Glowforge, the Seattle startup that rebounded from early setbacks to become a fast-growing 3D laser printer maker, announced high-profile hires and a big board appointment Wednesday as it plans for the next phase of growth.

Dr. Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, is joining the Glowforge board. She is the newest independent director to join the board, following Foundry Group’s Brad Feld.

Glowforge makes 3D printers that use lasers to quickly cut and engrave products and lets people use raw materials like leather, paper, plastic, fabric, or cardboard and make items with a push of a button.

The company “struck gold when Maria agreed to join us,” said Glowforge CEO Dan Shapiro in an interview. He said it took half a decade searching for “the kind of board member who would take us all the way from where we are today, through to a publicly-traded company that has a dramatic impact on the world.”

Klawe is no easy get. She is a noted computer scientist and academic, and a former Microsoft board member. Before becoming the first woman to lead Harvey Mudd, she served as dean of engineering at Princeton University and dean of science at the University of British Columbia. Klawe is credited with achieving gender parity at Harvey Mudd at a time when other institutions are struggling to recruit and retain women.

But Shapiro had a unique advantage. He is a Harvey Mudd grad.

“It was so joyful for me to see my alma mater grow and thrive under her leadership,” he said.

“My passion is to diversify science and engineering and improve society as a result,” Klawe said in a statement. “I’m thrilled to be joining the board of a startup that holds these same values and continues to push for diversity and inclusion in tech. But there’s still work to be done to equal the playing field, and I’m excited to be a part of a company that is trying to do just that while changing people’s lives with their technology along the way.”

Glowforge also announced two new additions to its executive team Wednesday. Renuka Ayer is joining as chief financial officer, and Nate Kelly will be Glowforge’s new chief operating officer.

The hires signal a new chapter for Glowforge, a startup that was navigating difficult waters just a few years ago. After setting a crowdfunding record, Glowforge had to delay shipments three times over several years to the consternation of customers.

But today, Glowforge has shipped tens of thousands of printers and customers have printed more than 5 million items. The company now has 90 employees, up from about 75 last year.

Glowforge has raised $40 million in venture funding, on top of the $27.9 million crowdfunding campaign. The company has fulfilled all of its backorders with the exception of countries with regulatory hurdles and customers who haven’t requested delivery of their units yet, according to Shapiro. He said sales tripled in 2019.

In June, Glowforge announced a partnership with WeWork to install 3D printers at co-working locations in Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, New York, and London. Shapiro said that partnership is still alive and well despite, WeWork’s recent troubles.

“It started out as a combination of a dream and a hope as we launched our first crowdfunding campaign,” Shapiro said. “Now it really is this magic box that people can use in their everyday life that makes it better.”

The only thing more attention grabbing than the technology at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas might be the food that keeps attendees fueled at the massive conference. So an idea that combines tech and what to eat might just steal the show.

Picnic, the Seattle startup using automation to disrupt food production, is bringing its pizza-making robot to CES Jan. 7-10. But the smart-pie-producing machine won’t just be another booth or display angling for attention on the Las Vegas Convention Center floor. Picnic is teaming with event hospitality company Centerplate to actually serve food to attendees.

PREVIOUSLY: Secretive Seattle startup Picnic unveils pizza-making robot — here’s how it delivers 300 pizzas per hour

Picnic’s platform can churn out up to 300 12-inch customized pizzas per hour — sauce, cheese, pepperoni and other topping choices are dropped by conveyor belt onto dough (formed by human hands).

“Picnic’s distinct culmination of food production customization and throughput, smart data and cloud analytics is quickly resonating with food service operators,” Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic, said in a news release on Wednesday. “This is one robot that won’t be a CES exhibitor only showing futuristic concepts; it is already in use in real-world kitchen settings and will only continue to grow its capabilities, as will be seen through Picnic’s delivery of mass customization food production and great-tasting pizza provided to CES attendees.”

Centerplate has already used Picnic tech during a pilot program at Seattle’s T-Mobile Park, and the robot is providing all pizzas made during Enchant Christmas, a holiday event taking place at the baseball stadium through the end of the month.

Picnic’s business model is essentially pizza-as-a-service, GeekWire previously reported during a test-run of the tech. Restaurant owners pay a regular fee in return for the system and ongoing maintenance as well as software and hardware updates

The robot has a vision system that allows it to make adjustments if the pie is slightly off-center. It’s also hooked up to the internet and sends data back to Picnic so the system can learn from mistakes.

Hungry CES attendees looking to track down a slice next month should stay tuned to the Picnic website, where specific location details for the robot will be revealed prior to the start of the convention.

HaptX announced a $12 million fundraising round Thursday, allowing the Seattle startup to develop its next generation of virtual reality gloves and robotics.

HaptX is partnering with the Idaho-based manufacturer, Advanced Input Systems on the new gloves, which will launch next year. HaptX’s first-generation product use microfluidic technology and motion tracking to let users to move through virtual environments and feel virtual objects with their hands. HaptX, previously known as AxonVR, unveiled the first version in 2017. The gloves work with a VR headset and tracker, connected to a central control box. 

The company made improvements to the gloves, reducing the size and weight, and adding more precise haptic technology that makes the touch sensation more realistic. HaptX also unveiled an enterprise-focused software development kit with support for Unity and Unreal Engine 4, allowing users to create new VR experiences with the gloves.

Enterprise customers use HaptX Gloves to design virtual reality products and in training programs. HaptX has collaborated with Nissan, the U.S. Army, and others. HaptX is going after customers in the government as well as automotive, aerospace, and robotics industries.

The latest round brings HaptX’s total funding to $19 million to date.

Chicago-based Mason Avenue Investments led the round, with participation from existing investors NetEase and Amit Kapur of Dawn Patrol Ventures. In addition to Mason Avenue Investments, new investors include Taylor Frigon Capital Partners, Upheaval Investments, Keiretsu Forum, and Votiv Capital.

Last year, HaptX CEO and co-founder Jake Rubin said the company eventually plans to sell the gloves to consumers. But HaptX’s marketing director Andrew Mitrak said the company is focused on enterprise and industrial applications for now.

The seven-year-old company now has 20 employees, down from 35 in 2018. It’s one of several virtual reality startups in the Seattle area. Others include Pluto VR, Pixvana, VRStudios, VREAL, Endeavor One, Nullspace VR, Against Gravity, and Visual Vocal.

Microsoft is getting behind Evisort, a startup that makes artificial intelligence software to automate processing and tracking of corporate contracts.

Microsoft’s investment arm M12 co-led a $15 million Series A round for the San Mateo, Calif. startup, along with Palo Alto-based venture capital firm Vertex Ventures US. M12 invests in startups that make products for other businesses using technologies in Microsoft’s wheelhouse, such as cloud computing and AI. M12 has offices in Seattle, San Francisco, London and Israel.

Evisort can review, analyze, approve and track documents such as contracts, statements of work, invoices, purchase orders, service-level agreements and more. The software reads more than 50 key data points, including payment tables and contract expiration dates, freeing up teams to spend their time making strategic decisions rather than processing large documents.

Evisort will use the cash infusion to expand its team, product offering and customer experience. The 35-person company plans to open a new research and development office in Montreal and staff it with 10 technical employees.

Contracts are core to every business, and the market for managing them is growing. One of the big names in that field is Icertis, the Bellevue, Wash. company that raised $115 million earlier this year to push its valuation above $1 billion.

Since launching its AI platform late last year, Evisort has landed more than 100 enterprise customers, including Brooks Brothers, Cox Automotive, Fujitsu, TravelZoo and Sweetgreen. Customers are using the platform to manage more than $40 billion in contracts, the company estimates.

Editor’s Note: Reference to Vertex Ventures corrected since publication.

As we brought the GeekWire team together last week at our offices in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, recapping the past year and looking ahead to the next, we were struck by the number of people in the room in entirely new roles, positions that didn’t exist a year ago.

This wasn’t an accident. We’ve spent much of the past year laying the groundwork for GeekWire’s next phase as a global media company and hub for the Pacific Northwest tech community. We’ve set the stage to improve our news coverage, refresh our events, and reinvent longtime staples of our business such as the GeekWire membership program.

In the tradition of the periodic GeekWire updates that we’ve shared over the years, we’d like to catch everyone up on some behind-the-scenes changes.

But first, how did we get here? As longtime tech journalists in the Seattle region, we launched GeekWire in March 2011 based on the belief that the Pacific Northwest deserves a national and global tech news site and online community of its own. It’s home to some of the most influential companies in the world, ambitious startups, and leaders in tech, science, health, e-commerce, games, the cloud, and many other areas of innovation.

We aspire to be the connective fiber for one of the most innovative, creative, interesting and impactful communities on the planet. What happens here matters everywhere, and we have the privilege of telling the stories of this place — the good, the bad, and the geeky — to the world.

Our team has grown to 15 people, across news, business, sales, marketing, events and operations. Our news coverage delivers information and insights to millions of readers around the world. Brands big and small work with our business team to expand their reach. Our annual GeekWire Summit has become a destination for global business and tech leaders.

But there are so many areas where we still need to improve and grow. As we told the team at our year-end meeting, we’re more excited about the future than at any point we can remember in the history of the company.

One of the main reasons is the evolution of the GeekWire team. In fact, in just the past few weeks, we’ve filled two entirely new positions.

Paula Wilmot has joined GeekWire as our first internal events director. A native of Coventry in central England, Paula brings years of event management experience to the table, plus a sharp British wit. She most recently served as the event manager at Seattle Academy, organizing and running a series of events for the school. She also operated events for the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and ran her own events company for a decade.

An animal lover, Paula describes herself as a “closet geek.” She has worked for companies such as Terabeam Networks and Splunk, and started her career as an IBM project manager and programmer.

Paula is ramping up quickly, working with our business team and longtime events partners at Proper Planning, gearing up for 2020 events including the upcoming GeekWire Awards, taking place March 26 in Seattle.

We’re also excited to welcome Melanee Ferrier as GeekWire’s membership director, a new role in which she will be responsible for reinventing and running our GeekWire membership program.

Melanee is ideally suited for this entrepreneurial challenge, having previously served as Campus Operations Director at Galvanize-Seattle, as well as working for membership-based organizations such as the Austin Chamber of Commerce and YMCA. Melanee is a native of Texas whose hobbies include painting, baking, music, and movies.

Her knack for networking and connecting people in the tech community makes her well-suited for this role. She is moving quickly to reimagine the GeekWire membership program, expanding beyond our existing benefits to make it even more valuable for the tech community. Stay tuned for more on the revamped membership program in the weeks ahead.

Cara Kuhlman, who was our longtime events, marketing and operations director, has shifted from the business side of the company to the GeekWire newsroom, in the new role of editorial operations director.

This is a multifaceted job that includes overseeing databases and features such as the GeekWire 200, Startup List, Fundings List, and Tech Moves column; coordinating editorial content for events; and other special projects to help us better serve the tech community with news and information.

An experienced sailor, Cara is our resident boat captain, literally and in spirit. She is already making an impact on our news operations in her new role, positioning our team to create meaningful and impactful journalism.

These changes follow the earlier addition of Holly Grambihler as our sales and marketing leader, the hiring of Tiffany Grunzel as digital advertising specialist, and the promotion of Taylor Soper to managing editor, all key positions that strengthen our existing editorial and business teams.

Our priorities for 2020 include bolstering our news team, stepping up our startup coverage, producing smarter and more creative events, and simply getting out there more, creating stronger connections with the community.

We’re fortunate to be leading a healthy and growing media company, covering people and organizations defining the future, and serving the tech community in one of the most dynamic corners of the world. We don’t take this responsibility lightly. As GeekWire approaches its second decade, we’re continuing to adapt to meet the needs of the community in our backyard, and an audience of readers around the globe.

How can you get involved?

• Give us your feedback. Positive, negative, constructive, critical, doesn’t matter, we’re always looking to improve, and we need to hear from you. Use this link to email us directly.
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Thank you all for your readership, feedback and support.

— GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop.

Inside the lobby of Vicis‘ headquarters in Seattle this week, floor-to-ceiling images on the walls showed young football players wearing the company’s high-tech helmet. A portrait of former Seattle Seahawks star Doug Baldwin loomed behind a reception desk. The slogan “Protect the Athlete, Elevate the Game” was stenciled next to a lighted display case with two helmets.

But it was unusually quiet. Not much work was getting done.

That’s because Vicis recently furloughed a majority of its 110-person team, leaving a skeleton crew of 12 employees this week.

Now the fate of the company is in the air.

The one-time Seattle startup darling, which raised in excess of $85 million from more than 400 investors since spinning out of the University of Washington in 2014, suddenly finds itself on the verge of a shutdown, with no money in the bank and limited options on the table.

The New York Times reported on the company’s condition on Monday. Vicis held several board meetings this week to determine its fate, weighing dueling offers from investors that would keep the company alive. A decision is expected early next week.

But how did Vicis even reach this point? Interviews with people close to the company, and internal Vicis documents, reveal what happened behind the scenes.

• Market: Vicis was a startup trying to enter a complicated football helmet industry dominated by decades-old giants Riddell and Schutt.
• Capital: As the company’s cash balance approached zero, it tried to raise more investment in recent months, but all options fell through.
• Transparency: Vicis’ troubles came as a surprise to some shareholders. Former CEO Dave Marver says he talked about the company’s cash situation with shareholders this summer and fall, but some people involved with the company say it was too late.
• Profitability: A longtime board member said the company put too much focus on grabbing market share rather than turning a profit.

“This remains very personal,” co-founder Samuel Browd, a neurosurgeon at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said on a Nov. 26 webinar with investors, a recording of which was viewed by GeekWire. “It’s very tough that we’re in this situation. I would just say to everybody out there that I’m very sorry that we are here, and that we’re all in this situation together.”

A game-changer

To outsiders, Vicis was a startup success story, a gem of the football world that attracted big-name supporters such as current and former players, spine doctors, military experts, members of the Seattle business community, and the NFL itself.

Vicis had ambitious goals from inception. The company aimed to commercialize technology developed at the University of Washington’s engineering department and sell a state-of-the-art football helmet designed to mitigate the impact of bone-crushing hits that cause concussions and put the health of professional football players in jeopardy.

Football safety is a huge issue threatening the future of a 150-year old sport, as more research pairs on-field blows to the head to long-term brain damage. The NFL agreed to a $765 million concussion settlement lawsuit with former players and their families in 2013, and has changed its rules to make the game safer.

Meanwhile, participation in boys 11-player football has declined in recent years, and head injuries are a contributing factor. Nearly half of parents say they would dissuade their kids from playing football due to concerns over concussions, according to a poll last year from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal.

Vicis wanted to be part of the solution. Unlike traditional helmets, the outer shell on its ZERO1 model is deformable and yields much like a car bumper upon impact. A layer of flexible columns in the helmet absorbs impact before it reaches the head.

The helmet, manufactured at a facility in Seattle, was the result of more than three years of research and development.

Browd, medical director of Seattle Children’s Hospital Sports Concussion Program, helped get Vicis off the ground after seeing too many young athletes affected by concussions. He reached out to Per Reinhall, chair of the UW’s mechanical engineering department, for his technical expertise and later rounded out the team. Marver, a medical device industry veteran, came on as CEO. Jonathan Posner, a UW professor who heads up the Posner Research Group, is another co-founder but left in 2015.

The founders originally referred to their startup as Spark Medical when it spun out of the UW. They went with Vicis for an official title because the word means “change” in Latin.

The helmet was pricey, initially debuting for $1,500. A handful of NFL and NCAA players began wearing the ZERO1 in 2017. Baldwin used the helmet during games, along with his teammate Russell Wilson — both became Vicis investors, in addition to Aaron Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers star quarterback and two-time MVP.

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

The company also made inroads with youth football. Its $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.

But off the field, there were major problems with Vicis’ operations. Its cash balance was getting low. And investors weren’t ready to write additional checks.

Out of cash

Vicis raised millions in the latter half of 2018 from backers including Rodgers; former NFL quarterback Roger Staubach; media, auto, and sports magnate Red McCombs; and Cincinnati Reds minority owner Harry Fath. But soon after, it still needed more cash. The company is projected to generate $14 million in revenue this year, with a $26 million cash burn, according to information provided on the Nov. 26 webinar.

Vicis raised an additional $6 million through a variety of notes earlier this year, Marver confirmed to GeekWire. But he was unable to convince investors to put more money into the company in recent months.

On Nov. 22, Marver resigned and stepped down from the board.

When he left the company, Marver cited the need to take a break “after years of withering hard work.”

“I have felt such a profound obligation to VICIS’ employees and investors, and all of our customers, that I have worked too much … beyond what’s reasonable,” Marver told GeekWire last month. “It’s time for a pause.”

Vicis board member and ex-Nike executive Ralph Greene took over as interim CEO, and on Nov. 24 the company furloughed more than 100 workers.

Two days later, Vicis held the webinar with hundreds of investors, going into detail about its financial position and making a plea for help. It had two options, according to Browd: go into bankruptcy, or try to keep the company alive with more investment at a paltry $5 million valuation.

“These are people we have a tremendous amount of respect and love for,” Browd said on the call, speaking about furloughing employees. “Many came out of the university and instead of working at Boeing, they came to work for us. That was an awful moment for me personally and for the company.”

Others in the room for the call were Baldwin; longtime board member Bruce Montgomery, who had just been appointed chairman; and Seattle-area lawyer Richard Adler, an early Vicis investor.

“Obviously, all of us are pissed to be in this situation,” Baldwin said on the call. “I think all of us would have put in more work and more due diligence to make sure that we weren’t in this predicament as we are standing right now.”

Baldwin added, “From a human element, I know the frustration is there. I want to reiterate to everybody that we are working diligently to make sure that this does not happen again and that the process from here on out is being taken care of in a very transparent manner. We will get this turned around.”

Adler echoed Baldwin’s sentiment.

“If we had a little bit more runway and a little bit more notice and more transparency — six weeks? — we wouldn’t be sitting here,” Adler said. “We would have had the ability to think proactively and do what we need to do and what we’re kind of doing now.”

In an email sent to shareholders on Oct. 15 and reviewed by GeekWire, Marver told investors that the company’s Series C round may take longer than anticipated to raise. “We need funds to support the company in the interim,” Marver wrote. “Cash is tight. I’m coming to you to please continue your support of Vicis so we can realize our important vision.”

Asked about his transparency with investors about the company’s financial situation, Marver told GeekWire, “Though we had discussions with our largest shareholders throughout the summer and fall, all shareholders were informed the company was tight on cash by mid-October and a webinar for shareholders was held October 24th, more than a month prior to my departure and the Board’s decision to furlough employees.”

Marver previously spent 14 years as a sales, marketing, and strategy leader at medical devices companies Medtronic and Cardiac.

“This is a disappointing situation for everyone,” Marver said in an email this week. “In retrospect, there are things we could have done differently but on balance I’m proud of what we achieved. We invested a lot of capital because we were trying to achieve something important and meaningful, and we wanted to be first-mover with new and better helmets in multiple categories.”

He added, “I travelled and worked to exhaustion over the past several months in an all-out effort to generate investor interest and raise money for the company. As anyone who has raised money knows, fundraising requires a lot of calls and meetings and it’s difficult to know in advance which will bear fruit. I would have loved to have travelled less and spent more time with my family, but that was not an option.”

Greene has already been replaced by Bill Shadle, a former Kymeta and HP exec who joined in September as chief operating officer and is now acting as interim CEO.

In recent weeks, Vicis asked Steve Singh, former CEO of Concur who invested in the startup three years ago, to help analyze its financials and come up with a recovery plan toward profitability. Speaking on the webinar last month, he recommended that Vicis focus on fewer products and reduce the cost of sales.

Singh spoke on the Nov. 26 webinar via phone. He said he wouldn’t serve as a board member but wanted to remain close to the company. Singh lauded Vicis’ market opportunity and product, but said on the webinar that “the company was run without a lot of rigor in how you allocate capital and measure metrics around that investment.”

Montgomery added, “One of our mistakes was probably chasing market share and not profitability.”

Later on the webinar, Adler pointed to the company’s tagline. “There’s an expression here on the wall that says, ‘Protect the Athlete; Elevate the Game’ — that’s external,” Adler said. “Internally, it needs to be: ‘Protect Vicis, and Elevate the Operation.’ Right now the operation needs a lot of help.”

Two groups have emerged in recent weeks as a potential rescue syndicate for Vicis. One includes a small set of existing shareholders from the Seattle region. An alternative group with connections to Marver is also in the mix, according to sources familiar with the discussions.

Here’s what Marver said in response to an inquiry about his continued involvement with the company’s fundraising activities:

“Given the company’s cash shortage I continued to work to find sources of capital even after my departure, acting in my capacity as a shareholder. I felt a responsibility to the shareholders, employees, and customers to do everything I could to help the company. There was one group that was very interested, but they couldn’t move fast enough to put forward a proposal to the company in December. Now that I’ve been gone several weeks, I am no longer connected to any of these activities.”

It’s unclear which option will be chosen — if either, for that matter. Vicis could also go into receivership or get acquired by a competitor.

Meanwhile, outstanding deals such as providing helmets to the XFL are up in the air.

The company’s homepage has this message: “Vicis will be conducting internal year-end activities through January 2nd, 2020. We will resume accepting orders at that time.”

Here is the makeup of the board as of Nov. 29, according to a document sent to investors on that day.

• William S. Ayer, former chairman and CEO of Alaska Air Group; serves on the University of Washington Board of Regents
• Dr. Samuel Browd, co-founder of Vicis
• Lynnette Frank, CFO at Ben Bridge Jeweler
• Ralph Greene, former Nike exec and former Vicis interim CEO
• Bruce Montgomery, CEO of Avalyn Pharma
• Frank “Buz” Walters, former global investment banking chair at Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Despite the struggles, some are still optimistic about the future of Vicis.

“We’re sorry that we’re here. We think that we can live to fulfill the mission of the company,” Browd said on the Nov. 26 webinar. “We are committed to restructuring, bringing in different leadership, changing the board out, and moving forward. If we do that, I think we can fulfill the promise of the company.

“When [Per Reinhall] and I sat down together, we thought we could do something important. We thought we could potentially change a little slice of the world and do something that we both felt passionately about. We thought technology could bring something important to kids playing and participating safely.”

A complicated industry

In a recent story about the football helmet industry, Sports Illustrated called it the “most innovative and complicated corner of the sports world,” citing established contractual relationships between helmet companies and organizations that make it hard for a startup like Vicis to break through. Riddell and Schutt are the industry kingpins; Xenith is another main competitor.

“On any given day it is both the most challenging and most exciting space one can imagine — sometimes simultaneously,” Xenith CEO Ryan Sullivan told GeekWire. “You can create the most incredible products for the athlete from head to ankle, but that does not guarantee industry success.”

There’s also the debate over how much innovation is actually occuring — and whether any helmet can help to prevent brain damage. “While science can verify the reduction of impact forces on a helmet, no scientific study has yet shown that a helmet can reduce impact forces on the brain contained within,” SI’s Greg Bishop wrote in the story.

Last week, The New York Times profiled a Stanford researcher pursuing a fluid-based solution inside the helmet. The story cited overall skepticism from brain experts, including one who said “my fear is that a better helmet will give false reassurance,” likening it to a better cigarette filter.

Vicis repeatedly placed first in the NFL’s recent helmet safety test, though the top three helmets had no statistical difference in performance. There are questions about the reliability of such tests, which “can be gamed,” according to Marver, who was quoted in the SI story.

The football helmet market is estimated at around $140 million, according to 360 Research Reports, with projections to reach $150 million in 2024. That’s small for a startup like Vicis that raised more than $85 million. And more than 80 percent of demand in that market is from middle and high school players.

Vicis pursued other revenue streams. It debuted a soft helmet for use during practices, 7-on-7, and flag football in July. There were talks of making a hockey helmet. 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.

But according to the proposed plan Singh laid out on the webinar, Vicis needs to focus solely on its new ZERO2 helmet and the youth model in order to increase gross margins.

There are examples of successful helmet startups. LIGHT Helmets, based in Carlsbad, Calif., built an ultra-lightweight helmet using materials and technology proven in military and auto racing industries. The company has several top-rated helmets and raised just $3 million while keeping its R&D costs low, said CEO Nick Esayian.

“Our plans include a wide range of contact sports and commercial products — and we are on track,” he said. “Vicis’ lack of results doesn’t dim our enthusiasm for this space at all.”

Esayian added that while football is under the microscope, “the game is safer to play now than it has ever been.” He said the life lessons learned from playing youth football — teamwork, respect, bringing people together from all races, creeds, religions, and sexual orientations — are indispensable. “We cannot let it fade into history,” he said.

Vicis garnered praise and attention from the NFL, landing $1.1 million in grants from the league. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell mentioned Vicis in 2016 while discussing the league’s equipment innovation.

In a statement sent to GeekWire this week, 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.”

Seattle startup Vicis officially eliminated the jobs of more than 100 employees on Friday, including its interim CEO, in the latest sign of problems at the high-tech football helmet maker.

Previously, the company had furloughed employees, putting a majority of its 110-person staff on temporary leave while its board explored options including a potential sale. But in an employee webinar on Friday, the company informed employees that they are being officially let go, GeekWire has learned.

It’s the most significant sign of problems yet at the startup, which has abruptly run out of cash after raising more than $85 million from 400-plus investors including current and former NFL stars. A Vicis spokesperson declined to comment on the layoffs when contacted by GeekWire.

Bill Shadle, the company’s interim CEO, lost his job as part of the cuts, as well. The former Kymeta and HP executive joined the company in September as chief operating officer and was named to the interim CEO position in recent weeks.

Vicis held several board meetings this week to determine its fate, weighing dueling offers from investors that would keep the company alive. A decision is expected early next week.

Two groups have emerged in recent weeks as a potential rescue syndicate for Vicis, GeekWire has learned. One includes a small set of existing shareholders from the Seattle region. An alternative group with connections to former CEO Dave Marver is also in the mix, according to sources familiar with the discussions. That group is being led by Aves Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based family office and existing Vicis backer.

Marver is a Vicis co-founder. He resigned and stepped down from the board on Nov. 22.

Other co-founders include Dr. Samuel Browd, medical director of Seattle Children’s Hospital Sports Concussion Program; University of Washington professor Per Reinhall, chair of the UW’s mechanical engineering department; and UW professor Jonathan Posner, who left the company in 2015. Browd recently stepped down from the board, according to sources close to the company.

Vicis spun out of the UW in 2014. One longtime board member said the company put too much focus on grabbing market share rather than turning a profit; other people involved with Vicis say there wasn’t enough transparency into its operations and balance sheet. The company battled long-standing competitors in a complicated football helmet industry.

Zach van Schouwen, vice president of engineering for Karat, landed his job through a Craigslist ad.

It was 2016 and he was on sabbatical, living in Brooklyn in New York City. He’d left Google after six years, leaving a role as the technical lead for the web survey tool Google Forms. On the other side of the country, Seattle-based Karat was building a platform for conducting technical interviews for companies seeking employees. Van Schouwen had plenty of experience interviewing candidates at Google and was particularly excited by one of the job’s features: he could work from home.

He got the job and did 1,300 interviews for Karat from his apartment, sifting through back-end developers applying at companies including MuleSoft and Pinterest. “I was sucked in immediately,” van Schouwen said. He loved the nature of the challenge, finding a smarter way to hold interviews to assess how technical candidates thought and worked.

In 2017, van Schouwen left New York for the Northwest and now leads the product, engineering and content functions for the fast-growing startup. Karat has raised $41.6 million in venture capital since launching in 2014.

While van Schouwen graduated with a computer science degree from Columbia University’s engineering program, he has a dual passion for something less ephemeral than lines of code or, as he sometimes calls it, “electrons in a box.”

Van Schouwen loves the literally more concrete world of the urban environment. After earning his bachelor’s degree, he briefly attended the University of Washington’s Urban Planning master’s degree program, though he dropped out after taking a job with Google “to pay the bills” and finding it a good fit.

Van Schouwen still indulges his interest in the cityscape in his free time. At one point, he became captivated by a five-story tenement on Manhattan’s Eldridge Street where his great-great-grandfather had lived. He researched the decade-by-decade history of the city block that included the tenement, beginning with a farmstead in the 1780s and ending with the public housing structures erected in 1985. For a project he called The Block, he built a hand-drawn, short film showing the street in profile with links to details about the structures as they came and went.

“Seeing the way that they changed over time, and the degree the landscape reflected social and political changes, is a really interesting project,” he said.

Now he’s considering an even more ambitious initiative dubbed “Under I-5” that aims to discover all of the buildings razed for the construction of Interstate 5 as it cuts through Seattle. Work on the highway began in the late 1950s.

At some point, van Schouwen said, he might seek a career that weds his tech skills with his urban development interests. For now he’s happy to dabble in the space off the clock. Another of his hobbies is building a Minecraft city complete with road and highway infrastructure, a project he describes somewhat jokingly as “a very long game of solitaire.”

We caught up with van Schouwen for this Working Geek, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for his answers to our questionnaire.

Current location: Seattle

Computer types: I’m a Windows user, although I use Linux and Windows pretty interchangeably.

Mobile devices: Hardcore Android user. I’m currently using the Pixel 3. I got my first smartphone — the Nexus One — while I was at Google and have been Android ever since.

Favorite apps, cloud services, and software tools: I’m a true minimalist. My entire life is in Gmail. My garden is in a Google spreadsheet that tells me what to water and when to fertilize. I try to use as few apps as possible — except Twitter and Instagram. I’m a newsfeed junkie.

Describe your workspace. Why does it work for you? I’m a big proponent of working from home and do most of my best work out of my home office. It is a really bright outdoor-facing area. As a programmer, having a quiet focused workspace is key to productivity. Lots of candles and cactuses.

Your best advice for managing everyday work and life? Big believer in productivity consultant David Allen’s “getting things done” method. Write every task down and have a deliberate way to think about it. I’ve been doing it since my freshman year of college. Everything is in my Gmail, and everything is an actionable task. I don’t have a perfect track record, but I’ve found it really valuable, especially for super distant goals so there’s always something on the horizon.

Your preferred social network? How do you use it for business/work? I use LinkedIn for business. Instagram for personal. I like that Instagram can be a non-interactive social network, keeping it more community-driven as opposed to broad. And I’m a Twitter listener.

Current number of unanswered emails in your inbox? “Oh God [buries face in hands].” It’s like 120. Maybe an all-time high. This job is the first time it’s been like that. It’s stressful for me. I used to laugh at people who declared email bankruptcy — and now I regret my earlier reaction.

Number of appointments/meetings on your calendar this week? Too many. 42? I need to hire a lot of people.

How do you run meetings? I’m a big believer in saying as little as possible in meetings where I’m in charge. I like to have a clear agenda but do less talking. And “leave when bored” is one of my favorite meeting philosophies.

Everyday work uniform? Pure Seattle. Plaid shirt and jeans. I’ve outgrown wearing hoodies, though, so that’s gone.

How do you make time for family? Balance is really important. I set hard boundaries for the day and turn off communications. I’m a heavy believer in Slack’s snooze feature and in deleting Slack from my phone when I go on vacation. I really try to take that seriously with my team and try to be visible with this approach because it rubs off on the team and culture. I think Karat excels at this, and it comes from the top down. We all work very hard — but not when we’re not at work.

Best stress reliever? How do you unplug? I like to exercise. I walk eight miles a day. I’ve walked all around Seattle, every neighborhood in the city. I also get up early and spend time in my garden. Mostly perennials: roses, rhododendrons and succulents. I have an all succulent-themed Instagram. I also like to take old photographs and re-shoot them today. Same time of day, same angle, etc.

What are you listening to? Vintage soul right now, And early ’90s hip hop. My girlfriend is a music industry vet and is our music curator. She has much better taste than I do.

Daily reads? Favorite sites and newsletters? I try to avoid this stuff like the plague at work. If I read the news first thing, then all I think about is news. It’s too distracting. I try to catch up on the news in the evening.

Book on your nightstand (or e-reader)? I’m re-reading “The Thirty Years War” by C.V. Wedgwood.

Night owl or early riser? Definitely early riser. I used to live above a fried chicken restaurant in Brooklyn that was open ’til 3 a.m., which kept me up all night. Now I’ve completely reverted. I wake up at 6 and go straight to the garden!

Where do you get your best ideas? Other people. I’m at my best when I can bring ideas to life by synthesizing things that I hear and finding ways to apply ideas that are in the air.

Whose work style would you want to learn more about or emulate? Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy is my nerd-hero. He wrote the vi text editor for Unix. Probably one of the most productive people in software history. I love his quote when someone asked him how he implemented the TCP/IP stack (Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol). He said “it’s very simple. You read the protocol, and you write the code.”

Seattle’s already robust gaming scene is getting even stronger.

One More Games, a studio started earlier this year by a pair of veterans of the gaming industry who also spent time at Amazon and Chef respectively, has raised $5.67 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The startup was founded in early 2019 and has yet to release a game.

The studio is in the earliest “earliest phase of development,” which involves “roughing out game design and building core tech,” One More Game co-founder Patrick Wyatt told GeekWire. The company lists only two employees on LinkedIn — Wyatt and fellow co-founder Jamie Winsor.

Wyatt didn’t say how many employees the startup has, but he noted that the studio will use the cash infusion to grow the development team. However, Wyatt wants to restrict headcount to “just a handful of folks while we continue to refine our core concepts,’ he said.

Wyatt spent the three years before founding the company as a CTO/principal engineer at Amazon. In the 1990s he was a vice president of research and development at Blizzard where he worked on iconic games like Starcraft and the Diablo series. Following his stint at Blizzard, Wyatt co-founded ArenaNet, the Seattle-area gaming studio responsible for the Guild Wars series.

Winsor did two stints at Undead Labs, a Seattle-area studio that Microsoft bought last year. In between, he spent nearly three years as a principal software development engineer at automation technology company Chef.

The co-founders worked together at three different game companies — ArenaNet, En Masse Entertainment and Undead Labs. They knew they worked well together, and they’re both excited by the idea of building games and teams with an eye toward improving the development process.

“When we’re hanging out having fun we almost always end up talking about game development because it’s a passion for both of us,” Wyatt said.

Seattle has grown to become an gaming epicenter in recent years, led by mainstays such as Amazon Studios, Microsoft’s Xbox division, Valve and Nintendo’s North American division. Other big-name game companies, such as Pokemon Go maker Niantic and Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, have set up shop in the region to take advantage of its wealth of talent.

Wyatt chose Seattle to start ArenaNet nearly two decades ago partly because of the welcoming local game development community. There’s a level of openness in the area and willingness to share technical expertise and best practices for development that helps everyone make stronger games, Wyatt said.

Part of the reason for this atmosphere, Wyatt argues, is that the gaming audience is so big that there’s plenty of room for numerous studios to succeed.

“One of the great things about the game industry is that game developers are not competing in the same way that, say, dog-walking companies are, where there are few dogs that need exercise,” Wyatt said. “There are so many people who love playing games that there’s opportunity for many game developers.”

To make the pitch for her Seattle-based startup, Yuan Karppanen poses some basic questions for our tech-enhanced world: Do you know what your home assistant is doing at your home? Do you know which services are getting your data when you browse a website? Do you know what devices or users are currently on your network?

If you answered “no” to any of these queries, Karppanen’s company UNpkl has a solution for tracking your tech devices and flow of information.

Launched in 2017, UNpkl (pronounced “un-pickle”) offers routers and software that can manage this data, blocking and unblocking devices from a customer’s system and blocking and unblocking specific sites used by the devices.

UNpkl’s technology shows real-time data traffic on a user’s network. Customers can use their own router, or UNpkl’s router; their software works on a variety of systems. Their target customers are business and industry as well as home users.

“As today’s kids are moving more and more of their entertainment activities and social interactions online, parents have been in the eternal battle of restricting the time their kids spend on the internet,” Karppanen said. “Our solution helps parents restrict their kids’ play time with a single click, and within budget.”

In the case of curbing kids’ behavior, a parent could, for example, create a list of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram and block them on devices used by the child.

CEO Karppanen co-founded UNpkl with Chief Technology Officer Yogesh Nagarkar. The two work for Microsoft and are both parents.

Nagarkar is the inventor and patent owner of UNpkl’s technology, which he was inspired to develop to help limit his son’s use of the internet. Karppanen has worked in technical product management, marketing and management consulting in the U.S., Asia and Europe. The third member of the team is Caleb Wells, who, according to Karppanen, “is an iOS developer with an artistic flair.”

UNpkl has pricing packages for business customers based on the number of devices or platforms, cloud accessibility, data analysis and other services. For residential customers, they receive a three month free trial of the service when they buy an UNpkl router, which costs $98. Subscriptions to UNpkl’s services are $1.99 or $4.99 per month, depending on the number of devices and extent of the services required.

Competitors in the business market space include Cisco Umbrella and Google Public DNS. Xfinity xFi sells a solution for home users.

“Nobody has this all in one package that we’re developing right now,” Karppanen said.

Over the next year, UNpkl will continue working on new capabilities with a focus on the enterprise market. Karppanen said they’ll be looking to raise some seed capital and want to hire some more software engineers. But they’re getting positive feedback already.

“All of the pilot customers love the solution,” Karppanen said. “We see the benefit — that they enjoy it and it makes their life better.”

Data privacy has become top-of-mind for consumers and businesses across the globe, with concerns about location tracking and how smart speakers listen to users making several headlines in the past year.

We caught up with Karppanen for this Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for her answers to our questionnaire.

What does your company do? UNpkl provides you with a live data cam with our router and services, which empowers you to monitor your own data traffic and block/unblock sites with your own customized policies. UNpkl also works with enterprises and businesses to integrate our software with any platforms and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) machines for advanced access management and IoT use cases.

Inspiration hit us when: Both founders are parents, concerned about their kids spending too much time on the internet and the threats from malicious websites. It’s a problem that challenges a lot of parents and people in general as the awareness of personal data protection increases. We see a huge potential for our solution in the area of privacy protection. With our long-term vision, we make our business models flexible and adaptable to a wide range of customer segments.

VC, Angel or Bootstrap: Bootstrap has allowed us to launch and develop our product in our own terms. We are getting ready to raise our seed round after our service is live.

Our ‘secret sauce’ is: We provide the option, but leave the flexibility and power to our users to decide what they want to do with their own data traffic. Both home users and businesses can easily create policies that best meet their individual needs. We humbly listen to our customers on what additional features they want and focus our development efforts on the most requested features.

The smartest move we’ve made so far: We moved fast and pushed out our product on Apple’s iOS platform first, which enables us to get early-phase customer feedback and gauge market interest. With something tangible to demo to industries and consumers, we are able to be more convincing and credible as prime movers in the area of personal data protection.

The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: Instead of seeking external funding early, we funded the development by ourselves, which slowed down the progress and our go-to-market speed. We understand now the importance of scaling and are taking more initiatives in pitching our business ideas to investors.

Which leading entrepreneur or executive would you most want working in your corner? Computer scientist Alan Kay famously said: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” History has also confirmed Kay’s assertion, as pure software companies, such as Microsoft and Google, have become more involved in hardware design and manufacturing.

We are inspired by Alan Kay and started our cooperation with router manufacturers right from the get-go. As we expand our business to include more hardware types to our portfolio, we would really like to have a mentor like Kay to show us the direction and areas we should deepen our knowledge.

Our favorite team-building activity is: We each have a favorite activity. Due to our hectic schedules with work and family, hardly anyone gets to do things we genuinely enjoy. Therefore we use team-building opportunities to rotate our individual favorite activities. As a result, Yogesh has seriously challenged Yuan with high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts and Yuan has often made fun of Yogesh in a cardio dance studio.

The biggest thing we look for when hiring is: To make a diverse team, we value different perspectives our talent can bring to the table. We look for people from different backgrounds, yet with the same can-do attitude and move-fast spirit.

Our company also aims at creating flexible job opportunities for moms who want to strike a balance between career and family. Because of visa limitations, I spent two years as a stay-at-home mom after relocating to the U.S. from Finland, where I worked full-time as a management consultant. I felt the distinct challenge of women sacrificing their career for the benefit of family because of the lack of flexible opportunities in the U.S. job market. I am determined to help women in the same situation to maintain their financial independence without “feeling guilty” about working.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: Belief! Believe in what you do and that it will fundamentally disrupt the world and set new norms. If you don’t believe in what you do, don’t even waste a second. If you do, put in all you have!

A stealthy Seattle startup has raised seed funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock and Bellevue, Wash.-based Trilogy.

Falkon AI has “discovered a revolutionary way to combine machine learning and human intuition to empower professionals to define, understand and improve metrics that really matter,” according to its website. The company describes its technology as a “new system of intelligence” that works with “massive customer datasets,” according to job postings.

Mona Akmal, a 12-year Microsoft veteran who was most recently head of product at Seattle startup Amperity, is CEO and co-founder of Falkon AI. Akmal also held executive engineering roles at Code.org and Zulily.

The other co-founders are Aakash Kambuj, another former Microsoft engineering leader who previously spent six years at Dropbox, where he led the search and retrieval engineering team out of the company’s Seattle office before departing in October. Josh Zana, a veteran of Dropbox, Amazon, and Microsoft, rounds out the founding team.

Falkon is currently hiring for eight open roles. Akmal, a former GeekWire Geek of the Week, declined to provide further details about the company when contacted by GeekWire.

The CEO recently spoke at a Seattle Startup Week event, sharing tips about launching a company. Akmal said she loved her team at Amperity, a customer data platform that just raised $50 million, but she also had “absolute clarity” about venturing out as a startup founder.

Greylock is one of the Valley’s most prominent VC firms, with more than $3.5 billion under management and 130-plus profitable M&A’s since 1965. Its past investments include LinkedIn, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, Okta, Workday, and others. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is a partner at the firm.

Greylock is an investor in Seattle-based unicorn Convoy and online learning platform CreativeLive; it also recently led a Series A round for Chronosphere, a cloud startup founded by former Uber and Microsoft engineers with an office in Seattle.

Trilogy is an active Seattle-area investor, with recent investments in startups including Spiral; Fresh Chalk; Give InKind; Adaptilab; and others.

At first glance, the GeekWire 200 might not seem that different today than it did a year ago. But a closer look shows some of the region’s most valuable companies rising steadily in our ranking of the Pacific Northwest’s privately held tech startups.

The trend was driven by large funding rounds and significant growth among the Seattle region’s unicorns, tech companies with valuations of $1 billion or more.

• Digital freight network Convoy shot up 17 spots over the past year, coming in at No. 5 on the GeekWire 200 after reaching a $2.7 billion valuation in November and nearly doubling its headcount.
• Outreach, a Seattle sales automation tech startup, moved up eight spots to No. 16 after it raised a $114 million funding round in April at a $1.1 billion valuation.
• Authentication technology company Auth0 jumped five slots to No. 7 after raising $103 million in funding in May.
• Contract management technology company Icertis, which raised $115 million in July, rose four spots to No. 11.

Also rising on the list were two companies that are approaching unicorn status: pet-sitting marketplace Rover (No. 3) and mobile remittance company Remitly (No. 5), which raised $135 million in equity in July.

But overall, 23 of the top 25 startups on the GeekWire 200 are the same as a year ago. One reason: merger and acquisition activity in the region has been relatively quiet.

Adaptive Biotechnologies, No. 37 on the GeekWire 200 a year ago, went public in July, graduating from the GeekWire 200. Employee experience software company Limeade went public last week on the Australian Securities Exchange but remains on the GeekWire 200 at No. 30 because the majority of its shares are still privately held.

GeekWire 200: See the full December update for our Pacific NW startup ranking

By comparison, four Pacific Northwest startups went public in 2018: Avalara, DocuSign, Smartsheet and nLight.

We launched the GeekWire 200 seven years ago to help identify the next wave of influential tech companies emerging from the region — a new Microsoft, Amazon or Expedia, for example. Over the years, it has proven to be a strong indicator of startups that are positioning themselves to go public or be acquired by larger companies.

The GeekWire 200 is derived from our broader database of Pacific Northwest tech startups. The rankings are generated from publicly available data, including social media followings, approximate employee counts (via LinkedIn) and inbound web links.

The index heavily weights employee growth, which is often one of the most clear signs of momentum. But that’s not always the case as we learned over the past week when high-tech football helmet maker Vicis, No. 56 on the list, laid off more than 100 employees and was put into receivership. We are continuing to monitor the situation and will reevaluate Vicis’ inclusion on the GeekWire 200 with the next monthly update.

At the top of the GeekWire 200, space venture Blue Origin and vacation rental management platform Vacasa remain in the No. 1 and No. 2 positions, respectively.

Blue Origin’s employee count is up by more than 800 employees to around 2,500 while expansion plans rush ahead in the Seattle region and Los Angeles. Backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the company closed out the year with the 12th test mission for the New Shepard suborbital spaceship.

It was also a year of growth for Portland, Ore.-based Vacasa, the newest Pacific Northwest unicorn. The company grew to more than 500 employees across its Portland and Boise offices in 2019, in addition to its boots-on-the-ground workforce. It plans to add roughly 2,000 more people in the coming year. Vacasa raised $319 million in new funding to fuel expansion, finalized its $162 million acquisition of Wyndham Vacation Rentals, and signed a deal with Google to have its properties show up in Google search results.

More insights from the GeekWire 200

Over the past year, we increasingly used the data behind the GeekWire 200 to answer questions about the state of startups and the region’s tech industry. If you missed any of these in-depth analyses, a full roundup is below. Which trends should we dig into next year? Send suggestions to editor@geekwire.com, or contact us on Twitter.

Gender gap: Women-led companies make up 8% of the GeekWire 200 startup list: Less than 10 percent of the companies listed on the GeekWire 200 are led by women, based on our analysis this past January. Read more.

Digital health startups rise in the Pacific NW, fueled by enterprise tech and AI talent: Digital health has become one of the hottest areas of healthcare, attracting both tech entrepreneurs and gobs of venture capital. In the past year, companies in this industry shot up the GeekWire 200. Read more.

Microsoft veterans lead nearly 25% of Seattle region’s top tech startups, GeekWire analysis shows: It all started with a tweet. Investor Kirby Winfield felt like Microsoft was far more important to the startup scene of the Pacific Northwest than most people realized. He called on GeekWire to do some more digging. Read more.

The hidden legacy of aQuantive: How Microsoft’s $6B loss became a win for the Seattle tech industry: Microsoft bought Seattle-based advertising technology firm aQuantive for $6.3 billion in 2007 in what would later be seen as an epic blunder. But the story didn’t end there: The former aQuantive executives, entrepreneurs and investors who emerged from ashes have gone on to play key roles in building the Seattle-area’s tech ecosystem over the following decade. Read more.

GeekWire 200 startup index analysis shows hottest industries emerging from Pacific Northwest: The quality of local startups in a region can often indicate the future of a tech ecosystem. To find out what the future may have in store for the Pacific Northwest, we analyzed companies that recently joined the GeekWire 200. Read more.

A new world for unicorns: What the WeWork flop means for Seattle’s top startups and IPO prospects: WeWork’s dramatic fall from grace was just one example of a larger reckoning on newly public companies. Investors also trimmed the valuations of companies in the Pacific Northwest that went public since 2018. What does this all mean for the next crop of startups with high valuations that might go public? Read more.

Rising Pacific Northwest startups show that financial technology is about more than payments: Amid hopes that the Seattle area could grow into a financial technology hub, notable startups in the region are showing that finance is more than just loans and payments — it’s about community, too. Read more.

Latest changes in the index

Eleven startups debuted or returned to the GeekWire 200 this month, due in part to ongoing updates to GeekWire’s Startup List, which now features more than 1,300 Pacific Northwest startups. Don’t see your company on the list? Submit it here.

Here are the latest additions to the GeekWire 200:

• Rad Power Bikes, No. 47 – direct to consumer e-bike startup.
• Pela, No. 49 – maker of compostable flax-based phone cases.
• Viome, No. 76 – wellness startup that analyzes customers’ microbiomes.
• Thoughtexchange, No. 84 – crowdsourcing intelligence platform.
• MagniX, No. 125 – electric propulsion for aviation.
• The Dyrt, No. 136 – campground search platform.
• Ideoclick, No. 138 – e-commerce platform for Amazon sellers.
• Samaritan, No. 155 – app and cashless donation platform to help unsheltered people.
• Wiivv, No. 179 – custom-fit footwear designed from an app.
• StormX, No. 188 – blockchain microtask platform.
• Crelate, No. 200 – recruiting software startup.

And finally, here were the month’s biggest movers:

• Thinkific, No. 58 (+9)
• CoreStack, No. 120 (+16)
• ModusBox, No. 123 (+6)
• Ritech Solutions Ltd., No. 124 (+6)
• AppSheet, No. 133 (+9)
• KenSci, No. 134 (+7)
• Loftium, NO. 158 (+7)

About the GeekWire 200

The GeekWire 200 — sponsored by CenterCard — is derived from our broader list of more than 1,300 Pacific Northwest tech startups.

To make sure your startup is eligible for inclusion in the GeekWire 200, first make sure it’s included in the broader Startup List. If so, there’s no need to submit it separately for the GeekWire 200. If your Pacific Northwest startup isn’t among the companies on that larger list, you can submit it for inclusion here, and our algorithm will crunch the numbers to see if your company makes next month’s GeekWire 200. (Please, no service providers, marketing agencies, etc.)

Thanks to everyone for checking out this month’s ranking. And, just a reminder, if you value resources like these, be sure to check out our list and map of out-of-town tech companies with Seattle engineering outposts as well as our list of startup incubators, co-working spaces and accelerators in the region, startup fundings, and our GeekWork job board.

U.S. clothing sales generate $357 billion in revenue, according to Statistica. But clothes shopping remains an often inefficient and uninformed experience.

Online models and in-store mannequins “are limited and most often provide looks that are not inclusive of all body types and styles,” said Swati Padmaraj Angolkar. And shoppers trying to put together a certain look frequently have to hop between multiple sites to peruse different clothing brands and stores to assemble the right shoes, apparel and accessories.

Padmaraj and Ritesh Desai in 2017 launched Style-At-Iz to try to solve those problems, building a tool for creating outfits that flatter and fit a shopper’s needs.

The two have been friends for a decade. Padmaraj, who is a fashion designer, stylist and owner of Atiz Fashion House, noticed the problem in her field. Desai has worked for two startups and has experience building tech products targeting both businesses and consumers as customers. Padmaraj asked Desai if there was a scalable, digital solution to make shopping easier, and Seattle-based Style-At-Iz (pronounced “style at ease”) was born.

Through an app available for Apple devices, the five-person company provides recommendations for event outfits or wardrobe purchases via chats. The advice comes from personal suggestions from stylists, and from machine-learning algorithms.

To build its reach, Desai said their startup is working with a small secondhand clothing store in the Seattle area to help shoppers explore its inventory online. Style-At-Iz is eager to partner with more smaller brands as one avenue for reaching customers. The site will generate revenue by taking a percentage of sales generated by their app, as well as offering a subscription service to retailers and acting as a stylist partner.

Desai points to personalized clothing rental companies such as Seattle-based Armoire, or brands including Rent-the-Runway and Stitch Fix as the startup’s greatest competition.

“The relationship with the [clothing] retailers is going to be a big hurdle,” said Desai. “If we can get over it, I think (attracting) consumers and recruiting people to our platform will just take time and work.”

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

What does your company do? Style-At-Iz provides customers with look and style recommendations based on personal criteria and machine learning models. Style-At-Iz provides styling services through real-time chats and curated looks across brands. We also plan to work with brand stores to create customized looks for specific criteria like special events, body type, budget and other preferences that can enhance the search within the store’s online presence. We believe that this approach allows customers to zero-in on their selections easily and will encourage them to go through to point of sale for their selections quickly.

Inspiration hit us when: There are two places where we were inspired to go ahead on this initiative. Initially, we were encouraged by my (Padmaraj’s) efforts to personally style multiple people, and we realized that this is a service that should be made easily available and accessible to all. We wanted to provide a scalable platform that allows users to work with stylists.

The second inspiration came from the challenge of bringing looks together. When people plan a vacation for their family, for example, they do not go through each airline or each hotel website; they use aggregation sites like Expedia, Kayak, etc. These platforms bring together the best package based on the user’s criteria like dates, times, budget, etc.

What if we could have an aggregation platform that allows users to put in their criteria and search for best possible looks within their parameters just as you do pulling together the pieces for a vacation? This could be combined with multiple brands, such as a top from Zara and a bottom from Nordstrom, which can be easily bought through a single platform: Style-At-Iz.

VC, Angel or Bootstrap: We are bootstrapped at this time, and as founders we have put our money where our mouth is. We want to prototype this idea and show that it has merit. We have an established way of how we like to work and a culture that we like to encourage, and we believe this can be only possible when working for ourselves.

Having said that, we are not averse to getting some VC or angel help in the future, but we want to prove some areas before we go down that path.

Our ‘secret sauce’ is: Our energy and our ability to quickly work through ideas to evaluate their feasibility and the value they’ll add. We also have experience in fashion design and knowledge of the industry, which allows us to create the best recommendations for our customers. The technical chops within the team, along with business acumen, provides us with a unique ability to solve lots of complex business problems by applying simple technical solutions.

The smartest move we’ve made so far: We built some initial affiliations with networks like ShopStyle, which allowed us to access inventory across multiple brands. This in turn allowed us to create recommendations for shoppers and for them to have a single point of sale to buy their selections. We’re also partnering with Jessica Singh, a local stylist and blogger, who brings expertise and skills. This was a good way to build an application, have real users try it and provide valuable feedback.

We also attended some courses with the The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) organization for roughly six months and it was extremely educational. These connections helped us to find the right resources and make some good contacts within the startup community, which we felt was very important for the initial push of the concept. We continue to maintain these valuable contacts as we grow.

The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: Initially we went down a path of spending some of our limited finances on a strategy of sketched looks within our first app on iOS, as opposed to featuring real clothes and accessories — and we did this without conducting a good customer study and market research. This was not well accepted by the users and we had to scrap most of the work — except, of course, that we learned how to conduct detailed market research and user studies!

Which leading entrepreneur or executive would you most want working in your corner? Jeff Bezos quickly comes to mind. Amazon has been doing retail business replacement for years and has steadily added domains, from books, toys and clothes to everything else. We believe that once a model is proven within a domain, it can be replicated across other domains.

The Nordstrom family would be next. A store like Nordstrom brings together brands from multiple designers and has shown the ability to do that quickly and efficiently. We would like ideas and opportunities for partnering Style-At-Iz with a store like Nordstrom to provide the best experience for their consumers.

Our favorite team-building activity is: Our Starbucks discussions that sometimes go for hours. We also spend quite a lot of time in our small office area (or Bellevue public library rooms) brainstorming ideas.

The biggest thing we look for when hiring is: Passion and an eagerness to contribute. We are looking for people who can take critical feedback with their eye on the eventual prize, and for their ability to pivot quickly, as is required within a startup environment. We believe that women — especially at stay-at-home moms — can join the team and empower themselves.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: Test the market, spend a lot of time asking your customers what they need and get real data quickly. It will save you a lot of money and time in the future. The ability to build prototypes (even paper ones) and test them with real users is something you should strive for. Try not to spend months trying to perfect a lot of things, but spend a few weeks perfecting one or two things.

— How did Outlook’s mobile app reach 100 million users since launching in 2015? Hear from Outlook Mobile team leader and longtime Microsoft employee Michael Palermiti talk about his learnings at the latest Products That Count event at Mixpanel HQ in Seattle; 6 to 8 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 8.

— The world’s biggest technology conference happens in just a couple of weeks, and GeekWire will be there. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is now in its 53rd year and showcases the latest advances in consumer-facing tech, from smartphones and TVs to a device that blow-dries your dog. CES takes place in Las Vegas from Jan. 7-10. Email tips@geekwire.com and let us know if you’ll be there!

Here are more highlights from the GeekWire Calendar:

• Hardware Happy Hour: A monthly meetup for hardware developers and enthusiasts at Postdoc Brewing Company in Redmond; 7 to 9 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 2.
• Winter Fishtival: A multi-day event that features special talks, hands-on activities, performances, and more at the Seattle Aquarium in Seattle, Dec. 26 – Jan. 5
• Fandom PDX: A comic book and pop culture convention at the Sheraton Portland Airport Hotel in Portland, OR; Saturday, Jan. 4 and Sunday, Jan. 5.
• Seattle Aerospace BBQ: A party celebrating all things aerospace at Jack’s BBQ SODO in Seattle; 4 to 7 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 4.
• Learn to Lead without Self Doubt: A workshop designed for emerging leaders at Galvanize in Seattle, 6 to 8 p.m., Monday, Jan. 6.
• 1 Million Cups Seattle: A weekly meetup where early-stage entrepreneurs present their businesses and get feedback at The Collective in Seattle; 8:30 to 10:30 a.m., Wednesday, Jan. 8
• There Is No Right Answer: Product Planning: A talk by a Twitch executive about best practices in product planning at The Product School in Seattle; 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 8.
• Video Game Tap Takeover: A bi-weekly video game tournament at Capitol Cider in Seattle; 7:30 to 10 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 8.

Post updated at 6 p.m. on Dec. 29.

Seattle-area startup Wyze, a provider of home video cameras and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, announced on Dec. 26 that it had been informed of a “data leak” that reportedly exposed the personal information of 2.4 million of its customers.

The problem arose from “a new internal project to find better ways to measure basic business metrics like device activations, failed connection rates, etc.,” writes Dongsheng Song, Wyze co-founder and chief product officer, in the company’s post.

“We copied some data from our main production servers and put it into a more flexible database that is easier to query,” he explains. “This new data table was protected when it was originally created. However, a mistake was made by a Wyze employee on December 4th when they were using this database and the previous security protocols for this data were removed.”

Founded in 2017 by a group of Amazon veterans, Wyze offers a series of low-priced cameras, plugs, bulbs and other smart-home devices. The company, based in Kirkland, Wash., has raised $20 million in venture capital. GeekWire has contacted Wyze for additional comment.

To Wyze’s credit, it has been very detailed in describing what happened, when, why, how, and what the company is doing about it.

A post by Twelve Security claimed that the leaked data included the following:

• User name and email of those who purchased cameras and then connected them to their home
• Email of any user they ever shared camera access with such as a family member
• List of all cameras in the home, nicknames for each camera, device model and firmware
• WiFi SSID, internal subnet layout, last on time for cameras, last login time from app, last logout time from app
• API Token for access to user account from any iOS or Android device
• Alexa Tokens for 24,000 users who have connected Alexa devices to their Wyze camera
• Height, Weight, Gender, Bone Density, Bone Mass, Daily Protein Intake, and other health information for a subset of users

Wyze quoted that list in its original post but added, “We don’t collect information about bone density and daily protein intake even from the products that are currently in beta testing.”

In looking over this event, there are ten key security and privacy takeaways.

1) Another argument over “responsible disclosure”

Wyze has been upfront about the manner in which it was informed of the leak, with little or no time to mitigate the problem before it was made public. ZDNet’s Catalin Cimpanu summed up the feelings of many (likely including Wyze) about whether this disclosure was “responsible” or not.

This is not how "responsible disclosure" works.

In the past, I've waited weeks for some companies to secure servers.

These guys couldn't wait a f***ing day. Talk about being unprofessional.

14 minutes (my bad, not 9) means you didn't actually care about disclosure at all pic.twitter.com/EWmV33rQD6

— Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) December 29, 2019

These are valid and reasonable concerns. As is often the case regarding the “disclosure wars,” there likely won’t be any resolution, but instead a renewed airing of both sides of the argument. Those supporting the disclosure can and will say the information was public for a number of days and holding that information back prolongs the risk. Those against it will say this just wasn’t enough time for the vendor to take action. Either way, this situation shows that the disclosure wars will continue so long as there’s no collective agreement on how to handle these situations.

2) Wyze moved quickly to respond

One thing to Wyze’s credit: they clearly jumped on this fast once it broke. The company’s post states: “Immediately upon hearing about a potential breach, Wyze mobilized the appropriate developers and executives (CEO and CPO) to address the allegations.”

It adds later, “This means that all Wyze user accounts were logged out and forced to log in again (as a precaution in case user tokens were compromised as alleged in the blog post). Users will also need to relink integrations with The Google Assistant, Alexa, and IFTTT.”

This level of response and these steps are reasonable to address the risks around potentially lost authentication tokens. These are also actions that will impose a burden on users.

Going back to our first point, people can and will argue how much of this response is due to the nature of the disclosure. But these are good, concrete steps, which put security ahead of ease-of-use: Wyze is risking user frustration for better security.

3) But Wyze is not forcing password resets

One thing that Wyze isn’t doing, however, is forcing password resets on users. While Wyze has said that passwords weren’t stolen, it’s often hard to be certain. And if the current situation involving Amazon’s Ring has taught us anything, it’s that people are regularly reusing passwords, especially where IoT devices are concerned. Not forcing a password reset is missing an opportunity to be thorough in the response to improve overall customer security.

4) This is different and more serious than the Ring situation

Ring has been in the news a lot lately for being “hacked.” As I’ve noted, the nature of those hacks boil down to the inherent weakness of relying on passwords. This situation is different because it’s a leak of data held by Wyze. In fact, it even appears that password information wasn’t involved.

In this case, even if you’ve used two-factor authentication (2FA), you still are at risk from this data breach.

If the Ring situation has reminded us of the risks of password reuse and the overall weakness of passwords as a security measure for IoT, this breach helps show us the risks inherent to losing the kind of data used byIoT and health-related devices in the home.

5) This shows what IoT data breaches can mean

By their very nature, IoT devices are integrated into our most intimate spaces. Cameras in particular represent a major window into our most protected personal spaces, as we’ve seen in the reactions to the Ring situation.

Looking at the information that’s potentially lost in this breach, we get a more concrete sense of IoT data breaches can mean in real terms.

In particular, Wyze notes that the data loss includes: “List of all cameras in the home, nicknames for each camera, device model and firmware. WiFi SSID, internal subnet layout, last on time for cameras, last login time from app, last logout time from app.”

This data is troubling because it can give very specific information that can be useful for real-world crime. People regularly name devices in ways that are descriptive for themselves, not expecting them to be publicly known. For example, people might name a camera in a child’s room “Betty’s Room.” Information like this can give an attacker information about who is in the house, where they might be and where cameras are going to be placed. All of this can be useful information for people who want to enter the home for malicious purposes.

One thing that Wyze has not recommended, which I would recommend, is that users rename their internal WiFi SSIDs, rename their cameras and potentially reposition those cameras. All these steps can mitigate the risks of that information now being publicly accessible.

6) IoT health data is VERY personal

Another piece of the exposed data is this: “Height, Weight, Gender, Bone Density, Bone Mass, Daily Protein Intake, and other health information for a subset of users.”

Wyze goes to some length to point out that this information lost only affects a very small subset of their users, specifically “140 external beta testers.” Yes, that is a very small number of people. But the information that’s was exposed is very sensitive and very personal health information. It’s a reminder of the nature of the data that’s being handled by IoT and health devices.

7) Similarities to the Capital One Breach

The similarities to the Capital One data breach are striking. In this case, as Wyze says: “a mistake was made by a Wyze employee on December 4th when they were using this database and the previous security protocols for this data were removed.”

While this isn’t exactly the same thing that happened with Capital One, in both cases you have data that was accessible in the cloud without appropriate security protections due to human error. It’s also notable that in both cases, auditing and monitoring failed to catch the misconfiguration.

Both of these cases are a reminder that, unfortunately, when things are deployed to the cloud, the risks of exposure and breach are frequently greater. And in terms of IT operations and practice, the controls and countermeasures often aren’t as robust and mature for cloud deployments as they are for traditional “on premises” deployments.

8) Speed kills

For startups, there are two lessons, as well. One is cautionary and the other potentially positive.

First the cautionary tale: speed kills.

Once again, to its credit, Wyze is open about what happened, and there’s a very clear message for startups. From the company’s posting: “To help manage the extremely fast growth of Wyze, we recently initiated a new internal project to find better ways to measure basic business metrics like device activations, failed connection rates, etc. We copied some data from our main production servers and put it into a more flexible database that is easier to query.”

Two things happened here that are common for startups. First, the company experienced sudden, fast growth. Second, it moved quickly to address the implications of the growth.

As noted above, it was during this “fast move” that, at some point, the security that had protected the data was removed by an employee.

It’s great that Wyze was able to move fast to address issues related to their fast growth. But this is also a reminder that speed can kill. Mistakes happen when things move fast and there’s little checking. This is a risk that all startups face and should be conscious of.

9) Speed can save you

Of course, the speed that can kill you as a startup can also save you. The fast response that we see from Wyze is an example of the speed startups can achieve. Another positive aspect of this speed is shown in the statement that is going to “bump up priority for user-requested security features beyond 2-factor authentication”.

If we compare and contrast this with Ring’s response to its current situation, the difference is stark. Ring has made no announcements of any major plans to improve security capabilities in the wake of stories of Ring devices being hacked. By contrast Wyze has committed early and openly to reworking their prioritization of new user-requested security features.

Here too is another lesson for startups: use the speed and agility that being a startup gives you to move quickly to turn disadvantage into advantage.

10) Alarmist reactions over data and China

In its post, Wyze very clearly refuted the claim that it is sending data to Alibaba’s cloud in China. A question and answer in the post speaks directly to this:

Is there validity to the claim that Wyze is sending user data to China?

Wyze does not use Alibaba Cloud. The claim made in the article that we do is false.

It goes on to note that the company has employees and manufacturers in China, but “Wyze does not share user data with any government agencies in China or any other country.”

The fact that this claim was made and Wyze feels a need to refute it points to another takeaway: there is an emerging, almost “McCarthyite” trend lately to imply or allege that tech companies with ties to China are storing data in China and/or sharing data with the Chinese government. We’ve seen similar insinuations in regards to TikTok as well.

Partly, this represents the sort of speculation that can fill a vacuum when companies don’t provide clear information themselves about where they store their data. A few years ago, people, especially in Europe, were concerned about data being stored in the United States and its possibly being subject to seizure under the Patriot Act. Now, people are concerned about data being stored in China and accessible by the government there.

One thing companies can do to mitigate this concern is to be open about where they store data.

Beyond that, though, there is clearly heightened concern now about data being stored and shared with China, and that concern is manifesting in claims and insinuations about data being stored or shipped there.

The Wyze breach is a serious one. And Wyze deserves credit for doing a lot of things right, quickly, in response. But as we dig into it more, we can see that this situation raises a number of issues around IoT devices, data storage, security and incident response.

We can all learn from this, which is one reason why it’s so good that the Wyze team has been open and up front about the situation: it helps the industry learn and grow collectively. And because Wyze is a startup, its experience and response has particular lessons for other up-and-coming companies in the IoT space.

Update: Wyze disclosed an additional issue in a Dec. 29 update to its post.

We have been auditing all of our servers and databases since then and have discovered an additional database that was left unprotected. This was not a production database and we can confirm that passwords and personal financial data were not included in this database. We are still working through what additional information was leaked as well as the circumstances that caused that leak.

We’ve also clarified our post above to note that Wyze says it doesn’t collect information about protein intake or bone density, contrary to a report that said such data was included in the leak.

It was a good ride for Magic AI. But Alexa Anthony’s love for horses and her desire to help owners of the animals use technology to better monitor them failed to ignite similar passion among investors. The Seattle startup is shutting down after 2 1/2 years.

In a Medium post over the weekend, and in a recent interview with GeekWire, Anthony shared the lessons and the heartache that she’s taking away from her first foray into startup life.

Magic AI started in June 2017 and relied on video cameras, artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning to keep an eye on horses in their stalls 24/7. The goal was for the tech — called StableGuard — to learn when the animals were exhibiting signs of stress or colic, and the idea was born when the former equestrian champion lost her beloved horse Magic in 2012.

Magic AI raised $1.2 million in an April 2018 seed round. But Anthony failed in her bid to raise a second $3 million round and said this week that no buyers had come forward for the company or the intellectual property.

“Unfortunately we didn’t get a lot of the buy in from the VC community that we thought we would,” Anthony said. “We went to a lot of VCs and the main feedback we got was the equine market’s too small. If your team’s not great or your solution’s not great or your tech isn’t great, you can fix all those things. It’s kinda hard to fix your market unless you go to a different one.”

After applying for and being accepted into the Techstars Agtech accelerator over the summer in St. Paul, Minn., Anthony wasn’t interested in a market she was being encouraged to pursue — livestock.

“I started the company to save horse’s lives,” she said. “As a vegan and animal rights advocate, it felt like I was starting to teeter on the tight rope of morality.”

Rather than head down the road of the “good, bad and ugly” of animal food production, Anthony decided to wind down the company of eight employees. And she came to grips with being among the majority who fail to make a startup into a success story.

“It’s hard. You hear that all the time, ‘Ninety-nine percent of startups fail,'” Anthony said. “But you never think, ‘That’s me.’ You always think you’re the 1 percent. Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it. … You feel so lonely. You feel like you’re the only person that didn’t succeed, and everyone else can figure it out, but why can’t you?”

Anthony, who pitched her idea during Season 1 of GeekWire’s “Elevator Pitch” business-plan competition (below), said she has found comfort in Seattle’s tech community and entrepreneurial friends who have gone through all the same challenges and ups and downs. The network has been helpful and she feels less alone.

She’s taking some coding and programming courses at the University of Washington, which she joked would make it easier to understand what her tech team is doing every day at her next company.

And she still thinks there is value in the Magic AI idea.

“I wonder if the timing wasn’t great, that people were still coming to terms with having video cameras around them all the time and monitoring their horses, but also them interacting with their workers and things like that,” Anthony said.

She has her entrepreneurial eye on a generation of horse owners growing up with tech and social media as a constant. People who would reason, “I’m always on my phone. Why wouldn’t I have video cameras monitoring my expensive horse?”

Like many workers in the busy tech industry, Akshay Ahooja had a hard time establishing a consistent workout routine. He got serious about fitness in the lead up to his wedding, working with a personal trainer. But once that was done, the routine melted away, and Ahooja was again left searching for a way to fit regular exercise into his life.

So he decided to start a company to fix this problem for himself, and the many others likely experiencing the same frustration.

Ahooja and co-founder Frank Fan, who worked at both Microsoft and Facebook together, teamed up to found Trainiac to help people make fitness a regular part of their lives. They built an iPhone app that connects people with certified personal trainers who create personalized plans to meet goals and provide accountability.

Trainiac last month closed $2.2 million in funding as part of a seed round from a group of angel investors and expects to raise another $800,000 in the first quarter of 2020. Those investors so far include veteran Seattle technology executive Andrew Wright, Pioneer Square Labs Co-founder Geoff Entress, ex-Socrata CEO Kevin Merritt and Bluemoon Ventures President Edward Yim.

The six-person company tried out a lot of tech-focused concepts to help people work out, including bots and artificial intelligence. But they kept coming back to a more simple solution: personal trainers.

“The most effective and well-known way to get into a long-term routine is to work one-on-one with an expert,” Ahooja said.

With this realization, the company set out to find the best way for people to connect with expert trainers. Trainaic has 50 trainers on the platform right now. Ahooja wouldn’t say how many users the app has, but he did note that customer growth is up 600 percent year-over-year.

The startup is focusing on consumers, and the plan costs $80 a month. Ahooja says the startup’s target customer is someone who has realized exercise needs to be an important part of their life but hasn’t figured out how to make that work.

Trainers are contractors, and they get paid based on how well their clients do, measured by metrics like how frequently they work out and whether they continue to subscribe to the platform. A version of the app for trainers focuses on helping them adjust from working with clients in person in a gym to virtual training.

“We’ve put in a tremendous amount of resources and focus in training trainers in being fitness coaches online and what it means to make a client successful in this new world,” Ahooja said.

Trainiac aims to be “the center of everything somebody does in fitness,” Ahooja said. It has an integration with Apple Health, so it can connect to more than 50 popular training apps like Nike+ and Strava for tracking runs and other types of workouts.

The Seattle area is quickly becoming a hotspot for startups vying to carve out space in the rapidly growing $4.5 trillion wellness economy:

• Pioneer Square Labs Entress, one of Trainiac’s investors, also invested in Sanctuary, which operates what it describes as “the most personal, immersive wellness studio experience in the universe.”
• Limeade, an employee experience software company based in the Seattle area with a major wellness component, went public earlier this month on the Australian stock market, raising more than $68 million in an IPO that puts its market value at $335 million..
• Volt is raising cash to expand its fitness training app that offers customized workouts for a variety of sports and training goals and relies on artificial intelligence to escalate exercises as users get stronger.
• Aduro recently raised $22 million to expand its take on wellness: Asking employees what goals they want to achieve and offer to help.

What remains lacking, especially in the digital fitness app market — which itself is estimated to become a nearly $15 billion business by 2026 — are high standards that give customers and trainers a clear idea of what exactly they are getting out of an app, Ahooja said. A search for online personal training returns pages and pages of results but they lack the one-on-one dynamic with trainers and personalized plans.

“There is this assumption out there that if you give trainers technology it will all work out, or if you replace that trainer with AI it will all work out,” Ahooja said. “For a client to really build a long term habit of fitness, it’s not about just throwing more and more options at them. It’s all about helping them build out something that works for their lifestyle and their own personal struggle.”

With the transition from big tech to Trainiac, Ahooja says he has finally established a sustainable routine that fits with his lifestyle: Weight-lifting and body-weight exercises three times a week, two Peloton biking sessions a week with some hiking and basketball thrown in.

Raising money and managing investors can be a major undertaking for any startup, but for failed Seattle startup Vicis, the complexity was on a whole other level.

The high-tech football helmet maker lists an extraordinary 389 investors on its capitalization table, or “cap table” as it’s commonly known in the business world. The list, never before made public, spans nearly eight pages in King County Superior Court documents unearthed by GeekWire.

Vicis was placed into receivership last week by its board after running out of cash.

The list includes current and former sports legends such as Aaron Rodgers and Doug Baldwin; pro team franchise owners; medical experts; and a bevy of respected Seattle-area business leaders including ex-Concur CEO Steve Singh, biotech venture capitalist Robert Nelsen, and Montlake Capital founder Arthur Buerk.

But what stands out even more is the sheer size of the cap table.

Experts in startup financing say they’ve never seen anything like it, and speculate that the complexity may have contributed to the company’s challenges.

Vicis raised more than $85 million after spinning out of the University of Washington in 2014. The number of investors isn’t a surprise, but the cap table shows that the majority of the backers are individual entities, with few institutional firms and no single shareholder owning more than 7 percent of the company. It’s more common for a startup to have a handful of investors, with a small number holding a controlling stake.

“For the startups that I’ve been involved in, it’s very unusual to have this number of investors,” said Lachlan Huck, an attorney with Seattle-based firm Focal PLLC who is not involved in the Vicis case.

The strategy can create potential challenges beyond communications and other logistics. When so many shareholders are involved, “no one investor may feel compelled to help the company if it runs into trouble,” The New York Times wrote in 2015.

Having hundreds of investors can also complicate big decisions that require a majority vote.

GeekWire has contacted a Vicis representative, and the appointed receiver, Eric Orse of Orse & Co., about these issues, and we will update this post if we hear back.

Shareholder list for failed… by GeekWire on Scribd

According to the cap table, Vicis’ largest shareholder is Cincinnati Reds minority owner Harry Fath, who owns 6.81 percent of fully diluted shares as part of the Fath Holding Trust.

Next on the list is Per Reinhall, the University of Washington engineering professor and co-founder who owns 5.06 percent.

The third-largest shareholder is a trust in the name of Charlene Marver, which owns 4.56 percent. Charlene Marver worked at Vicis and is the wife of co-founder Dave Marver, who stepped down as CEO in November. Dave Marver is listed as an individual shareholder and owns 2.36 percent of the company.

When contacted by GeekWire this week, Dave Marver declined to go into detail about individual shareholders but said around one-third of Vicis shareholders are his friends, family, or part of their extended network.

Sam Browd, another co-founder who is the medical director of Seattle Children’s Hospital Sports Concussion Program, owns 3.46 percent.

Seattle-area institutional investors include The W Fund LP, with 1.77 percent; Trilogy Equity Partners LLC, with 0.45 percent; and the Washington Research Foundation, with 0.45 percent.

The University of Washington is listed as the 14th-largest stakeholder, at 1.07 percent.

Vicis also raised money from several sports stars. Rx3 Ventures L.P., the venture capital firm co-founded by Rodgers, the two-time NFL MVP, is the 27th-largest shareholder, with a 0.571 percent stake. NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach owns 0.469 percent.

Baldwin, the former Seattle Seahawks wide receiver, has a 0.163 percent stake. Baldwin was in the room during a Nov. 26 webinar for investors, and expressed concern that investors weren’t kept fully up to speed on the company’s financial situation in a timely manner.

“Obviously, all of us are pissed to be in this situation,” Baldwin said on the call. “I think all of us would have put in more work and more due diligence to make sure that we weren’t in this predicament as we are standing right now.”

Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner (0.0187 percent) and former linebacker Cliff Avril (0.0173 percent) own small amounts of shares. Harrison Wilson IV (0.021 percent), the brother of Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, is on the list as well. Vicis previously said that Russell Wilson was an investor. Wagner, Wilson, Baldwin, and others were part of the Vicis “coalition,” which it described as “a movement of moms, dads, brothers, sisters, players, coaches, doctors, and others who care deeply and want to make a difference in the lives of young athletes.”

Other well-known investors from the Seattle region on the list include:

• Mike Halperin (0.390 percent), co-chair of the UW’s $5.9 billion Be Boundless fundraising campaign;
• Singh Family, LLC (0.186 percent), led by former Concur CEO Steve Singh;
• Robert Nelsen of Arch Venture Partners (0.161 percent);
• Linden Rhoads (0.034 percent), general manager at The W Fund.
• Las Vegas Knights minority owner and new Sounders FC executive Peter Tomozawa (0.151 percent);
• Strix Leviathan CEO and veteran Seattle entrepreneur Jesse Proudman (0.138 percent);
• Montlake Capital founder Arthur Buerk (0.121 percent);

Vicis laid off more than 100 employees earlier this month. The company can still be acquired out of receivership. Its primary assets, according to Vicis Board Chairman Bruce Montgomery, include all of Vicis’ current products, a new football helmet design, the youth football helmet, a soft helmet for 7-on-7 football and rugby, a hockey helmet, and a potential DoD contract for Army helmet liners.

Correction: Seattle-area angel investor Charles Fitzgerald says he is not the person of that name listed on the cap table. We’ve updated the story to reflect this.

It was a big 2019 for startups across the Pacific Northwest.

Venture capital dollars flowed into the region at record pace, minting several new unicorns — companies valued at more than $1 billion — and fueling growth for a flurry of other early-stage startups.

Nearly $4 billion went to startups based in the Pacific Northwest, according to GeekWire’s funding deal tracker. A big chunk of that went to fast-growing unicorns such as Convoy, Outreach, Auth0, Icertis, and others who remain atop the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the Pacific Northwest’s privately held tech startups.

But investor cash doesn’t tell the whole story of the bubbling activity in the region.

There were some key exits, including Prudential’s massive $2.3 billion acquisition of insurance tech startup Assurance, which bootstrapped its way to success. Business cloud software giant Workday acquired Seattle-based Trusted Key, which spun out of Kernel Labs, one of several startup studios in Seattle.

Biotech company Adaptive Biotechnologies went public this past summer, and employee wellness platform Limeade just did the same. Nike swooped up TraceMe, a Seattle startup founded by Seahawks star Russell Wilson and backed by Jeff Bezos, helping to set up a new “Nike Seattle” tech office.

Amid the growth, there were downfalls.

Multiple Seattle startups including wellness company Arivale and high-tech football helmet maker Vicis shut down. Just this week, another startup, Magic AI, closed its AI-powered horse monitoring tool.

In between it all, there were a bevy of early-stage startups — many led by veterans of local tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft — working away at their potentially game-changing ideas that could be the region’s next Expedia, Zillow, or Tableau.

A year of big deals

This year saw seven deals in excess of $100 million, compared to four last year. These deals alone totaled $1.44 billion in investment in the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

On-demand trucking startup Convoy led the way, raising a massive $400 million round at a $2.7 billion valuation in November. It was the biggest round in for a Seattle-area company in more than a decade and brought total funding for the company to $668 million.

Here are the other major deals of 2019:

Vacasa: The Portland, Ore.-based vacation rental platform raised $319 million in October.

Clio: The Vancouver, B.C.-based company aims to infuse law firms with technology and raised $250 million in September.

Remitly: One of Seattle’s top startups that uses mobile technology to help people send and receive money across borders, including immigrants who support families back home. Remitly raised $220 million in July, including $135 million in equity and $85 million in debt.

Icertis: The Bellevue, Wash. contract management startup joined the unicorn club in July when it raised $115 million.

Outreach: Another new unicorn, the sales automation startup reeled in a huge $114 million round in April.

Auth0: The startup that helps developers build identity authentication capabilities into their applications raised $103 million.

Waiting in the wings

If you’re a GeekWire newsletter subscriber, you’ve likely heard about the high-valued companies above. But which startups are waiting in the unicorn wings, set for major success in the coming years?

Seattle is becoming a key hub for life sciences and biotech innovation. There were several related startups that are poised for growth and raised cash in 2019, including Icosavax, Viome, Bardy Diagnostics, Navigating Cancer, Faraday, KenSci, Immusoft, Magnolia Medical, and others.

Real estate is also a theme for the Pacific Northwest tech scene, anchored by longtime industry leaders Zillow and Redfin. Startups including Crowdstreet, Modus, Flyhomes, Blokable, Knock, and Pro.com all raised capital this year.

And you can’t talk about the Seattle tech industry without mentioning Amazon. Much like veterans of Microsoft have done over the past several decades, Amazon is slowly but surely spawning entrepreneurs who are taking lessons learned and spinning out their own startups across industries such as retail, logistics, and media. Some examples of newer Seattle companies led by Amazon vets include Ideoclick; Shipium; Downstream; Spiral; Veeve; and others.

Women-led startups

Companies with all leadership teams made up entirely of women raised $3.3 billion nationwide in 2019, according to PitchBook. That may sound like a lot, but it represents a paltry 2.8 percent of all VC funding across the U.S., reflecting ongoing challenges of bias and inequality in the larger world of investing and venture capital.

The numbers are a little better when looking at startups with at least one woman co-founder. In 2018, these companies raised $46.3 billion, more than double the prior year, or roughly 18 percent of VC funds invested nationally, per PitchBook data. It doesn’t look like we will see a similar jump this year, as companies with at least one woman leader raised $18.7 billion through the end of August.

At the beginning of the year, we reported that 16 companies on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the top Pacific Northwest tech startups, are led by women, or 8 percent. That’s a little better than the larger business world, where women made up 5 percent (24 CEOs) of the annual Fortune 500 list in 2018, down from an all-time high of 32 women CEOs on the 2017 list.

Last year, DreamBox Learning, led by the Big Tech CEO of the Year winner at the 2019 GeekWire Awards Jessie Woolley Wilson, raised $130 million in one of the biggest rounds of 2018.

This year, the biggest deal for a woman-led startup was a $33 million round for nutPods, a maker of plant-based dairy alternatives. Founded by Madeline Haydon, the company was named Small Business of the Year as part of Amazon’s Small Business Spotlight Awards earlier this year. Haydon was also a EY Entrepreneur of the Year award winner.

Here are a few other notable deals for women-led startups in the Pacific Northwest in 2019:

• In January, Seattle startup Modumetal reeled in a $14 million investment round led by Vulcan Capital to scale up production of a unique metal that the company says offers better performance at a cheaper price than conventional steel.
• High-tech clothing rental startup Armoire completed a $3.9 million seed round in June and at the same time scooped up a new 7,500 square-foot office in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood that serves as headquarters, warehouse, and retail space all in one.
• Evrnu makes technology that takes discarded consumer apparel waste and converts it into renewable fiber. The startup raised $9.1 million in October and is licensing its technology to companies like Levi’s, Adidas, and Target.
• In October, IOTAS, a Portland, Ore.-based startup that helps landlords install and manage smart home devices raised $8.5 million.

The arrival of 2020 is a chance to look back on the past decade and what it has meant for the world of technology. Recent security problems with security cameras sum up where we are today: technology designed to protect us has made us vulnerable instead. Pessimism, dread, and anxiety have replaced the optimism and progress that defined technology from its inception.

And yet the decade has also been defined by unprecedented advances, changing our lives and the world on a scale we might not yet even comprehend.

What happened? What can we learn from it? And how can we turn it around?

1. Social Media: Propaganda, Disinformation and Discord

Social media first emerged in the latter part of the 2000s. YouTube debuted in 2005, Facebook and Twitter really hit the mainstream around 2007. So technically these are innovations from the previous decade. But as we stood on the cusp of 2010, these and other social media platforms were new enough that we were all still figuring out what they could do. It was still a time of infatuation with the new technology.

This infatuation has now passed. Hopes and dreams have been replaced by reality: these platforms have caused harm that no one in 2010 could have imagined.

An obvious example is interference in the 2016 U.S. election. The leaders of Western democracies and social media companies were, like the rest of us, slow to understand how social media could be harnessed for malicious, manipulative purposes. Many of us looked at social media and saw ways to share cat memes and food pictures. Others saw the most advanced and efficient means ever devised to distribute propaganda and misinformation.

In addition to its role in election interference, social media has failed to live up to its potential to support human rights, democracy and positive social change. In 2009, Twitter was credited for helping protesters in Iran stand up to the regime. In 2019, we’ve seen authoritarian regimes shut down internet access and use Twitter and Facebook in malicious ways. The use of Facebook in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar is one alarming example.

Even outside the realm of governments and propaganda, social media in the past decade has arguably driven people apart more than bringing them together. Social-media fights over politics, religion and a host of other issues have become commonplace to the point of cliché.

All of this makes social media — one of the most pervasive technologies in everyday life — at best a net neutral, and at worst a net negative.

2. Devices as Addiction

Speaking of pervasive, let’s examine the impact of mobile devices.

Make no mistake, the iPhone in 2007 was revolutionary, and Android soon followed. Similar to the introduction of social media, at the start of the 2010s, the role of mobile devices was still unknown and held great potential. Over the course of the past decade, however, we came to better understand what mobile devices could do for us, and to us. And it’s the “to us” that is the problem.

In an article in The Guardian in October 2017, Loren Brichter (who created the iPhone’s “pull to refresh” feature) admits and expresses regret that this capability has helped make mobile devices addictive, much like slot machines.

Take a moment and look around at a restaurant and you’ll see many people sitting at a table together, all glued to their mobile devices at the expense of conversation and interactions.

We read regularly about the challenges of kids being addicted to “screen time” and the resulting negative social and cognitive impacts. And we’ve seen the rise of technology meant to mitigate addiction (for kids at least) in the form of parental controls that limit screen time.

The place of mobile devices in our lives now is far from where it was in 2010. We don’t talk about the promise it holds, but about the dangers and the problems.

Along with social media, mobile devices are the most common way people connect with tech in their daily life. And now, that connection is viewed as addictive, on par with tobacco, gambling, or opioids.

3. Data Breaches Everywhere

The number and scale of data breaches since 2010 has skyrocketed in ways that even the most pessimistic among us wouldn’t have predicted. It may well go down as the “Decade of Data Breaches.”

You only have to go to haveibeenpwned.com, type in your email and see how many times your credentials have been exposed. At the time of this writing, that site alone counts more than 9 BILLION compromised accounts.

In conjunction with this, credit card fraud has skyrocketed, and identity theft is rampant.

The situation has gotten so bad that we’re numb to it. A steady drumbeat of data breaches, compromising millions of accounts at a time, has bludgeoned us all into a sense of defeated resignation.

All of this has fundamentally and deeply eroded trust in the internet to the point where many people just assume that their data can and will be lost if it hasn’t been already.

4. Rise of “Big Tech”

In the United States, the label “Big” on anything is never good. Whether it’s “Big Government,” “Big Business,” “Big Oil,” or “Big Tobacco,” the “Big” moniker is a sign that an industry or institution has reached a size that violates American populist sensibilities.

Microsoft may have been “the Borg” or even “the Evil Empire” in its worst days, but it was never “Big Microsoft.”

What an iconic picture this is. pic.twitter.com/1KKORDbWYU

— Dave Lee (@DaveLeeBBC) April 10, 2018

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the term “Big Tech” emerge and be used with increasing frequency, bordering now on regularity. As a phrase, “Big Tech” puts Amazon, Facebook and Google into a single category. Sometimes Apple and/or Microsoft are included, but not as reliably as those three.

The label “Big Tech” has stuck as people have come to increasingly distrust and resent the power and influence of these large, successful tech companies. And the cultural resonance between “Big Tobacco” and “Big Tech,” as purveyors of something enjoyable but addictive and unhealthy, shouldn’t be underestimated.

This rise of “Big Tech” also impacts those within the industry. Many people went into technology over the decades not just out of personal excitement and enthusiasm but from a true desire to make a better world. Finding yourself working in an industry that is viewed as harmful on par with Big Tobacco runs directly counter to that sentiment, and has a real and deep impact.

5. Loss of Optimism

Technology itself is the final problem. The engine that has driven the industry and its optimism since the 1970s has been innovation.

In 1980, we knew processors were coming that would make computers like the Apple II even more useful and powerful. In 1990, we knew that the Mac and Windows would be made better in the next versions. In 2000, the internet was new, and we knew more exciting things were coming. And in 2010, mobile devices and social media were still new enough that we knew (or thought we knew) that more, better technology was yet to come.

At the end of the 2010s, we just don’t have that same sense that something new, bigger and better is coming.

Partly, this reflects the march of time. Bill Gates is focused on philanthropy; Steve Jobs has passed away. Satya Nadella and Tim Cook have done good things for Microsoft and Apple respectively. And they’re both rightly viewed as more “caretaker” than visionary CEOs. You have to go digging to see what Marc Andreessen is up to these days. The generation of visionaries has passed, and there’s not a new generation to take its place.

This also reflects business realities. The goal for startups these days isn’t necessarily to go public, like it was in the past, but instead to be bought up by a Microsoft or Google or Facebook. And while that’s a perfectly valid business strategy, it does represent a literal focus on “selling out” rather than making it big on your own.

But ultimately this reflects the basic technical reality. Smartphones and social media, as noted above, came out in the last decade. The internet, the World Wide Web and web browsers are products of the 1990s. The personal computer is still around despite predictions of its demise, and that comes from the 1970s. In a lot of ways, the decades of optimism in tech have been fueled by early adopters, hobbyists, geeks and hackers. And as we come to the end of the 2010s, there’s not much new for those audiences to build or buy, take home and try to build something new and revolutionary.

Indeed, in a poetic and prophetic sign, we just heard that Fry’s Electronics in Palo Alto is closing.

Even where we do see promise of new technologies, in areas like artificial intelligence or quantum computing, those increasingly have a shadow of doubt and concern in light of the past decade. More importantly, these are technologies that look and feel more like something that would come out of IBM than Steve Jobs’ and Steve Wozniak’s garage.

Historians say it often takes a few decades before you can write history, so making pronouncements on the 2010s now could be premature. But I’ve heard a common refrain from my colleagues in tech these past few years: “It’s just not fun anymore.” And while that may seem like a shallow complaint, it points to a greater truth under the surface. The nature of the tech world has changed, people’s attitudes towards it have changed, and it has lost the optimism and promise it once had.

Can that optimism come back? Yes, I believe so, and this is how.

First, the issues that impact trust must be addressed. Whether it’s through regulation or self-regulation, the concerns around social media abuse, device addiction and data breaches must be resolved. Otherwise, tech will continue its trajectory towards “Big Tech.”

Second, there must be a new generation of truly disruptive innovators who look at tech as a tool for individual liberation and have a determination to take on the IBMs of today and win. Turning this around requires the next generation of geeks, hackers and hobbyists to find their own inner Jobs and Gates, follow their own paths, and bring a renewed sense of hope and progress to the decade ahead.