— Seattle-based customer data platform Amperity hired Lynn Girotto to be the company’s first chief marketing officer. Girotto was most recently senior vice president of marketing at Tableau Software and vice president of global product and digital marketing at Getty Images prior to that. She also held senior marketing roles at Starbucks and Microsoft.
Amperity sells a platform that helps marketers at some of the world’s largest companies better understand their individual customers by connecting disparate data sources from across the internet. In 2017, the startup raised funding from Tiger Global Management, a New York-based firm known globally for making long-term investments in companies including Spotify, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flipkart, and other tech giants.
“Our industry is filled with data-driven companies, but occasionally you encounter one with the vision, the talent, and the unique technology to transform the way the world’s largest brands do business — that’s Amperity,” Girotto said in a statement. “The fact that Amperity’s platform has been around for just 18 months and has been able to attract brands like GAP, Lucky Brand, TGI Fridays, Alaska Airlines, Wynn, and more says everything you need to know about Amperity — and that’s just scratching the surface.”
“Lynn not only has senior experience leading marketing and brand teams at iconic companies — she has the strategic know-how to take our hyper-growth company to new heights while helping us better serve our customers,” Amperity CEO Kabir Shahani said.
Amperity is a finalist for Startup of the Year at the GeekWire Awards on May 2.
— Conor Webb, a senior associate at ff Venture Capital, has moved to Seattle from New York. Webb, who interned with Bend, Ore.-based Seven Peaks Ventures in 2016, told GeekWire he “saw an opportunity for an established firm like ffVC to be able to have an impact in a region with a high amount of tech talent and exciting young companies but not necessarily a saturated market of seed stage investors.”
ffVC is not the only out-of-town investor that is paying more attention to Seattle, a city known for tech titans such as Microsoft and Amazon that is ripe with engineering talent but lacks sufficient local capital.
Webb said that New York City-based ffVC recently invested in a Seattle-area company but declined to specify which one. “We are looking for founders who create new technologies or build upon the expanding capabilities of technology to develop new markets, change behaviors, and solve important problems,” he said.
Since launching in 2008, ffVC has invested in more than 90 early-stage companies. Recent investments include companies such as Augean Robotics; StoryFit; Wade & Wendy; and Dashbot.
