Participated · Seed · Jan 2022

FarmHQ, formerly CODA Farm Technologies, was founded in 2020 by brothers David and Connor Wallace and is based north of Seattle. The company adds IoT sensors and controls to existing irrigation pumps, valves and flow meters and delivers real-time irrigation data to a cell-phone dashboard. Its system supports a wide range of sprinkler setups and is designed to reduce manual labor, prevent flooding, and improve water efficiency. Last year FarmHQ’s devices helped save approximately 365 million gallons of water across roughly 40,000 acres. The business has eight employees plus a network of dealers and is operating in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and has a pilot deployment in Australia; farm accounts and dealer partners have each grown roughly fourfold and revenue is up fourfold year over year. Customer retention is high, with a reported 95% contract renewal rate, and the company plans to pursue a Series A. CODA Farm Technologies develops hardware and a software platform that controls traveling-sprinkler irrigation systems and streams real-time irrigation data to a cellphone dashboard. The company was founded in 2020 by siblings who returned to their family potato farm in Western Washington’s Skagit Valley after careers in data science and technology. Their system modulates flow to prevent stalls and field flooding and provides remote monitoring. The startup has navigated supply-chain challenges that required design changes to obscure parts. CODA has sold 120 devices to 20 farms across eight U.S. states and Canadian provinces and collected data from 3,000 irrigation activities. Based on that data, their technology saved 21 million gallons of water and 4,300 gallons of diesel; the new capital will fund scaling production, geographic expansion, R&D and data collection, and the team of five may double in 2022 with some fulfillment shifting to Seattle.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2021

AdaptX provides a self-serve clinical management platform centered on its AI-driven Adaptive Clinical Management™ technology and Mission Control Center™. The platform ingests real-world data from electronic medical records (EMRs) to enable clinical leaders to assess performance, compare approaches, and rapidly adapt treatments, workflows, and protocols. Its tools aim to improve patient care while delivering immediate ROI for healthcare institutions. Leadership includes CEO Warren Ratliff and CMO Dan Low, MD. The company plans to invest the newly raised capital into further development of its AI-driven Adaptive Clinical Management technology. AdaptX is headquartered in Seattle, WA. AdaptX (fka MDmetrix) offers an Adaptive Clinical Management™ solution and an AI-driven Mission Control Center that lets clinical leaders leverage real-world data to visualize performance, compare approaches, and adapt across patients, teams, protocols, workflows, and facilities. The platform is positioned to help health systems address recovery from the Covid-19 financial crisis, improve quality of care, advance health equity, and navigate value-based payments. The company was founded in 2016 and is led by CEO Warren Ratliff and CMO Dan Low, MD, an associate professor at the University of Washington. AdaptX closed a $6M Series A and plans to use the proceeds to add key hires and invest in its adaptive clinical management technology. The product emphasis is on using AI-driven insights to enable clinical leaders to manage performance at scale. No operating metrics such as revenue or user counts were disclosed in the article. MDmetrix offers analytics, visualization and AI tools that give clinicians access to electronic health record data to better understand outcomes. Its platform lets hospital and ambulatory surgery leaders compare data across patients, providers, protocols and facilities and track metrics such as pain scores, procedure times and readmissions. The company has rolled out department-specific specialty modules and a clinical operations Control Center used to measure and enhance clinical operations. Seattle Children’s clinicians have used MDmetrix’s solutions to improve care for thousands of patients, yielding care improvements, cost savings and increased capacity. MDmetrix was initially created at Seattle Children’s in 2016 and brought on Warren Ratliff as president and CEO in 2018. With the new funding the company plans to hire additional staff at its Seattle headquarters and expand its AI capabilities.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2021

Videon provides cloud-based infrastructure for streaming high-quality, low-latency live video to customers in 19 countries. The company’s core product is a video computing platform that supports live-streaming workflows via the cloud. Videon recently raised a $9 million funding round and previously completed a separate $7.3 million round in July. The startup is based in State College, Pa., and serves a global customer base. It is led by CEO Tricia Iboshi, a longtime Seattle entrepreneur who previously worked at thePlatform and Make.TV. Iboshi, now based in San Francisco, replaced former Microsoft manager Rob Green last year. Videon provides a live video encoding, streaming, and edge computing platform built around on-chip video processing capabilities. It enhances the compute and video processing power of Qualcomm Snapdragon chips to enable broadcast-quality workflows. The platform is used in 19 countries, handling tens of thousands of hours of content each day across live sports, news, betting, auction houses, emergency services, drones, and other verticals. Customers include LiveX, Techex, major broadcasters, and top sports leagues. Led by newly added CEO Rob Green, Videon works closely with a partner ecosystem that includes Akamai, AWS, Mux, and Vimeo. The company intends to use the Series A proceeds to expand senior leadership, engineering, marketing, and sales and to bring its video compute platform to more customers worldwide.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2020

Picnic Works develops intelligent robotic technology for food service and hospitality, with flagship products the PPS Leonardo and the smaller PPS Michelangelo designed for high-volume, low-customization environments. Its systems are deployed or piloted in sites including universities, stadiums, big-box retailers, commissaries, pizzerias, and a U.S. Navy base, and the company recently ran a pilot with one of the world’s largest retailers. Picnic positions its automation to address rising labor costs, productivity shortfalls, and food waste by improving consistency, reducing waste, and enabling staff to focus on higher-value tasks. The company said it will use new capital to scale operations, ramp up production, accelerate delivery capabilities, and meet growing North American demand. Picnic emphasizes customer-centric partnerships and has cited use cases ranging from traditional pizzerias to high-volume venues like sports arenas. Picnic is a Seattle-based food automation company that has developed the Picnic Pizza System, a pizza-assembly machine for restaurants and commercial kitchens. The system dispenses fresh ingredients onto hand-made dough and enables a single employee to produce up to 100 12-inch customized pizzas per hour. The recipe and ingredient dispensing can be tweaked to suit the restaurant or kitchen owner. Picnic positions the system as small-footprint, contactless, easy to install, and available with no upfront fees. The company has been iterating on system enhancements throughout 2021 and is preparing installations with additional customers. Recent financing will be used to grow the team, attract talent, and expand commercial operations to scale deployments. Picnic develops robotic systems that automate the pizza-making and assembly process. The company says interest in its pizza system has ramped up recently and it has announced partnerships with Orion Land Mark, Ethan Stowell Restaurants, National Service Cooperative and Baseline Hardware Financing. Picnic plans to roll its technology out to restaurants and other public gathering spaces, including schools, stadiums and hospitals. The latest financing will be used to add headcount and expand operations. The article positions Picnic as one of a handful of companies targeting pizza automation alongside peers such as XRobotics and the now-exited Zume. Picnic designs an internet-connected pizza-making robot that can produce up to 300 12-inch customized pizzas per hour, using a vision system, conveyor, and automated sauce, cheese and topping dispensers. The company is preparing for a commercial rollout and says demand has increased during the pandemic as operators seek lower-contact food preparation. Picnic’s business model is pizza-as-a-service: restaurant owners pay a recurring fee for the system plus maintenance and software/hardware updates. The recent funding will be used for product development, hiring, responding to customer interest, and marketing. Picnic has expanded its team, hiring a chief food scientist and a vice president of sales, and was a finalist for Hardware/Gadget of the Year at the GeekWire Awards. The company has operated under prior names Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics and is positioning itself amid competitors and pilots from larger players testing kitchen automation. Picnic develops a configurable, modular automated pizza assembly system that launched in October and integrates with cloud analytics. The platform focuses on high-volume pizza production, reaching rates of up to 180 18-inch pizzas or 300 12-inch pizzas per hour. It is designed to fit into existing kitchen layouts, including food trucks and kiosks, and connects to Picnic’s software for backend data to improve consistency, speed, and reduce food waste. Picnic operates on a robotics-as-a-service subscription model, with users paying for the system on a subscription basis. The company has deployed its system with customers including Centerplate and Washington-based Zaucer Pizza. Picnic recently raised $5 million in seed funding to support product development, hiring, and marketing and has added experienced hires including Kennard Nielsen (VP of engineering) and Mike McLaughlin (VP of product).

Participated · Equity · Apr 2017

Stackery provides a SaaS platform that enables enterprises to manage release automation, governance, observability and operational control for serverless applications and infrastructure. The company targets enterprise customers seeking operational tooling for distributed serverless systems. In March 2018 it released a serverless Health Metrics Dashboard that offers at-a-glance visibility across application tiers and deep drill-down diagnostic observability. Stackery was founded in November 2016 and is led by CEO Nate Taggart. The company is based in Portland, Oregon. Financially, Stackery has raised more than $7.3M since founding and recently secured an additional $5.5M round. Stackery offers a visual, drag-and-drop serverless development tool that represents databases, code functions, and other infrastructure components to deploy and monitor cloud applications without managing servers. The product integrates with Amazon Web Services today and the company plans to add Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud soon. Stackery positions itself as a software tool focused on connecting underlying infrastructure and maintaining application health for large-scale applications, rather than a code framework. The startup will use the new funding to expand its product team and grow headcount from three to about twelve over the next year. CEO Nate Taggart and co-founder Chase Douglas launched the company out of the Techstars Seattle 2017 class. The company is Portland-based and emphasizes serverless as the next major shift in computing.