April was a big month for Seattle tech, not least because the city saw its latest company head into unicorn country. Meanwhile, big dollars flowed to local startups working in automated app development and several different branches of healthtech. As the very first hints of summer reach the Northwest, we take a look back on Seattle tech’s five biggest funding rounds for April.
How much: $12 million
Date: April 2
Details: Using similar principles to customer relationship management software, Navigating Cancer’s “patient relationship management” platform helps doctors guide oncology patients through treatment regimens. The company plans to spend the funding in scaling out its team and investing in further data analytics capabilities.
Quotable quote: “The biggest place where we’re hiring is on the development front,” CEO Bill Bunker told Built In Seattle. “We’re building out a development team to progress our mobile solutions, and expand our data analytics capabilities and our ability to leverage data to improve the care process. There’s some very interesting work we’re doing around data analytics and how you deal with longitudinal datasets to understand cancer care experiences.”
How much: $15 million
Date: April 26
Details: AppSheet’s intuitive user interface belies complex code, allowing users with little or no engineering expertise to create their own applications — whether for customers or fellow employees — with a series of clicks. The Seattle startup plans to invest in technology, hire more customer success and marketing experts and open a machine learning-focused engineering office down in Portland. Shasta Ventures led the round.
Quotable quote: “We believe AppSheet’s demonstrated success with a broad horizontal customer base is a key indicator of its expected impact,” Shasta Ventures Managing Director Ravi Mohan said in a statement. “There is no doubt that we are at the start of a technology revolution that will allow business users to create their own software solutions, and there is no doubt that AppSheet is the market-leading platform that will drive this transformation.”
How much: $25 million
Date: April 18
Details: Once it has measured the presence of microorganisms in a user’s gut, Viome says it can offer personalized dietary recommendations through its app to improve wellbeing. The types of microorganisms inside us varies hugely between individuals, even among those with similar diets, and Viome’s platform steers users toward nutritious food and away from harmful toxins.
Quotable quote: “We are basically a walking, talking microbial ecosystem,” CEO Naveen Jain told Built In Seattle. “We are essentially a container for microorganisms. Forty trillion of them live inside us. We are here to feed and spread them, and their job is to take care of us.”
How much: $35.5 million
Date: April 16
Details: Bardy Diagnostics’ heart rate monitor sits on a user’s chest and detects P-waves, a type of seismic wave produced in the body, to measure the rhythm of a heartbeat, and send notifications when it detects signals of arrhythmia. The company will use the funding to expand its sales team, find more potential uses for the product and invest in technological advances on the back-end.
Quotable quote: “For nearly 60 years, standard ECG engineering practices have over-processed the heart’s electrical message to make machines’ ‘lives’ easier at the expense of losing details in the ECG,” CEO Dr. Gust Bardy said in a statement. “In essence, such legacy engineering doesn’t listen to what the heart is trying to tell us but rather tells the heart what we are willing to hear.”
How much: $114 million
Date: April 16
Details: With another $114 million in the bank and a $1.1 billion valuation, Outreach became Seattle tech’s newest unicorn this month. The company’s platform automates a wide range of sales-related tasks, including rescheduling meetings when it detects an “out of office” reply and tracking down phone numbers. Outreach plans to use the funding to invest in data analytics and natural language processing technology.
Quotable quote: “We’re one of the few SaaS companies out there that has the desire to serve the entire gamut of the market, from a micro-startup all the way up to large enterprises,” CEO Manny Medina told Built In Seattle. “So to realize our full vision, we need to be fluent in both high velocity service models and enterprise deployment. That’s an ambitious undertaking, and we decided we are the team to do it.”
