One of five companies is about to join an exclusive club.
Past winners of GeekWire’s Next Tech Titan award have completed successful IPOs, landed huge funding rounds and emerged as some of the most powerful new companies in the Pacific Northwest.
Over the next two weeks, we’re opening voting in 13 GeekWire Awards categories, with GeekWire readers choosing their top picks from finalists selected by our panel of judges from community nominations. Check back on GeekWire each day to cast your ballot. Winners will be revealed at the GeekWire Awards — presented by Wave Business — on May 10th at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. The GeekWire Awards sell out every year, so go here to purchase tickets for this one-of-a-kind tech celebration.
Which of the five finalists will join past winners like BitTitan, Smartsheet, Avalara, Zulily and Tableau Software?
Vote on our poll below and continue reading for more information about the finalists for Next Tech Titan — Accolade, Convoy, Outreach, Remitly and Rover — sponsored by former winner Smartsheet.
Accolade
Accolade continues to pile up the accolades from investors, having just raised a $50 million round last month, to bring the healthcare technology company to more than $200 million raised in its lifetime.
Accolade uses a combination of personal health data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, mobile apps, analytics, and human concierge “Health Assistants” to help provide users with personalized healthcare recommendations. Accolade’s customers are large employers like Comcast, Lowe’s, Allegiant, AmeriGas, Temple University Health System and more.
Founded in 2007 in Pennsylvania, the company made a huge splash in 2016 when it hired Concur co-founders Raj Singh and Mike Hilton to top executive positions. They then established a second company headquarters in Seattle. Today, Accolade employs 800 people, including 120 in Seattle. It expects to add another few hundred employees this year.
Singh told GeekWire last month that U.S. employers represent 170 million people paying for healthcare. And like he did at Concur with employee expenses, he wants to use technology to bring down costs for employers and make the system more approachable for employees.
Convoy
Seattle startup Convoy keeps on truckin’. The company’s platform matches 100,000 truckers with available jobs, and it has rapidly grown to 225 employees.
That’s up from 120 employees this past July, when Convoy raised a $62 million round from investors like Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Code.org founders Hadi and Ali Partovi, former Starbucks president Howard Behar, Expedia Chairman Barry Diller, and others. The round brought Convoy to $80.5 million raised since it was founded in 2015.
The startup helps facilitate shipments to more than 400 customers, including 20 Fortune 500 companies, and makes money by keeping a percentage of each transaction. It has deals with giant corporations like Anheuser-Busch and Unilever.
Convoy operates in a competitive industry, battling against Uber Frieght, freight-booking startups like Transfix and uShip and large incumbents like C.H. Robinson and XPO Logistics. Can Convoy move from Startup of the Year — the award it took home in 2017 — to Next Tech Titan in the course of 12 months? We shall see.
Outreach
Fresh off a move to a new, bigger headquarters space and a $30 million funding round, Outreach is ready to take the next step.
The sales software automation company is helmed by 2017 CEO of the Year nominee Manny Medina, and has raised $60 million since it was founded in 2013.
Outreach originally built software tools for recruiters, but it pivoted in 2014 to focus on tools for salespeople. It was a key move.
The company now helps clients like Pandora, Adobe, and Zillow automate and streamline communication with sales prospects. It offers one system to track all touch points, from phone calls to emails to LinkedIn messages. The software integrates with existing tools like Salesforce and Gmail.
“Like many industries, technology is transforming sales from an art to a science,” Medina said at the time of its funding round. “Sales is no longer about following up on inbound leads and hunting for a few big deals. It is about sales excellence – predictably executing the right selling activities at the right time.”
Remitly
Remitly is doing big things.
The Seattle startup lets people transfer money internationally, and it raised the biggest funding round among Pacific Northwest companies in 2017. The $115 million round was led by PayU, an international online payment service provider and the fintech arm of Naspers, a global investment company with equity stakes in tech giants like Tencent and Flipkart, among hundreds of others and will help Remitly “supercharge” its growth.
Remitly describes itself as the largest independent mobile remittance company in the U.S.; it allows people to send money from three countries (U.S., U.K., and Canada) to 10 countries (Philippines, India, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru).
Remitly’s technology helps eliminate the need for forms, codes, agents, and other fees typically associated with the international money transfer process. The company allows free transfers if the sender can wait three days for the funds to arrive; it charges a $3.99 flat rate for same-day transfers and credit card transfers include an additional 3 percent fee.
Rover
This Seattle startup has quickly become one of the top dogs in the Northwest tech scene. Last year, pet-sitting startup Rover got a $65 million cash infusion led by Spark Capital, an investor in companies like Slack, Twitter, Oculus, Warby Parker, and Trello.
Founded in 2011 by venture capitalist Greg Gottesman and developer Phil Kimmey, Rover runs one of the largest pet services marketplaces. It helps match more than 140,000 vetted sitters across 10,000 cities in North America with pet-owners looking for someone to take care of their dogs and other animals.
We’ve pegged Rover as a potential IPO candidate this year, and the startup has raised close to $160 million in its lifetime. It also gobbled up one of its largest competitors, DogVacay, last year.
Rover already holds a spot in the annals of GeekWire Awards history. Its chief executive Aaron Easterly won the CEO of the Year honor at the 2016 GeekWire Awards.
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