Seattle startup Azuqua pulls in $10.8 million

Matt Day | The Seattle Times | 1 August 2017

“Azuqua, a Seattle technology startup working to make the vast array of web-based software work together, has bagged $10.8 million in venture-capital funding.

The investment round, announced Tuesday, follows a $5 million haul in 2014. Since then, the company has grown to 45 employees. They recently moved to offices overlooking Elliott Bay near Pike Place Market.

Azuqua, founded by former Microsoft manager Nikhil Hasija, went through the Techstars mentorship program in 2013. It started selling the main version of its product last year and now boasts high-profile customers including General Motors, Charles Schwab and General Electric.

Businesses are slowly but steadily migrating from applications hosted on their own servers to web-based programs, whether Salesforce’s customer tracking tools, Google’s email and document-management tools, or Atlassian’s project-management software. Different departments within big companies often use software that doesn’t sync automatically.”

Read more here.

View Azuqua job openings here.

 

Jobs are being outsourced again — back to the U.S.

Steve Lohr | The New York Times | 30 July 2017

“For years, U.S. companies have been saving money by “offshoring” jobs — hiring people in India and other distant cubicle farms.

Today, some of those jobs are being outsourced again — in the United States.

Nexient, a software outsourcing company, reflects the evolving geography of technology work. It holds daily video meetings with one of its clients, Bill.com, where team members stand up and say into the camera what they accomplished yesterday for Bill.com, and what they plan to do tomorrow. The difference is, they are phoning in from Michigan, not Mumbai.

“It’s the first time we’ve been happy outsourcing,” said Ren Lacerte, chief executive of Bill.com, a bill payment-and-collection service based in Palo Alto, California.”

Read more here.

 

Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking industry with technology

Taylor Soper | GeekWire | 25 July 2017

“It’s a warm summer afternoon at the TA Seattle East truck stop in North Bend, Wash., and Jerry Brooks is waiting for business. The 60-year-old driver from South Carolina wants to head back east, but the offers he’s received so far don’t meet his standards for distance and pay.

“Everybody you see here is looking for loads,” says Brooks, a 38-year truck driving veteran, sitting in his trailer and pointing out to the other trucks. “They are sitting here and they wait. Ain’t nothin’ guaranteed. Flip a coin.”

Now a Seattle startup, which just raised cash from Bill Gates and other tech luminaries, is looking to make life easier for drivers like Brooks and shippers like Unilever and Anheuser-Busch.

Convoy today announced a massive $62 million funding round led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, the investment arm of Silicon Valley-based accelerator Y Combinator. Also participating in the Series B round is Cascade Investment, the private investment vehicle of Gates, Mosaic Ventures and Expedia Chairman Barry Diller. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, has other related investments in industries like railroad and agricultural.”

Read more here.

 

OfferUp expanding Seattle area headquarters as headcount has doubled to 200 people in last year

Nat Levy | GeekWire |20 July 2017

“OfferUp is more than quadrupling the size of its headquarters in Bellevue, Wash. as the mobile marketplace begins to put the $130 million it raised last year to work.

OfferUp confirmed a report from real estate firm Broderick Group that it has signed a new 71,330-square-foot lease for a building called Mercer Pointe. The building is right next door to its current 17,000-square-foot office the Bellefield Office Park. An OfferUp spokeswoman told GeekWire that the company will move to the new building next door in the fall and vacate its current headquarters space.

The fast-growing company has been on a hiring spree for the last couple years and has outgrown its current home. OfferUp has more than 200 employees today, up from about 100 a year ago and 45 around this time in 2015.

Among those hires are some big name personnel, including Peter Wilson, site director for Google’s expanding Kirkland campus, to be vice president of engineering and long-time Zillow executive Chloe Harford, who will join OfferUp as new vice president of product. The company has another 15 open positions listed on its website, mostly in engineering.”

Read more here.

View OfferUp job openings here.