If you’re reading this, you probably already know that Seattle is well on its way to becoming the one of the biggest tech markets in the United States. We have one of the highest concentrations of tech workers in the country, and every week it seems there’s a news story about a Washington startup raising millions in venture capital money. But how familiar are you with the stories behind these companies? How did they come into existence? Who do they represent? What trends among them can we detect, and what might those trends say about us as a region?

This year, we decided to do a deep analysis of Washington tech companies to uncover the stories our Seattle Tech Universe Map doesn’t tell. We partnered with Madrona Venture Group in 2015 to create the map, which depicts over 600 Seattle tech companies as stars. The result was a straightforward visual that immediately conveyed the immensity and interconnectedness of the local tech community. While impressive, the map doesn’t reveal any information beyond that, leaving the stars shrouded in mystery. We set out to add more layers of research to it to paint a better picture of our tech ecosystem.

We decided on the following seven questions to guide my research:

• What percentage of Washington tech company founders are male vs. female?
• What educational institutions did the founders attend?
• Which years were these companies founded?
• How many employees worked at these companies?
• How much venture capital-backed investment did companies receive?

In order to be included in the research, each company had to be headquartered in Washington, at least two years old, and have at least one completed seed round. This left me with 365 companies, which had an average of 2.44 founders per company. I spent the next few months scouring publicly available data and cross-checking it with sources like Bloomberg, LinkedIn, CrunchBase, news articles, and company websites. All findings are based on publicly available data of 365 companies on our list as of 2017. It’s not representative of the whole population in the region.

Here is what I found.

Gender disparity among founders is as stark as ever.

Just 45 out of the 893 total founding members are female. That means a whopping 95% are male. Check out this article by GeekWire in which our CEO Michael Schutzler gives his thoughts on this statistic.

UW alumni outnumber all the Ivy alums combined.

The University of Washington boasts the most alumni, at 125 founders. Coincidentally, this is the same number of the total alumni from the next five universities. Two other Washington schools – Washington State University and Western Washington University – cracked the top ten.

If Washington tech companies were people, most of them would belong to Generation Z.

The majority of companies on the list were founded after 2000. The oldest started the same year as the moon landing.

There are more people on the Seattle Seahawks roster than there are employees at the average Washington tech company on our list.

Many companies fall into the 11-50 employees bracket. About 70% have less than 250 employees. Nine companies have more than 10,001 employees.

Series C and D are the most lucrative funding rounds.

Over the course of funding series, the seed round has always received the least amount of funding. (Read more about the different rounds of funding here.) Over the last three years, the amount of Series A funding has declined. The most funding was concentrated in Series C and Series D. If we include angel fundings and series-undefined fundings, the amount of investment to the companies on our list has grown over the last three years.

Other notable findings:

• 2002 and 2013 were big years for IPOs. (That being said, there was no record available for IPOs from 2008 to 2010.)
• The total value of M&As peaked in 2014 and the number of deals was highest in 2015.

This research is only the beginning of my analysis. Next month, I’ll be sending out a link to a survey to acquire information that’s not publicly available. I plan to take an even deeper look into the backgrounds of the founders and the roles they play inside and outside of their companies. Piece by piece, we will bring a clearer image of our tech universe into focus. If you want to be included in the Seattle Tech Universe list or have any questions about this research, please contact bklee@washingtontechnology.org.