Startup radar: Early stage tech companies making moves in Seattle
There’s a lot of action happening in Seattle startup land.
New companies are sprouting up every week, and it can be hard to keep up.
Many established startups are ranked among the GeekWire 200, our list of top privately held tech companies in Seattle and across the Pacific Northwest.
But others are just getting off the ground and still in early stages of growth.
Below are six newer startups I’ve come across that are worth watching. Send us an email at [email protected] to flag other companies or startup news we should know about.
Alice
Founded a year ago, Alice has developed an AI-powered voice recorder that generates transcripts in seconds. The company targets its product to journalists and recently transcribed discussions at events hosted by Salesforce and Apple.
“Our mission is to assist journalists, historians and media professionals in capturing and preserving spoken words authentically and securely,” the company recently posted on LinkedIn.
Alice is led by Karan Gupta, a former engineering executive at The RealReal, Shift Technologies, and LeafLink.
Clearly AI
Fresh off graduating from the latest Y Combinator cohort, Clearly AI aims to help companies ensure their software complies with industry standards and internal policies related to security and privacy.
Clearly AI also performs vendor risk assessments and stores security and privacy documentation in one place. Its tagline is “built by security engineers for security engineers.”
The company is led by CEO Emily Choi-Greene, a former senior security engineer at Amazon and Moveworks, along with Joe Choi-Greene, who also worked at Amazon as an engineer for Project Kuiper and Alexa.
Maelstrom
Led by Neal Fachan, who previously co-founded data storage company Qumulo, Maelstrom is building developer tools to improve how software is tested.
“Our goal with Maelstrom is to give developers the tools to run their tests after every change they make,” Fachan wrote in a recent post.
Fachan is a former Isilon and Amazon engineer who co-founded Qumulo in 2012. Qumulo raised $125 million in a Series E round in 2020. Fachan left the company two years ago.
Ravenna
Taylor Halliday and Kevin Coleman, former engineering leaders at Zapier and Amazon Web Services, recently launched a new software startup building an “AI-powered helpdesk for modern operations.”
“Between our advanced knowledge retrieval and AI-assisted actions, we help operations teams deliver fantastic service to their colleagues with less human involvement,” Halliday wrote on LinkedIn.
Ravenna says it has a “deep” Slack integration and is built for IT, HR, and revenue operations teams.
Rome
Dog owners looking for a place to exercise their pup can use Rome to find a private backyard offered by homeowners who can generate revenue by renting out their space.
The concept is similar to Sniffspot, another startup with Seattle roots.
Rome recently inked a partnership with Dog Yard Bar in Seattle and is participating in Antler’s latest Residency program in Austin, Texas. The company is led by CEO Ana Malhotra, a former security engineer at Amazon Web Services, and CTO Sahil Naikwadi, a former engineer at TikTok and Amazon.
Silurian AI
Former AI researchers from Microsoft who worked on the company’s Aurora machine learning model took the startup leap with Silurian, which is building foundation models for simulating Earth. It is initially focused on weather forecasting.
The company is another recent Y Combinator grad, also from this year’s summer cohort, and was recently was accepted into the AI Grant program for seed-stage AI startups.
Silurian was co-founded by Jayesh Gupta, former head of AI at Poly Corporation and a senior researcher at Microsoft, and Cristian Bodnar, also a former senior researcher at Microsoft.