Bellevue-based Atigeo is a bit of an anomaly in the world of startups.
The big data company is 10 years old, has 100 employees and this year alone raised $18.4 million in outside funding. But you’ve probably never heard of Atigeo — and that’s just the way the company likes it.
“I see a lot of startups out there bragging about how much they raised,” Atigeo CEO Michael Sandoval said. “But if you’re building for the long run, that doesn’t matter.”
Sandoval, who was a Microsoft general manager before he left to start Atigeo in 2005, said he didn’t start a company to flip it like you see from a lot of entrepreneurs these days. From the beginning, he said he showed investors a business plan that required five to 10 years and $50 million to $100 million to get things up and running.
And that’s pretty much exactly what has happened.
Atigeo calls its product the xPatterns platform. It’s designed to digest unstructured big data, make sense of it, reveal patterns and predict future behavior. A beta version launched in 2008. The company began taking on paying customers in 2013.
Today, Sandoval says Atigeo is “doing eight-figure deals consistently,” though he wouldn’t reveal any specifics. He did say the company has seen 1,000 percent revenue growth, but that probably has a lot to do with the fact that it’s just now starting to see any steady revenue.
At least one investor got anxious during the decade it took for the company to get this far, as Atigeo was sued by billionaire backer Edra Blixseth, according to a past Seattle Times article. Those charges, which claimed misuse of investment funds, were dismissed in 2008.
But Sandoval said the company is getting ready to turn the corner now as its focus is moving from research and development to sales and marketing. Over the next year, Sandoval said he expects the company’s headcount to roughly double to around 200 workers.
Atigeo publicly announced funding for the first time today, revealing an $18.4 million round that was capped off by Ascension Ventures. The firm is a subsidiary of Ascension, the largest nonprofit health system in the U.S. that recently began using Atigeo’s xPatterns to monitor hospital operations.
Atigeo also recently hired its first Chief Marketing Officer, Alejandro Cabrera.
