Seattle tech is in the midst of a funding bonanza at the moment, with VCs piling onto a newly-minted unicorn and a couple of rounds pushing north of a whopping $40 million.
Amid all the hype, it’s easy to miss stories about the smaller startups among us. Several have emerged in recent months, raising their first rounds to fund everything from intercontinental logistics to kids’ clothing. Here, we check in with four local startups about what they’re working on, and how they plan to spend their latest batch of seed funding.
Founder: Elise Worthy
Funding: $3.3 million
What they’re up to: Kids on 45th started life 30 years ago as a brick-and-mortar kids store in Wallingford. Now, the business has found new life shifting a large chunk of its business online. At the receipt of an order, the startup’s stylists put together a box of season-appropriate clothes and sends them off to parents. At $35 for up to 17 items, the company says it cuts costs, reduces the environmental impact of buying new clothing and takes kids’ fashion concerns off their parents’ plates.
How they’ll spend the funding: “We plan on growing our operations,” Founder and CEO Elise Worthy told Built In Seattle. “We’ve been shipping boxes for a year, have processed a half million pieces of used clothing for sale so far and plan to process a lot more. Our technology is all centered around making it as easy as possible to buy kids clothes without having to browse for them.”
Founder: Mia Lewin
Funding: $3 million
What they’re up to: Spruce Up helps users make decisions around home design, sending a digital quiz to users and applying artificial intelligence and a stylist’s expertise to the answers. The technology serves up a selection of furniture and decorative items it thinks will resonate with the user, who can give feedback on whether or not they like each item and — crucially — why. Spruce Up’s catalog features more than 25,000 items of furniture, decor and tabletop decoration, sourced from more than 50 design brands.
How they’ll spend the funding: “With Spruce Up’s AI and designer-powered digital curation, we are seeing relevancy unseen in traditional e-commerce — our customers love more than 60 percent of the products we recommend,” Founder and CEO Mia Lewin said in a statement. “With this seed round, we are doubling down on AI powering every aspect of our product and operations.”
Founder: Milkana Bruce and Jonathan Burstein
Funding: $1.8 million
What they’re up to: Jargon’s software development kit and cloud-based tools help brands, agencies and independent developers structure, manage and optimize their voice application content. The company’s Conversation Platform helps voice applications manage and personalize how they respond to spoken communication, maximizing their potential for both the brands that own them and the users who speak to them. The company graduated from Techstars’ Alexa Accelerator late last year, and was one of Built In Seattle’s 50 Startups to Watch in 2019.
How they’ll spend the funding: “We believe that the friction we’re removing from the developer experience will dramatically improve the quality and usability of voice applications like Alexa Skills or Google Actions,” co-founder and CEO Milkana Brace told Built In Seattle. “We’re putting all of the fresh capital toward hiring a small team of top-notch engineers, working under the leadership of our amazing CTO, Jonathan Burstein. We’re looking for talented full-stack software development engineers, willing to work on a variety of technologies and who are excited to shape not only the future of this startup, but also the future of the voice industry.”
Founder: Rathna Sharad
Funding: $1.7 million
What they’re up to: To ship goods to customers overseas, retailers must employ logistics teams to manually classify every product and thereby define the kinds of customs duties that will be charged on each item. FlavorCloud’s software assesses the specifications of a product alongside historical data to automatically recommend the most cost-effective shipping routes available to retailers for any individual item, and can generate labels, commercial invoices and customs paperwork specific to each country.
How they’ll spend the funding: “We plan to use the funds to continue to grow, by expanding our team and scaling our technology platform,” Founder and CEO Rathna Sharad told Built In Seattle. “We also plan on expanding our existing artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that drive supply chain optimization and build predictive capabilities for conversion optimization. We’re currently a product and engineering organization, and we’re now looking to expand our sales, business development, operations and customer success teams as we continue to onboard customers and build new partnerships.”
