cannot imagine two founders on the planet better positioned to scale such an audacious vision to retailers everywhere.”

Publicly-traded home services giant Frontdoor has acquired Streem, a Portland, Ore.-based startup that develops augmented reality technology for home improvement technicians.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Frontdoor bought Streem with a combination of cash and equity, including incentive-based equity. Streem’s CEO and co-founder, Ryan Fink, and the rest of the team, will remain in Portland.

Founded in 2017, Streem aims to give home service professionals a way to more quickly diagnose and quote a customer’s inquiry via new smartphone technology. Customers can use Streem’s app to stream HD video of their given issue to the professional, who can then use a digital toolbox to take measurements and other notes. Computer vision technology can automatically detect the brand and model number of a part or appliance. Professionals can guide the conversation with a laser pointer and use arrows anchored to a 3D map of the space. The photos, videos, notes, and data stay saved on the app.

The idea is to help professionals assess a problem during a “virtual visit” and gather the necessary tools, all before they physically enter a home.

Streem had raised more than $10 million from investors including Flying Fish Partners; Greycroft; Curious Capital; Oregon Venture Fund; Portland Seed Fund; TechNexus; Rogue Venture Partners; Betaworks Ventures; GGV Capital; General Catalyst; Loup Ventures; and others.

Earlier this year Streem acquired Selerio, a computer vision startup based in the U.K. that spun out of research from the University of Cambridge and a Google fellowship.

“Combining Streem’s AR-enhanced platform with Frontdoor’s marketplace, will accelerate the transformation of the service experience for consumers and businesses alike,” Fink said in a statement. “We’ve long said our platform is defined by three key pillars: remote video collaboration, simple augmented reality tools, and, most importantly, contextual data. This allows service experts to capture information as well as – if not better than – if they were on site. Our shared visions for simplifying life and delivering innovative technology to help solve problems are extremely aligned.”

Streem lists more than 30 employees on LinkedIn. Fink, who previously sold smart glasses startup OnTheGo to Atheer in 2015, started the company with Sean Adkinson, who was CTO of Provata Health.

Frontdoor describes itself as the biggest player in the home services industry, with more than 2 million customers and a network of 16,000-plus contractor firms. It responds to more than four million services requests annually. Frontdoor is the parent company to brands including American Home Shield, HSA, Landmark and OneGuard.

The company’s stock has nearly doubled this year; its market capitalization is $3.8 billion. Its Q3 revenue increased 8 percent to $407 million, while revenue came in at $61 million, up 23 percent.

“I am extremely excited about Frontdoor’s acquisition of Streem. Not only will it accelerate our work to transform the service experience for homeowners and reduce costs, it will create unique opportunities for new revenue streams across a variety of new channels,” Rex Tibbens, president and CEO of Frontdoor, said in a statement.

Companies such as Porch, Pro.com, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and even Amazon are trying to create new ways that match home service professionals with customers. Streem is similar, but with a focus on the initial diagnosis aspect of an interaction.

Streem previously inked partnerships with Porch and HomeAdvisor.

In an interview with Digital Trends last year, Fink said he wanted “to open Streem up to everybody.”

“No matter if you’re a chef; you own a local store; you’re a YouTube celebrity — you want to connect with your customers in a more personal way,” he told Digital Trends. “We want you to be able to do that through Streem.”

AR and VR technologies haven’t caught on with mainstream consumers, but businesses have found various use cases for something like home services, or training.

A press release noted that “Streem’s leadership team and employees will continue to focus on developing innovative AI-enhanced technology solutions post-acquisition, as well as expanding its existing retail, consumer telecommunications, and technology channels.”

We’ve followed up to get more details about the deal, and will update this post when we hear back.

Elizabeth Sheils has a confession to make. If she had known before launching Rock Paper Coin what she knows now, she wouldn’t have launched her wedding payment and contract platform.

“Sheer ignorance was bliss,” Sheils said. “We had no idea what we were getting into.”

Sheils and her co-founder Nora Sheils (the two are sisters-in-law) were already working for Bridal Bliss, a successful wedding and event planning business that Nora started in 2002. But the two were frustrated by the lack of digital tools available for tracking contracts and payments between planners, vendors and couples getting married.

The wedding sector was so technologically out of date that the Sheils would sometimes have to advise younger digital-centric couples to order checkbooks before starting their wedding planning because so many vendors only took cash or checks.

“We were getting tired and fed up with tracking down contracts and checks,” Elizabeth said. And when you’re dealing with amounts totaling thousands of dollars, “it’s very stressful to lose a check.”

So in 2018, the duo created Rock Paper Coin, a Portland, Ore.-based startup that has six employees. The company recently raised $875,000 from two angel investors.

Between them, the Sheils have 29 years of experience in the wedding and event sector. Technology was their weakness, so hiring a development team was key to building a platform that’s currently available for free as a beta product. Next year, they’ll begin offering subscriptions to event planners and vendors.

The initial focus has been on creating tools for digital contracts and payments, and will expand to include workflow management for wedding planners. Elizabeth compared the field to the construction sector, drawing a parallel between event planners and general contractors, both of whom are responsible for coordinating and communicating with multiple vendors on behalf of their customer.

There are other companies providing contract management, Elizabeth said, but Rock Paper Coin supports three-way communication between the event planner, the couple and vendors such as photographers and caterers. The platform also works as a “wedding binder” with budgeting and other tools for couples managing their own event.

The challenge is getting small and medium-sized businesses to adopt this sort of technology after years of using Word documents and spreadsheets. Rock Paper Coin has an account manager who will do in-person onboarding with customers to ease the transition.

“Nora and I feel incredibly lucky and validated as more and more people begin to utilize — and love — our services,” Elizabeth said. “We knew it was something the industry desperately needed, but seeing it truly help others is incredibly rewarding.”

We caught up with Elizabeth and Nora Sheils for this Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for their answers to our questionnaire.

What does your company do? Rock Paper Coin is a user-friendly platform that brings together event professionals and engaged couples to streamline the often-daunting contract and invoice process. We offer a professional, inexpensive and easy way to process payments, contracts and invoices. The wedding and event space is incredibly outdated and most couples getting married today do not have the patience to print, sign, scan a contract or find their checkbook. Rock Paper Coin is essentially a digital project binder streamlining the planning process for couples and vendors.

Inspiration hit us when: We were out to drinks commiserating about constantly chasing down contracts, printing contracts, writing checks and, no joking, even faxing paperwork. We wanted to save the other Bridal Bliss planners time, so we set out looking for a platform that would work not only as a CRM (customer relationship management) but allow collaboration between three parties. After two years of trying out various event software, we determined nothing existed and decided to build it.

VC, Angel or Bootstrap: At the start of Rock Paper Coin, we decided to bootstrap and to make sure we had an idea that was worth spending our own money on. We truly believed in the software and were willing to bootstrap until we needed to add on additional investment. We secured two angel investors. Both were past clients to Bridal Bliss who saw the need for the product, trusted the our expertise and jumped at the opportunity to invest. We liked the angel route as we had a prior working relationship with both groups, and both also brought quite a bit of experience with their diverse backgrounds in business and tech.

Our ‘secret sauce’ is: One of the defining features of Rock Paper Coin is its ability to collaborate with a third party. All electronic contract and payment systems currently on the market in the events world are solely between two parties (vendor and client). Rock Paper Coin integrates a third party (event planner) who, with prior permissions, has the ability to act on behalf of their clients, review, approve contracts and make payments. While Rock Paper Coin will disrupt the wedding and event industry first, the third party collaboration is one that many businesses would benefit from.

The smartest move we’ve made so far: Before we hired a development team or made any decisions, we thoroughly research the needs of the market. We held focus groups, interviewed event professionals all over the country and confirmed what we already knew: a platform like ours was desperately needed and wanted. We still welcome feedback from users and add features that solve the needs of our clients and ensure a smoother experience.

The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: We designed the initial onboarding experience to capture all the data needed for an event professional to open an account with Rock Paper Coin. We were requiring sensitive information, which users said was uncomfortable without seeing the inner workings of the product. Our team realized this mistake early on and quickly corrected it. Users can now sign-up with just an email address and enjoy what we have to offer, essentially trying before buying.

Which leading entrepreneur or executive would you most want working in your corner? Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, a female-focused dating and social app. She fights for women, invests in women and is what we consider an all-around badass female. Self-made and having triumphed through a dark time, she came out better and stronger. She is smart, tech savvy, prioritizes family and gives back in meaningful ways. Who else would you want in your corner?

Our favorite team-building activity is: Going out to eat, drink and unwind together is our favorite team building activity. There are various studies showing the importance of a family eating dinner together and we believe in this at the workplace, too. Encouraging a more casual conversation, listening to others and learning more deeply about a team member’s true self, builds trust and creates a bond that goes further than “co-worker.” The benefits this provides in a home setting carry over into the workspace.

The biggest thing we look for when hiring is: We like to hire based on a quote from James Collins from his book “Good to Great”: “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”

This really resonates with us. As a startup, there are new ideas and directions for where to take the company. By having a team that works well together, respects each other and believes in the core of the product, that drives the direction of the company.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: Fundraise, fundraise and fundraise. Start fundraising well before you think you will need it. Fundraising was one of the most stressful pieces for us because we waited longer to start than we should have. We were two newbies in a big world and no clue where to begin. We talked with countless advisors who offered great advice on whom to talk to and where to go, but never about when to start. If we could do this all over again, we’d save ourselves quite a bit of midnight oil and start the process earlier.

One thing that has been a wonderful surprise through this process has been the constant encouragement and support of tech entrepreneurs locally and nationally. Many have reached out to us unsolicited to simply pat us on the back, offer to help when needed and truly pay forward all the expertise they were given in their early stages. Being newbies in the tech space is intimidating and this has really meant a lot to us!

Volt is raising more funds to bring its fitness training app to different types of groups, including offices and “tactical readiness” organizations such as police, firefighters, and military.

The Seattle startup has raised about $1.1 million in equity and another $1 million in debt as part of an ongoing round. The six-year-old company has raised close to $4 million in its lifetime, including an investment from soccer star DeAndre Yedlin.

Volt calls itself the No. 1 AI workout app. It offers customized workouts for a variety of sports and training goals and relies on artificial intelligence to escalate exercises as users get stronger. The app is free, but Volt charges between $9.99 and $99.99 for various workout programs and services.

The company has more than 1 million total users, split into consumer and group categories. On the groups side, more than 5,000 sports teams, companies, military groups, fire and police departments across 150 countries use the app.

The move beyond pure sports training into both general fitness and tactical training began about six months ago. Volt counts the Seattle SWAT team and South King County Firefighters Training Consortium as some of its local tactical customers, and recently inked a deal with the Texas Army National Guard. The company is also getting traction among tech companies in the Seattle area that want to use the app to replace their wellness programs.

Today, Volt has 24 employees in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, and is actively hiring for five more positions. The company is led by Dan Giuliani, a former professor of sport performance at the University of Washington and an ex-football coach.

Last year, the company landed a milestone alliance with Gatorade. The deal brought Gatorade’s sports nutrition expertise to Volt’s revamped app, offering a more complete digital fitness guide for its users.

— Government, higher education, and workforce management are just a few places where artificial intelligence is popping up. In hopes of educating everyone about AI, the Tech Alliance is holding the AI Public Policy Summit to give those who want to learn more a chance to hear from experts and network with those in the field. The summit takes place at the Seattle Airport Marriott on Dec. 12.

— New Tech Seattle is expanding its event lineup in response to demand for women in tech and diversity in tech programming. New Tech Seattle: Women & Diversity in Tech is newly-launched monthly networking event focused on women and minorities. Reverb CEO Mikaela Kiner will speak on Thursday, Dec. 12 at Galvanize Seattle Pioneer Square.

Here are more highlights from the GeekWire Calendar:

• Local Design on a Global Scale: A presentation about strategies for designing products for a global audience at Facebook Seattle; 7 to 9 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 12.
• Angel Shark Tank: Blockchain and Digital Currency: An event where digital currency startups pitch their companies at Alki Starbucks in Seattle; 9 to 11 a.m., Friday, Dec. 13.
• Artist’s Choice: Laser GRIZ: A future-funk laser show Pacific Science Center, 9 to 10 p.m., Saturday Dec. 14
• The Truth about Startup Accelerators: A presentation outlining accelerators and their pros and cons at Atlas Workbase in Seattle; 5 to 7 p.m., Monday, Dec. 16.
• Podcasting: An Intimate How-To: A workshop for aspiring podcasters at Larj Media Studio in Seattle; 5 to 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Dec. 18.

— David Shim, founder and former CEO of Seattle startup Placed, was appointed CEO and a member of the board of Foursquare, which acquired Placed from Snap in May.

Shim was appointed Foursquare president after the acquisition. He’ll succeed Jeff Glueck, who was CEO for four years.

In his new role, Shim will be responsible for continuing to grow the location technology company and its commitment to Foursquare Labs, focused on next-generation research and development.

“In 2020 and beyond, Foursquare is set to further accelerate growth on the foundation set in the past year, and expand its leadership position in location technology. Foursquare’s future is as bright as it’s ever been, and I am thrilled to be appointed as CEO,” Shim said in a company blog post.

Placed sold to Snapchat parent Snap in 2017 for a reported $135 million.

Before founding Placed, Shim held leadership roles at Quantcast, WebTrends, and Farecast.

— Seattle startup Pro.com announced Monica Williams as its new chief financial officer. Williams was most recently a vice president at Zillow Group and previously served as CFO at Avvo and Allrecipes.com.

Pro.com, founded in 2013 and ranked No. 65 on the GeekWire 200, offers a tech-powered general contracting platform aimed at streamlining the home building and renovation process. Earlier this year Pro.com raised $33 million and grew its executive team. Williams will be based out of the Seattle headquarters.

— Kimberly Proia was hired as vice president and project director in the Seattle area for HNTB, an employee-owned infrastructure solutions firm headquartered in Kansas City, Mo.

Based out of the firm’s Bellevue, Wash. office, Proia will serve as deputy project manager for the West Seattle and Ballard Link Extension project with Sound Transit. Proia has previous experience with light rail and rail-transit projects in Minnesota and Colorado.

— Seattle-based mobile workforce management startup Shyft announced Yaroslav Zubko will lead product design from the company’s new Los Angeles office. Zubko comes from Tinder, where he was the lead product designer for revenue. Ranked No. 186 on the GeekWire 200, Shyft allows hourly employees to swap shifts, communicate, and manage their schedule. It’s used by employers in industries such as retail and hospitality.

A new startup program, born in Seattle, aims to help tech workers leave big companies and launch their own ventures, aiming to generate a surge of new entrepreneurs in the local ecosystem.

Venture Out will launch its inaugural 10-week program next month with plans to accept 8-to-12 groups who have a startup idea but need help leaving their cushy day job to make the leap.

Seattle has become a global epicenter for tech talent, but many of the top engineers, data scientists, program managers and others are at working big companies such as Amazon or Microsoft, or one of the 130-plus engineering outposts in the region — Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, and more have large offices.

As a result, those giants get blamed for sucking up much of the would-be entrepreneurial talent across Seattle with their “golden handcuffs” and opportunities to work on some of the leading technologies. That trend, along with a lack of homegrown investment firms, is one potential reason for why Seattle’s startup ecosystem is not as strong as some might expect.

Venture Out aims to be “the ultimate two-way door for founders working at large tech companies actively building their startup while still in their day job,” said co-founder Sean Sternbach, who previously spent nearly three years as a manager at Amazon. That’s where he began thinking deeply about why some of his colleagues weren’t pursuing their awesome startup visions.

“They did not have the support network to help them build their startup,” Sternbach said.

Last year he launched an invite-only monthly event designed for founders, where successes and struggles could be shared, with the intention of receiving crowdsourced support from other founders.

That grew into a 170-person community of people in Seattle either “venturing out,” or moonlighting on their startup.

“The number one request from our member base was to receive more support, in a more formalized fashion, and that is how we evolved into creating a 10-week program,” Sternbach explained.

Sternbach left Amazon in March and teamed up with Ken Horenstein, who previously was a manager at M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, to help officially start Venture Out. Advising the organization is Pablo Rodriguez-Brown, an Amazonian and startup vet who leads the Seattle Xoogler group, and Jean Paoli, a former longtime Microsoft exec who co-founded Docugami in 2017.

The program — which does not describe itself as an “accelerator” — has participation from more than 50 mentors who will help support accepted founders, including Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Seattle venture capital firm Founders’ Co-op. Other well-known startups CEOs and angel investors are connected to Venture Out and some have also invested in the company, which will soon close its own $600,000 investment.

“Seattle has more product and technical talent locked up in big companies than anywhere else in the world, and while we have the start of world class resources to help folks build or join a startup once they’ve made the leap out on their own, venturing out can still feel like a daunting one way door to folks,” Ginzburg told GeekWire. “Through engaging with the Venture Out community, I’ve already seen how they are building a bridge between the old company town Seattle and a new entrepreneurial one.”

Venture Out will take 4 percent equity in each accepted company and also offers a “Venture Out equity back guarantee” — see details on the FAQ page. Its program requires members to work 10-to-20 hours per week on their startup. It is targeting companies that have raised less than $500,000.

In some ways, Venture Out is betting that what happened with Microsoft will repeat itself with Amazon and other tech giants in the region. A recent GeekWire analysis shows that nearly 25 percent of CEOs leading startups on the GeekWire 200 — our index of top privately held tech startups in the Pacific Northwest — had previous experience at Microsoft, which was founded in 1975.

Sternbach said that Venture Out believes that “great founders will come from large companies,” but they need help adjusting to startup life.

“Many of the founders we support are used to having access to large budgets and a large existing customer base,” he said. “Yet, these founders do not have experience operating in a cash-constrained environment or acquiring that first user. Focused mentorship and tactics to make this transition is an area we see opportunity to positively impact the startup ecosystem in Seattle.”

There are a few newer startup investment “studios” in Seattle targeting a similar demographic, such as Madrona Venture Labs, which raised an $11 million fund in May, or Pioneer Square Labs, created in 2015 using the concept of rapidly testing and validating new ideas before recruiting an executive team to build out a spin-off company. PSL launched an $80 million venture fund last year.

But Sternbach said there isn’t a similar program either in Seattle or across the globe that replicates its vision of supporting founders who have experience working at large tech companies.

“Our founders are busy managing their day job, family, etc.,” he said. “They come to us because they do not have time to read all the blogs, MOOCs, etc. on how to build their startup. This program provides the resources and accountability that this unique breed of founders are seeking to take their startup to the next stage.”

Flyhomes, the Seattle real estate startup that helps people buy houses in expensive cities, is expanding to a trio of new markets.

The startup is coming to Portland, Boston and the Los Angeles/Orange County area, expanding beyond its current base of Seattle and San Francisco. Flyhomes’ approach of operating in hot housing markets — all three areas feature listing prices well above the nationwide average and houses tend to sell in days rather than weeks or months — makes it stand out from other companies that focus on less competitive areas with lower prices.

Flyhomes purchases houses directly with cash and then holds onto them until its buyer clients secure financing. The goal is to present its customers as the equivalent of cash buyers, which in turn helps sellers get the most for their property.

“A home is the single biggest purchase most people will ever make, and the traditional process of making that purchase is fraught with obstacles, stress, and worry,” Flyhomes CEO Tushar Garg said in a statement. “Our approach — which brings every step of the process under one roof — helps buyers separate fear from risk to make more informed home-buying decisions.”

After Flyhomes fronts the cash for customers to buy new places, the startup wants to help clients sell their old homes. Flyhomes’ Trade Up service is designed to make it easier for customers to pull off the headache that is buying and selling a place at the same time.

In August, the company raised $141 million in fresh funding — $21 million in equity along with $120 million in debt. Since it was founded in 2015, Flyhomes has raised $40 million in equity. In its lifetime, Flyhomes says it has helped more than 1,000 clients close on more than $1 billion worth of homes.

The company faces a competitive field of real estate giants and fast-growing startups, all aiming to transform the transaction. However, Flyhomes contrasts itself with the popular “iBuyer” market, a group of companies that includes Seattle mainstays Zillow and Redfin that buy homes, spiff them up and sell them — in theory — for a profit. Flyhomes is more like a traditional brokerage, making money by taking a piece of the transaction.

Garg and his co-founder Stephen Lane, both former Microsoft employees, started the company to create a millennial-focused home-buying platform. Lane was inspired by his own experience buying a house and the aspects of the process he found lacking. Flyhomes’ first plan involved rewarding house hunters with airline miles when they purchased a home.

New funding: Seattle augmented reality startup Taqtile raised $3 million in a round led by Broadmark Capital and its affiliated entities, along with additional investors. It’s the first equity round for Taqtile. The 35-person company was also part of Magic Leap’s new enterprise partner program announced today.

Company background: Taqtile develops augmented reality tech for industrial applications on headsets and mobile devices. Customers across six continents use its cross-platform Manifest software for training and other on-the-job purposes. The idea is to increase efficiency by reducing the time it takes to get work done while lowering error rates.

Customers: Clients include Seattle-area King County IT, which uses Manifest and Microsoft HoloLens to train operators at a wastewater treatment plant, and the New Zealand Defense Force. Taqtile initially launched in 2011 and focused on mobile app development before shifting gears to mixed reality.

Magic Leap deal: Joining the enterprise partner program is a key milestone for Taqtile, given that Magic Leap is a leader in the augmented reality industry, having raised nearly $3 billion. Magic Leap will now re-sell Taqtile’s Manifest solution as it turns its focus to enterprise use cases. Taqtile previously won a “Creator’s Grant” from Magic Leap to port its solutions to the company’s platform.

Taqtile is also a Microsoft partner and won the U.S. Partner for Mixed Reality and Intelligent Cloud award earlier this year at Microsoft Inspire. AT&T — which is a Magic Leap investor — is also a Taqtile partner.

VR/AR training: VR and AR technologies — or “mixed reality” — haven’t caught on with mainstream consumers, but businesses have found various use cases, particularly with training and/or workforce efficiency. Companies from Airbus to Walmart are using the technology to train workers. Publicly-traded home services giant Frontdoor just acquired Portland startup Streem, which develops augmented reality technology for home improvement technicians. Other similar companies include Vancouver, Wash.-based RealWear, which raised $80 million in July, and new Seattle startup Altoura.

Will VR/AR catch on with consumers? Xbox chief Phil Spencer recently said that VR is not a priority for Microsoft’s next-generation console. VR/AR has clearly not caught on with mainstream consumers. “We’re responding to what our customers are asking for and … nobody’s asking for VR,” Spencer said.

Taqtile CEO Dirck Schou Jr. is more optimistic. He pointed to Apple’s continued investment in AR and said he expects everyday people to be eventually be wearing some type of headset that’s tethered to a phone. But he added that software will be key. “As was the case with the PC, software drives it,” he said. “You need software solutions to support new hardware ecosystems.”

David Shim’s entrepreneurial journey took a wild turn in 2019.

The longtime Seattle techie sold his location analytics startup Placed to Snapchat parent Snap in 2017 for a reported $135 million, marking a significant milestone for the company he founded in 2011.

Then, in a surprising follow-up deal two years later, Foursquare — the one-time social media “check-in” darling — made its first acquisition, swooping up Placed from Snap this past May as part of an announcement that included a $150 million investment round.

And the headlines didn’t end there.

Last week, Shim became the CEO and a board member at Foursquare. He’ll relocate from Seattle to New York City next month to lead the 10-year-old company, which has morphed into an enterprise-focused firm that sells location data to marketers at companies such as Uber, JetBlue, Target, and others.

So after a roller coaster past couple of years that included two “exits,” what can other entrepreneurs learn from Shim’s experience?

“My advice is, don’t focus on the exit — rather, focus on building a great company, and everything else will fall into place,” he told GeekWire this week. “With two exits in the past two years, I can confirm that an exit isn’t the end outcome, rather it can be just the beginning to building a truly great company.”

Shim previously served as president of Foursquare. He’ll succeed Jeff Glueck, who was CEO for four years, and work alongside Foursquare co-founder and executive chairman Dennis Crowley, who Shim described as the “godfather of location technology.”

“As a fellow founder, I have enormous respect for David Shim and his accomplishments,” Crowley said in a statement. “He has passion and vision, and he brings a great energy to the company. I am excited about having him as a partner as we continue to ‘invent the future’ here at Foursquare.”

Shim’s entrepreneurial roots started at an early age. He made stock trades at age 13, with his mother helping him approve transactions before Shim became a registered investment adviser at 17. “I use a lot of brute force to get through,” Shim told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, a lesson learned from watching his parents run their convenience store.

After graduating with a political science degree from the University of Washington, Shim worked at Seattle startups including Razorfish (acquired by aQuantive) and Farecast (acquired by Microsoft), in addition to WebTrends and Quantcast.

He launched Placed eight years ago as a solo founder. The company was originally called Sewichi and raised $13.8 million from firms including early investor Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group and Two Sigma Ventures.

Placed was a Foursquare competitor, operating a similar business that measured the effectiveness of a digital advertisement, to see if a campaign actually drove users to a physical location. Placed helps “advertisers track foot traffic to stores,” as The Wall Street Journal describes.

Combining forces with Placed bolstered Foursquare’s ability to help retailers, publishers, and restaurants better understand the value of their digital advertising through smartphone location tracking. The company’s customer roster includes more than half of the Fortune 100 and more than 75 of the 100 most-visited chains in the U.S. It posted $100 million in record revenue in the past year and has more than 300 employees. Foursquare still operates consumer-facing apps such as Swarm and City Guide.

“Foursquare is delivering a single currency for location across all use cases, signaling that the location tech space is ripe for even more growth and comes with significant upside where Foursquare is the clear leader pulling away from the pack,” Shim said.

Placed has maintained an office in Seattle through the two acquisitions and employs 50 people there, with 20 open positions.

Tracking user location via smartphones has come under the microscope in recent years. A New York Times article last year revealed how dozens of companies sell anonymous smartphone location data to advertisers, retailers, and even hedge funds, without the knowledge of individual users. Glueck, the former Foursquare CEO who is stepping down, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times this past October asking Congress to regulate the location data business.

Petabyte Technology, a Seattle-area startup building a cloud-based platform to modernize how veterinary clinics manage their practices, has raised $8 million.

The startup’s mobile-first Rhapsody platform touches every aspect of a veterinary practice, including scheduling, pricing, billing, inventory, medical records, prescriptions, and more. Petabyte executives say only 10 percent of veterinary clinics use the cloud today, with a few low-tech legacy providers serving as its primary competition.

Petabyte COO Alex Krooglik told GeekWire that three providers control about two-thirds of the market. However, these providers aren’t investing heavily in their products, Krooglik said, and their systems are just “glorified point of sale terminals that are essentially on life support.”

“Veterinarians deserve better,” Krooglik said.

The company also offers a migration engine that helps customers bring their old data into the Rhapsody platform within “minutes.” Petabyte has about a dozen customers after soft-launching in September.

A key element of the company’s secret sauce is its combination of enterprise software expertise and knowledge of the veterinary industry. CEO Michael Hyman worked at Amazon in the early 2000s and Microsoft in the late 1990s. He was an executive at Oath, the company created through the merger of AOL and Yahoo, focused on advertising and video, before starting Petabyte.

Krooglik co-founded Embrace Pet Insurance, where he learned the ins and outs of veterinary care. One of the biggest pain points he spotted was the physical exam, and it’s an area Petabyte wants to disrupt.

“Most other practice management platforms ask veterinarians to type in what they observe,” Krooglik said. “In some cases, they write it on a sticky note and hand it to someone else — there is so much room for error and data loss, not to mention lost charges. With Rhapsody, all of the pet’s body systems are displayed cleanly on the tablet and the doctor can simply tap — ears, skin, limbs, etc — and drill down to reach all of the observations they want to capture.”

Petabyte aims to standardize physical exams and other parts of the practice. That makes sure doctors are using the same terminology for drugs, procedures, and tests, and charging the same amounts.

The company has 25 employees based out of its headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., and additional offices in New York, San Francisco, Cleveland and Naples, Fla. Petabyte expects to double its headcount by the end of next year.

The Series A round was led by Acrew Capital with participation from Greycroft Partners, Correlation Ventures, and Ridge Ventures. Total funding to date is more than $10 million.

Tim Mahlman, an entrepreneur in residence at Greycroft and former president of Verizon Media’s ad platform business, has joined the company as president.

Thanks to Microsoft and others, Seattle has become a hub for enterprise software. Petabyte is part of a growing group of Seattle-area startups building enterprise software for specific industries. Other examples include Zenoti, which makes software for spas and salons, and Legwork, a maker of automation software for dentists.

New funding: Healthcare software startup GrowthPlug raised a $1 million round led by Elevate Capital. It also announced today that it has relocated from the Bay Area to Beaverton, Ore., becoming the latest Silicon Valley startup to pack its bags in search of a new environment.

Heading north: Sudhir Bhatti, CEO and co-founder of GrowthPlug, said the Bay Area was a great place to get connected to world-class investors. “But when it comes to hiring, it’s a hyper-competitive market and as an early-stage startup, a great and dedicated team is what matters the most,” he said.

That’s what eventually led to the relocation to the Portland region, which offers “the right mix of tech talent, great quality of life and booming startup scene,” Bhatti said. “We have been looking forward to moving GrowthPlug’s headquarters to a region where we can be capital efficient and get access to a big talent pool in the tech space,” he added.

Axios highlighted a trend earlier this year of founders forgoing Silicon Valley and picking other cities to start their next company, for reasons similar to why GrowthPlug moved away. Bloomberg Beta chief Roy Bahat tweeted about the trend.

SF has gone from startup hub, to startup headquarters-and-maybe-engineering hub, and risks soon becoming just a startup fundraising hub.

— Roy E. Bahat (@roybahat) February 11, 2019

Skyrocketing housing prices are also forcing tech workers to look for cheaper cities, a recent Wealthfront survey found.

Last year, security tech startup Twistlock moved from San Francisco to Portland.

Company background: Founded in 2016, GrowthPlug aims to help healthcare practices acquire, retain, and serve patients by automating various office management systems. It works with dentists, veterinarians, spa practitioners, and more. The company’s revenues increased by 300 percent in the past year.

GrowthPlug employs 25 people and plans to hire another 25 employees over the next year at its Beaverton office, located in the City Hall of Beaverton building.

Shavita Bhatti — the wife of Sudhir Bhatti — is the company’s other co-founder and currently is the chief operating officer.

Nitin Rai, managing director at Portland-based Elevate Capital, will join the company’s board of directors. The firm’s investment in GrowthPlug comes from its Elevate Inclusive Fund, which invests in minority entrepreneurs. Elevate has invested nearly $8 million across 37 startups since 2016.

A healthcare provider for mariners, a maker of electric outboard motors and a shipping logistics startup. These are just a few members of the cohort of startups chosen for WeWork’s Washington state maritime accelerator program.

First announced in October, the program aims to establish the region as a hub of innovation for maritime technology while also making the industry more environmentally friendly. WeWork is teaming up with the Port of Seattle and Washington Department of Commerce’s Maritime Blue initiative to make the program happen.

Here’s a look at the 11 startups chosen for the accelerator.

• Beam Reach: Offers a 10-week marine biology program for recent graduates and undergraduate students to conduct research on killer whales in the Pacific Northwest.
• Discovery Health: A group of emergency physicians providing a suite of remote healthcare services for vessel operators and their workers.
• EcoSpears: Maker of technology to extract contaminants from soil, sediments and ground water.
• eOceans: A platform for anyone — from scientists to everyday travelers — to provider data and insights on ocean health.
• Equll: Similar to Seattle unicorn Convoy, this startup is tackling the trucking industry. It makes a mobile app and online platform to connect owner-operators with shippers.
• Net Your Problem: Works with fishermen and recyclers to recycle fishing nets and turn them into new plastic products.
• OneTank: Maker of a simple, low-cost ballast water treatment system.
• OneForNeptune: Founded by a former marine scientist, the startup makes a line of white fish jerky sourced from West Coast fisheries.
• Pure Watercraft: Manufacturer of a zero-emission, electric outboard motor for boats.
• SPBES: A 10-year-old company focused on reducing reliance on fossil fuels in marine shipping through a battery-powered energy storage system.
• MER Equipment: To reduce fuel consumption and nitrogen oxide particulates, the startup is making an exhaust gas after treatment system that is a lighter, smaller and less expensive alternative to diesel systems.

The program kicks off on Jan. 21 with a launch event at Pier 69. It concludes in April with a demo day, where the startups will pitch their ideas to investors and government officials. The accelerator is funded by the Port of Seattle, with a grant from the Department of Commerce, and run through WeWork Labs, the company’s startup incubator.

The startups will work out of WeWork Labs’ Seattle location and get access to mentors and advisers. WeWork will facilitate seminars and workshops to help the startups navigate challenges and obstacles.

WeWork said the maritime industry in Washington state employs 146,000 people with an economic value of $30 billion. However, a lack of capital both in the Pacific Northwest and worldwide restricts innovation.

While there are a few maritime accelerator programs out there, WeWork says this one is the first in Washington state. Accelerators are a common vessel for connecting investors and entrepreneurs in the tech industry but somewhat rare in other areas.

The project comes at a turbulent time for WeWork that has led to the departure of its founder and large-scale layoffs. It’s also been an interesting few months for the company in Seattle, one of its top U.S. markets.

In a 10-day period in October, WeWork canceled a huge WeLive office and opened a new co-working space in the city’s Belltown neighborhood. Earlier this week, WeWork opened a new location in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, its 21st open or announced office in the region.

• Vancouver, B.C.-based education technology startup Riipen has raised $3.75 million to fuel growth of its technology that connects colleges and universities to employers. There are several companies aiming to build a bridge between students and postsecondary institutions, but Riipen focuses on helping instructors integrate real-world problems into coursework.
• Riipen serves more than 5,000 employers and 40,000 students 150 institutions around the world. Employers such as IBM and YMCA use Riipen to collect data on emerging markets and build their recruiting pipeline. Investors in the round include Reach Capital, along with Strada Education Network, SEI Ventures, EduLab Capital Partners, Entangled Group, Atrium, and ASU ScaleU.
• “Project-based, real-world experience has a profound impact on students. But this kind of experience is out of reach for too many of them,” Dana Stephenson, founder and CEO of Riipen, said in a statement. “To address this problem, we created Riipen to change the relationship between educational institutions and employers. Riipen is a powerful, proven platform that enables companies to rapidly identify and recruit students to work on projects. Working with Riipen, educational institutions can better serve students by getting them the experience that they need—now.”

Seattle’s unicorns are boring.

That was one funny takeaway from a panel last week hosted by TiE Seattle featuring executives from some of the region’s privately-held billion-dollar startups, also known as “unicorns” given their sky-high valuations.

“It’s a pretty boring thing,” said Auth0 CEO Eugenio Pace as he described his company’s identity and authentication platform.

“It’s not as boring as contract management!” piped in Icertis CEO Samir Bodas, whose startup helps companies keep track of deals that require extensive contracts.

Other panelists included Kristen Forecki, vice president of operations at Convoy, which operates a digital freight network, and Param Kahlon, chief product officer at UiPath, a robotic process automation (RPA) vendor that has a large R&D operation in the Seattle area.

These companies — along with other newly-minted unicorns in Seattle such as sales automation startup Outreach — certainly lack a “sexy” factor, which is symbolic of the region’s enterprise tech DNA as a whole.

And maybe being boring isn’t such a bad thing.

High-profile consumer-facing companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Peloton were among the biggest IPO flops of 2019, while enterprise software providers including Crowdstrike and Zoom fared much better.

Icertis, Auth0, and Convoy all raised huge funding rounds this year that helped them reach unicorn status. UIPath, headquartered in New York, reached a $7 billion valuation earlier in 2019.

There are now more than 400 unicorns globally, according to CBInsights, and 125 companies reached the $1 billion mark this year alone. Other Seattle-area unicorns include used goods marketplace OfferUp; pet-sitting startup Rover and remittance company Remitly are also close to the billion-dollar mark.

Given the increased access to venture capital dollars and the uncertainty of the IPO market — and the U.S. economy as a whole — startups are staying private longer.

Only one Seattle-area company went public this year: Adaptive Biotechnologies‘ IPO in June. While some of the panelists said they are thinking about an IPO and getting prepared for such an event, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see startups stay on the IPO sidelines in 2020.

An IPO provides a company with more cash while giving investors and employees a chance to liquidate their assets. But Bodas said there are ways to do that without going public, such as raising another venture round and giving out “secondaries” to workers.

“I’m not entirely sure why you would go public and take on all this compliance and SEC and quarterly pressure — man, it’s such a pain in the ass,” he said. “To be public is hard.”

Added Bodas: “If capital is available to me without the pain, I’ll take capital over the pain and capital, any day.”

The four panelists also shared their most important lessons. Here’s a recap of the responses:

Icertis CEO Samir Bodas: “One thing I didn’t appreciate, that I appreciate more now, is how much culture matters. When I came out of business school, I thought culture was all BS. I thought it was all about making money, and as long as you put enough money in people’s pockets, they will take the pain. That’s absolutely wrong. To be able to articulate that culture through your values, and knowing how those values are used in action and how you live them — it makes a huge difference for people.”

Convoy VP of Operations Kristen Forecki:  “There are always going to be new challenges that you can’t anticipate, so you have to expect the unexpected. Something I tell my customer service teams, is that if you work in an emergency room and you were always hoping that nothing crazy comes through the door, you’re just going to have a really bad day every single day. So you have to expect something crazy is going to happen and you have to just focus on building the toolkit to handle it and to continue to handle it better every time.”

Auth0 CEO Eugenio Pace: “Worrying about things that I have no control of is completely useless. It’s a complete waste of time. The only thing you have control over is yourself, and then the rest you can influence. It’s much better to put all the energy and emphasis on the things you control fully or things you can influence. That’s been my guiding principle.”

UiPath CPO Param Kahlon: “After 20 years of doing this, the most important aspect of a company to succeed is culture. Culture builds long lasting differentiation. We get customers who come to us and say they want to do business with us because they started with a competitor and were treated like crap, and they like the way we treat them. And the lesson we’ve learned it’s very hard to keep the culture when you grow. It’s easy to manage it at 50,100, 200 people, but very hard when you’re in the thousands. It’s a very tough problem.”

Raven stoops on a bench tranquilly flint-knapping an obsidian arrowhead by an I-5 overpass in North Seattle. His 10-man tent holds his guitar, banjo, art supplies and essentials. It would be a serene picture, if it weren’t for the cars zooming past on the other side of the chain-link fence.

A driver lowers his passenger window and yells across the fence, his curses drowned out by the roar of the freeway. Raven doesn’t pay him any mind. He’s used to being called names.

Raven, who prefers to go by his tribal name, grew up on his grandparents’ farm on Apache reservation land in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. After a difficult childhood, he moved to Seattle to reconnect with his estranged mother, but he says she kicked him out on his 19th birthday when he refused to give her money for drugs.

Raven’s birthday last January marked his 15th anniversary of being homeless in Seattle. His story of becoming homeless as a youth is a common one in King County. According to the county’s 2019 Count Us In Report, 45 percent of unsheltered respondents said they first became homeless while under age 25.

Although that day was a grim marker, it was also the first time anyone ever threw Raven a party. For his 34th birthday, a group of new friends showered Raven with gifts, including a mandolin and wire cutters for his jewelry making.

Raven found this new community on Samaritan, an app and donation platform that a Seattle startup by the same name launched three years ago. Samaritan users can give cashless donations, using their smartphones, to unsheltered people who carry a Bluetooth device called a beacon. The financial and emotional support Raven received through Samaritan helped him land a steady job and put him on a path toward permanent housing.

Raven’s story is one of 50 positive outcomes reported on Samaritan’s website, which includes stories of beacon holders getting housed, finding employment and getting treatment for substance abuse or mental health issues. The stories highlight the success of Samaritan’s initial 500-beacon Seattle pilot.

Despite those success stories, Samaritan has faced setbacks in getting funding for its second Seattle pilot. Samaritan founder and CEO Jonathan Kumar said the company has pivoted from its original thinking that city government would be its primary funding source. The new strategy is looking to healthcare organizations for research and potential funding.

On Nov. 14, Samaritan took first prize at the TRAIL pitching contest at the World Congress Reducing Physician Burnout Summit in Arlington, Va. The contest was held by Cambia Grove, a Seattle-based organization that promotes innovation in health care. TRAIL stands for “Traction and Implementation Lead to Solutions.”

The epidemic of homelessness across the country has had enormous costs for health-care organizations, particularly for public health hospitals like Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

In 2017, Harborview spent an estimated $119 million per year on uncompensated care, EMS aid response, and burial costs for the homeless, according to a Puget Sound Business Journal report on the price of homelessness in King County. That figure only included emergency care that was tracked at about a dozen shelters; it didn’t include ambulance response to individuals on the street or in encampments.

The first prize for the TRAILS pitching competition is $25,000 toward an evidence-based research study at the Primary Care Innovation Lab at the University of Washington. The timing of the research funding is ideal for the Samaritan team since they are looking to get more hard data on their platform.

Kumar said Samaritan is also applying for a $1.5 million commercialization pilot grant from the National Institute of Health and will hear back next spring.

“They’re really interested [in] solutions that are focusing on population health and opioid epidemic populations specifically – and we’re right in line for some of what they’re looking for,” Kumar said.

There are a number of moving pieces that make Samaritan work. First, there are beacons that are distributed by Samaritan’s nonprofit partners, such as Salvation Army and Mary’s Place, to unhoused individuals who choose to participate. Currently, seven out of 10 people approached opt to try it, according to Samaritan.

The beacon has a Bluetooth signal that can be picked up by Samaritan app users – called “samaritans” – who are within about 20 yards of the beacon holder. Once in range, the beacon holder’s profile shows up on the samaritan’s phone. The app displays a profile of the beacon holder with an optional photo, first name and last initial, and a brief story about the person’s situation, including how the beacon holder ended up on the street, if he or she wishes to disclose that information.

Although the beacon is designed to create opportunities for samaritans to connect with beacon holders in person, users can also see beacon holder profiles featured on the app. Once a samaritan has donated to a beacon holder, he or she can send messages of encouragement or opt to meet in person.

The beacon holder’s story can work somewhat like a GoFundMe in that it lists what is needed to move forward, like funds for transit or a down payment on an apartment. Donated funds can be spent at any of the Samaritan-partnered stores or nonprofits, such as Army Navy Surplus, Safeway or Goodwill, but they can also be spent on expenditures at the discretion of a partner nonprofit representative or Samaritan staff.

In order to keep a beacon active for more than 30 days, the beacon holder needs to go for a life-care visit with one of Samaritan’s nonprofit partners. During the visit, a counselor asks questions on the app, such as how the past month went, goals for the next month and what is needed to get there.

Kumar says the life-care partners are the ones who do the heavy lifting by connecting beacon holders with resources for employment, treatment options and housing.

Beacon holders get notifications of donations and messages on their cell phone, if they have one, or by signing into their email. Sometimes the donations are all that transpires between the two parties, but Samaritan encourages its users to do more to connect with beacon holders by going up to say hi or sending an encouraging message through the app.

Raven said Samaritan has been a game-changer for him.

“I don’t even know where to start on that,” he said. “There’s a lot of people I chitchat with throughout the week. I get people contacting me all the time: ‘you want to hang out?’”

“It is impactful, getting a text from someone saying, ‘Hey, have a good day.’ … that can keep someone on the path of not relapsing, not committing suicide, not getting locked up,” he added. “A lot of people don’t understand that about the homeless.”

Raven got a job last spring doing building security – the first steady job he’d held since 2005, and last month he got a new job testing video games. He credits the Samaritan app with helping him get to this point. Aside from the donations on his beacon, which have helped him buy necessities like food and clothing and pay his cell phone bill, he said the most important thing has been the relationships he’s forged through the app.

The samaritans who threw Raven the party helped him practice interviews before he landed his first job, and Samaritan staff has also given moral support.

Currently, Raven and some friends are looking for a house to rent. Beyond that, he wants to save up to buy a foreclosed home that he can fix up and help others struggling with homelessness.

The Samaritan organization has lightly marketed its app since launching a 500-beacon pilot in Seattle in September 2016 with a grant from Paul Allen’s Vulcan. Samaritan staff presented the platform to employees of downtown companies such as Amazon, Google, and Nordstrom and has relied on word of mouth. This year Samaritan surpassed 10,000 downloads of the app.

In 2018, a panel of investors named Samaritan champion of GeekWire’s Elevator Pitch competition, edging out 26 other entrepreneurs in the running.

The organization operates as a for-profit public benefit corporation. Kumar said he and his team chose not to be a nonprofit because they felt having to raise money was not a good use of their time. He said Vulcan approached them to provide the original pilot funding after hearing about the startup.

Since the two-year pilot ended, Kumar has been in discussions with the City of Seattle to fund a second pilot. The proposed contract would have provided initial funding of $175,000 from the city to give 750 additional people a beacon in 2020. Despite some strong proponents on the City Council, the first-year funding got reduced to $75,000 in budget negotiations and then was deleted altogether from the final budget vote.

It had been over a year since Kumar had first presented to the city, so he and his team were already exploring other funding opportunities before the vote.

“We’re not excited about working with cities anymore, and we see a much more straightforward opportunity in the healthcare space . . . we do think it’s a little bit more straightforward and less, perhaps, political,” Kumar said.

Through the initial pilot, Samaritan discovered that relatively small amounts of cash donations can lead to positive outcomes for beacon holders. The average beacon holder received about $40 a month, which Kumar said led about 54 percent to start meeting with counselors “because they were able to meet a financial or social need through their beacon.”

When beacon holders received $80 a month, Samaritan saw “the retention rate shot up dramatically,” according to Kumar.

“The average of our life-changing outcomes that we’ve tracked on the pilot page is $440 over six months, which is just under $80 [a month]. That’s not a lot of money, but we’re seeing huge impacts on people’s lives from even $80 a month.”

Samaritan’s larger vision of launching its platform in other U.S. cities is beginning to take shape, beginning with a one-year, 200-beacon trial with the Illumination Foundation, a nonprofit serving unsheltered people in Orange County, California.

The Illumination Foundation will use the Samaritan platform in its Recuperative Care program, which provides a place for unhoused individuals to recover after being discharged from emergency care at local hospitals. The program provides food and shelter at its 45-bed facility, along with medical oversight and social services, including housing referrals.

Samaritan also recently signed a contract with the Skid Row Housing Trust in Los Angeles, an innovative housing-first nonprofit that provides permanent supportive housing to formerly unhoused individuals.

Both organizations are set to launch their programs by the Christmas holiday.

Samaritan is one of several organizations seeking to connect everyday Seattleites with their homeless neighbors. The region has been in a state of emergency over its homelessness crisis since 2015, in part driven by a spike in housing prices that coincided with Seattle’s tech boom.

Other programs include Host Homes King County, where people with a spare room can host an unsheltered young adult, and the Facing Homelessness BLOCK Project, where homeowners volunteer to have a tiny home built in their backyard for unhoused individuals.

Kumar said that relationship-building is key to Samaritan’s success.

“The story of the good Samaritan is about a man who is left for dead on the side of the road, and another person comes by, the good Samaritan, and doesn’t just give him money through an app, he gives up his mode of time and transportation, gives up his to-do list and then just walks with this individual towards restoration,” Kumar said.

For Raven, Samaritan’s biggest impact has been how Samaritan staff and users of the app have related to him as a person.

“It’s that they see us as people – not as a junkie, not as a homeless bum, not as a loser,” he said. “They see people for what they can offer … it’s showing others that hey, there’s a diamond right here that just needs to be cleaned up.”

Online shopping is supposed to be about convenience. But the four-man team behind Seattle-startup Hippidy found it was anything but. Trying to make educated purchasing decisions sent them digging through dozens of sites for price and product information.

“When we were shopping for things, we had 100 tabs open,” said co-founder Phi Pham.

So last year, the group launched Hippidy to solve their shopping woes, and hopefully those of others.

“We pride ourselves on being your one-stop shop for products you want to purchase. We were tired of using comparison sites that focused on profit rather than user experience,” Pham said. So we sought to change this by building a new type of comparison shopping site, with a mission to empower shoppers to make the best purchase possible.”

It’s a crowded space with Google, Yahoo, BizRate, CamelCamelCamel, NextTag, Pronto, PriceGrabber and many others serving up shopping information. But the Hippidy founders believe there’s a better way. They describe their tool as creating a “shopping flash card” that contains pertinent details for deciding on a purchase.

The startup uses an affiliate business model, partnering with big-name retailers including Best Buy, Walmart and Target. Hippidy gets a commission for referring customers to partner sites “but this in no way informs the business decisions we make,” Pham said.

The team is focused on electronics including laptops, TVs, cameras, tablets, video games and other devices, with a plan to expand into other retail sectors. The price data largely comes from their partner companies, as well as other information that can be scraped from the internet and the team does spot checks to verify data on prices and whether items are in stock.

“That is where our focus has been, making sure that data is reliable and we’re getting it efficiently,” said co-founder Long Pham. Future features could include finding coupons for purchases and chat bots to help shoppers deliberate a deal.

The four founders all work part-time on Hippidy and hold jobs at tech companies. Long Pham has worked at Boeing, Paccar, Expedia and as a technical product manager at Rover. Phi Pham has held various marketing roles, including at Zulily, Casper and Thirty Madison. The two Phams are brothers. The other co-founders are Brad Porter, whose experience includes engineering at LaunchKey, which was acquired by Iovation, and Van Nguyen, who was a lead on the developer operations engineering team at Expedia. The co-founders met at the University of Washington.

We caught up with Phi and Long Pham for this Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for their answers to our questionnaire.

What does your company do? Hippidy is simply a better comparison shopping site. We provide our users with features designed to be completely easy to use such as price comparison, price history and consolidated product reviews. All from retailers that customers love and trust.

Inspiration hit us when: We came up with the idea for Hippidy at a Friendsgiving dinner in 2017. We discussed how the online shopping experience has become as stressful and overwhelming as shopping at a mall on the morning of Black Friday. With so much information online, it can be difficult to know where to start the shopping journey. Bouncing around sites looking for the best prices, reading customer reviews from various sources, as well as studying content articles about products from trusted blogs — it’s just all too much. That’s why over the past year, we sought out to fix this experience. Providing our users with three core features, designed to be completely user friendly — price comparison, price history and consolidated product reviews.

VC, Angel or Bootstrap: Bootstrap. This is the funding method that works best for our business at this moment. This allows us to run at our own pace and be really methodical about what we are building. Our business does not currently have too much overhead right now, so it’s manageable. However, we are constantly evaluating how to take our business to the next level.

Our ‘secret sauce’ is: Our ability to prioritize. Our team is constantly thinking of thousands of new ideas that we could build into the product. This can be a blessing and a curse. On one end, you have a bunch of great ideas that can potentially move the needle in a big way. On the other, it becomes extremely difficult to prioritize those ideas and focus on the set business goals. Being a small team, we force ourselves to be disciplined and do weekly prioritization exercises to make sure we are working on the correct things that will help us achieve our business goals.

The smartest move we’ve made so far: Releasing an early Beta version. It was important to us to get user feedback in every step of the creation process. We opened the Beta to gain feedback from our friends and family as well as people on Reddit. This allowed us to get objective feedback from people which informed how we iterated and built the product.

The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: Making assumptions without the data to back it up. There are times where we’ve built features based on our opinions of what we think the end user wants. We’ve learned to combat this by making sure we test and monitor user engagement and getting feedback as early as possible.

Which leading entrepreneur or executive would you most want working in your corner? Disney CEO Bob Iger for his customer obsession and ability to play the long game. Obsession over the customer experience is a driving factor for the way we run our business. Iger has proven that if you take the time to invest in the customer experience, then long term success will come.

Our favorite team-building activity is: Traveling and exploring new places together. Of course it’s a lot easier as a team of four, but we like to do quarterly retreats in a city at least one of us has not been to yet. This opens us up to new environments and promotes creativity.

The biggest thing we look for when hiring is: An entrepreneurial spirit. We’ve learned that you don’t need to start your own company to have entrepreneurial spirit. We look for people who are determined, passionate, creative, scrappy, disciplined and open minded — all great qualities of entrepreneurs.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: Stay motivated and focused on the goal. There will be times when things don’t go your way and you will feel like quitting. Stick through it. All the hard work you put in will pay off. We are so proud of the team for sticking through it and launching Hippidy.

Vicis, the high-profile Seattle startup that garnered support from the NFL for its high-tech football helmet, is in financial trouble.

The company is running out of money, has furloughed employees, and may shut down operations, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.

It’s an abrupt downfall for Vicis, which spun out of the University of Washington in 2014 to develop a helmet with multiple, specialized layers built to mitigate the impacts believed to cause concussions.

More than three-quarters of all NFL teams have a starter who wears a $950 Vicis ZERO1 helmet. At the college level, 180 programs have deals with Vicis, up from 125 last year.

The company has raised more than $85 million to date from investors that include current and former NFL players Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson, Doug Baldwin, Alex Smith, Roger Staubach, and Jerry Rice.

But that hasn’t been enough to support a sustainable business. Vicis is trying to raise more money at a $5 million valuation — down from a $90 million valuation last year — according to a letter to investors cited by The New York Times, which noted that the company expects to lose $26 million this year.

So what happened?

GeekWire first reported last month that Vicis co-founder and former CEO Dave Marver had stepped down. On Tuesday, Marver described Vicis as “a capital intensive business that does not attract VC interest.”

“That’s a tough formula,” he said via email. “Once through the current capital crunch, the company has the potential to succeed long-term — It has market-leading products, a great brand, and outstanding people.”

Marver was replaced by Ralph Greene, who is serving as interim CEO. GeekWire has contacted Vicis for comment on the details of the New York Times report.

Vicis landed a $1.1 million grant from the NFL and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has mentioned Vicis in the past while discussing the league’s equipment innovation. The company also placed first again in the NFL’s recent helmet safety test, though the top three helmets had no statistical difference in performance. Vicis competes with longtime helmet makers such as Riddell and Schutt.

In a statement sent to GeekWire on Tuesday, the NFL’s Jeff Miller, executive VP of Health and Safety Innovation, said Vicis has helped contribute to a “significant shift” in the helmet manufacturing industry.

“The team of engineers at VICIS have proven their ability to innovate to create better performing helmets,” Miller said. “Their ZERO1 helmet topped the list in the NFL and NFLPA’s joint laboratory tests the last three years running. They should be proud of the work they have done — it has contributed to a significant shift in the helmet manufacturing industry that benefits players at the professional level and beyond.”

Vicis also made inroads with youth football. Marver said previously that Vicis’ ultimate goal was to bring the price point down so it could offer its products to younger athletes.

The company’s $495 youth helmet ranked first in Virginia Tech’s inaugural youth football helmet safety ratings by a significant margin and was recently named to Time Magazine’s 100 Best Inventions of 2019.

Vicis’ challenges pose questions about the larger issue of safety in football and whether advanced helmets can actually help prevent brain disease — and whether companies can operate profitability while investing in research and development.

“If a company like VICIS has trouble making it, it will be that much more difficult for future companies with promising technology to raise capital,” Marver said. “That’s not good for football and it’s not good for the kids the company has worked so hard to protect.”

Participation in football has declined in recent years, and head injuries are a contributing factor. Nearly half of parents say they would sway their kids away from playing football due to concerns over concussions, according to a poll last year from NBC and The Wall Street Journal. The NFL and the NCAA teamed up this summer to make the sport of football safer.

Vicis was looking to create helmets for other sports. It debuted a soft helmet for use during practices, 7-on-7, and flag football in July. The company also has a military arm; it received a contract last year from the U.S. Army to develop technology for advanced combat helmets.

The company was founded by Marver; Per Reinhall, chair of the UW’s mechanical engineering department; and Vicis’ CTO, and Samuel Browd, professor of neurological surgery at the UW and Vicis’ CMO. UW engineering professor Jonathan Posner is another co-founder; he left the company in 2015.

Convoy has reached another milestone on the long road toward complete automation of the trucking industry’s brokering process.

The Seattle-based digital freight network announced Wednesday that it has achieved fully automated load pricing. The breakthrough comes less than a year after Convoy achieved fully automated load matching. Convoy says the combined pieces of brokering, which traditionally involved manual, time-consuming work identifying available trucks and negotiating on bids via calls and emails, can be handled by its platform in minutes with no calls or emails.

Convoy has come a long way since CEO and co-founder Dan Lewis was visiting shippers and truck stops, learning about the market and getting feedback on Convoy’s early ideas. Speaking Tuesday night at a live recording of the Acquired podcast in Seattle, he recalled walking into a shipper’s office for the first time, so nervous that all he could do was ask to use the bathroom.

But as he talked with drivers and shippers about the concept, Lewis found an industry in need of transformation. That was in contrast with some of his past ideas.

“I’d had some really bad ideas — really bad ideas,” said Lewis, a veteran of companies including Amazon, Google and Microsoft. “This one, every time I shared it with someone from the industry, they were excited about it and felt like it was necessary.”

Fast-forward more than four years, and Convoy is one of the Seattle region’s unicorns, valued at more than $1 billion. The 4-year-old startup, backed by high-profile investors including Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates and U2’s Bono, competes against traditional brokers such as C.H. Robinson, the largest U.S. freight broker, and newer players such as Uber Freight.

Convoy says its new milestone in automated pricing will help it operate more efficiently, and lead to reduced costs for shippers and full trucks for carriers.

“We’ve been working for the past four years on improving our pricing models,” Convoy Chief Product Officer Ziad Ismail told GeekWire. “And as we’ve been building more and more density we have more and more data for us to train our models. We’ve also gotten more drivers to use our app. The combination of those two things have led us to 100-percent automated pricing in Convoy’s top markets.”

Those markets include Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, and Los Angeles, among others.

Truckers earn more when they get more load options, better routes, and make fewer “empty mile” trips. Convoy aims to increase capacity and decrease costs for shippers with more truckers on its platform. Automated brokering produces further benefit for both sides of the marketplace, the company said.

The technological breakthrough comes just a month after Convoy’s latest funding round of $400 million, at a $2.7 billion valuation. And in Ismail’s view, it’s a top tech accomplishment for the company, alongside Automated Reloads, which uses machine learning to group full-truckload shipments for carriers and is helping reduce empty mile carbon emissions.

“Once you automate the core of the marketplace, which is the matching and pricing side, your ability to run experiments ends up being completely different,” Ismail said. “When you have human-based processes, trying to run small experiments to test differences is very difficult. But once you have a digital network, you can innovate, experiment and learn at a completely different pace. And so that’s kind of what we’re seeing now, it’s setting Convoy up really to experiment the way that you would expect a true technology company to experiment.”

Speaking with Acquired podcast co-hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal at the University of Washington in Seattle last night, Lewis recalled overhearing skeptical brokers cast aspersions on Convoy’s early plans, under the theory that “computers don’t match freight; people match freight.”

Such skepticism from traditional players put Convoy in a position to “write the rules … and be the first to come up with the models” for key parts of the process including payments, matching and providing data and insights to customers, Lewis said.

In a sign of how much things have changed, Lewis didn’t outright dismiss the question of whether Convoy could someday operate a third-party marketplace for other brokers, similar to what Amazon does with its marketplace for third-party sellers. “It could move in that direction at some point,” he acknowledged.