A “drunken” rainstorm barraged the Northwest this week. Entrepreneurs made it rain, too. Read on for details of funding news from TINYpulse, Eventbase Technology, MetricStory, and Pogo, as well as results of surveys of software engineer salaries and the best companies to work for.
—TINYpulse, the Seattle startup that makes anonymous survey and feedback tools to help managers monitor employee morale and reduce turnover, raised a $6 million Series A led by Arthur Ventures. More details here.
—Eventbase Technology, which makes technology to help event producers use beacons and mobile apps, raised $6 million from Madrona Venture Group. The Vancouver, Canada, company previously raised $2 million in 2014 from South By Southwest, the Austin technology and music event, through its SXSW Tech investment fund. In addition to SXSW, Eventbase counts among its customers the Sundance Film Festival, the last three Olympic Games, and several large technology companies. Madrona managing partner Paul Goodrich joins Eventbase’s board with the investment.
—MetricStory, a Seattle startup applying machine learning to improve the process of finding business insights via platforms like Google Analytics, raised a $1.45 million seed round from lead investor Elementum Ventures and a host of angel investors, including Frank Marshall, Rudy Gadre, Geoff Entress, Henry Lin, and Mike Galgon. Co-founded by CEO Joshua Gebhardt and CTO Brandon Nutter, MetricStory was part of the spring 2015 Techstars Austin class. Their goal is to go beyond the easy-to-find “vanity metrics” like page views, unique visitors, and time on site, and automate the process of answering marketing questions like which social media campaign drove people to purchase, and what audience segments could be better reached with an improved mobile site.
—You can win over investors, or you can win big entrepreneurship contests. (The latter will almost certainly help with the former.) Seattle-based Pogo, which helps parents coordinate carpools, is a big winner, taking home $1 million from Verizon through its 2015 Powerful Answers Award contest. The contest sought promising startups working on emergency response, healthcare, and transportation.
—Seattle-area software engineers earn an average of $125,000 (equivalent to $164,000 in the Bay Area), according to a new survey that adjusts for cost of living in 11 technology hubs around the country, using uber-expensive San Francisco as a baseline. Here are more details on the survey, which was run by SF-based Hired.
—Not only are software engineers here well-compensated, they love their employers. Glassdoor, the employer reviews and rating service, released its list of top 50 U.S. workplaces for 2016. Seven companies based in the Seattle area, mainly tech companies, made the list: Zillow Group (7th), Expedia (16th), Slalom Consulting (30th), F5 Networks (33rd), Costco (40th), REI (45th), and Concur (49th). Airbnb was the top-ranked company in Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards.
