In our age of averted eye contact and anxiety over answering the phone, text message rules the roost as our preferred form of communication. Its popularity presents a startlingly good business opportunity for techies who can specialize in streamlining avenues of communication, whether it’s messaging within businesses, facilitating communication between marketers and consumers, or even staying in touch with drug trial participants to offer support and gather data.
Here, we’ve assembled seven Seattle-based tech companies working to deepen this latest favorite among our array of communication methods.
Founded: 2007
Funding: $92.5 million
Designed for: Sales, support, marketing, billing and anyone else who interacts with customers
Details: When customers try to send text messages to a landline phone number listed on a website or business card, those businesses miss an opportunity to engage. In an effort to rectify the situation, Zipwhip was the first company to enable text messaging to and from landlines in 2014. The SoDo-based company’s core service essentially allows sales reps, support teams, marketers and accountants to send and receive text messages from their work computers. The service integrates with a wide variety of customer relationship management tools. It has been a big six months for Zipwhip, which ranked high on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S., featured on Built In’s 50 Tech Companies in Seattle to Know and announced a $51.5 million funding round in January.
Founded: 1999
Designed for: Just about anyone
Details: OpenMarket helps businesses build and automate text-based communication with customers. The company’s drag-and-drop software seeks to allow users to build text message campaigns without coding, while developers can use a range of APIs to build SMS, MMS and RCS campaigns. The technology has a wide range of applications, including verifying identity to fight fraud, soliciting customer feedback and combining with IoT tech to send alerts when devices are in danger of breaking down.
Founded: 2015
Funding: $8.3 million
Designed for: Gathering feedback to measure workflows
Details: With workplace communication increasingly taking place in virtual environments like Slack and Microsoft Teams, businesses need a method for measuring workflows there. Polly’s survey software integrates with those platforms to collect feedback from HR, development and product management teams, and the resulting reports and inbuilt metric analysis tools help managers identify and address any pain points as they arise. Polly graduated from Techstars Seattle in 2016, and last week announced a $7 million funding round.
Founded: 2007
Funding: $600,000
Designed for: Marketers
Details: Tatango’s software helps marketers build text-based campaigns without writing any code. The platform guides the user through the process of building a campaign; selecting and segmenting recipients based on age, location, gender, shopping habits and more; tracking trends through a variety of metrics; and accessing subscriber profiles. The company’s developer and mobile messaging APIs integrate with a number of different applications and software. Tatango is headquartered on the Seattle waterfront downtown and also has an office in New York, where it has acquired a couple of marketing and text messaging startups in the last six years.
Founded: 2016
Funding: $2.4 million
Designed for: Marketers and support teams
Details: Chatitive seeks to alleviate marketers’ reliance on email as their primary form of communication, and replace it with text messaging. The company’s platform drives engagement with consumers across social media acquisition, mobile customer onboarding, text-based conversations and customer support, with the ability to personalize messaging, automate campaigns and define keywords to create sophisticated campaigns. Through campaigns built on its platform, the company claims it can deliver 99 percent open rates, over 40 percent engagement and over 30 percent conversion. Chatitive was incubated at Madrona Venture Labs before spinning out in 2016.
Founded: 2007
Designed for: Researchers
Details: Mosio helps scientists trialling clinical drugs to collect data from research subjects through text messaging. Clinical trials are a major inconvenience for subjects, who often drop out of contact before a trial is finished — meaning scientists often waste time and money recruiting candidates only to lose the valuable data they were chasing in the first place. Mosio’s automated texts guide participants through the study and offer a channel of communication with researchers. Researchers can also offer incentives and rewards to motivate participants to complete the trial.
Founded: 2015
Designed for: Website users
Details: Engage puts chatboxes on business homepages, allowing visitors to a website to message directly with sales representatives. The platform ensures that users are always connected with the same representative, allowing businesses to build personal relationships over time. The widget tells visitors if and when there is a live person on the other end of the line, and can be placed on social media pages, digital documents like PDFs and search engines, as well as websites. Headquartered in Fremont, the company developed its browser application to work with most major browsers and devices, and offer the ability to search through messages and integrations with most website builders and template tools. There’s also a mapping function, to show where customers are messaging in from.
