By Isaac Kato, Managing Director of Techstars Seattle
Techstars Seattle is excited to kick off its 12th year, continuing a legacy of unparalleled entrepreneurial success. Our alumni include unicorns such as Remitly, Outreach, and Zipline. Collectively, Techstars Seattle alumni have raised well in excess of $1 billion in growth capital after graduating from our program.
We reached an important milestone this year: for the first time, Techstars Seattle has achieved gender parity. Five of our ten CEOs are women, and we’re proud to play a role in driving the tech industry towards greater gender and racial equality.
As usual, this year’s class represents a diverse group of industries. An educational current flows through our companies this year, with Brite enabling the delivery of STEM and other after school enrichment programs, Edith Labs providing mentorship and investment to undernetworked students, and with Aplic allowing students around the world to pursue their study abroad dreams. Marketplaces and commerce are a mainstay of Techstars Seattle, and this year we’re excited to welcome Afriblocks, which makes African freelance talent accessible to the world, Storey the App, whose wardrobe management app enables the circular economy for fashion, The Folklore, who brings African luxury designers to the global fashion market, and PairTree, who facilitates the adoption process for hopeful parents to be. Finally, it wouldn’t be Techstars Seattle without a healthy dose of machine learning enhanced Enterprise SaaS, represented by Edify, who ensures onboarding success for engineers, Bild, which streamlines the design collaboration process in manufacturing, and Twelve Labs, a deeply technical provider of video semantic search.
It takes far more than a pandemic to quell the entrepreneurial flames that burn bright at Techstars Seattle. If you're in the entrepreneurship game, you're fundamentally in the business of hope and optimism. And, it's hope and optimism which get us through dark times like these. So, we’re thrilled to welcome these 10 promising teams to participate in our rich heritage of technology startup success and to share their hope for a better future.
The Global Pan-African Freelance Marketplace.
Admission and career assistance platform.
Collaborate with your manufacturers in real-time.
We empower communities to teach kids life skills through STEM.
Onboard your new engineers, instantly.
Building relationships powered by equity investments.
Modernizing adoption.
Shop and sell from your digital wardrobe.
The Folklore is a distributor of luxury African designer products.
Semantic search for videos through context-aware AI.