The above image shows what Pitchbook thinks of Boston startups vs. Seattle startups, at least as far as funds raised are concerned, leading into the two cities' real matchup, Super Bowl XLIX, this Sunday.
They look at VC dollars invested over the past 12 months across a number of sectors; only in the field of media startups does Seattle outrank Boston by a few million dollars. In biotech, it's not even close--but here, we'll focus on tech, where, as readers of BostInno know, there are many ways to measure a city's startup sector, besides venture dollars raised.
Pitchbook gets into a few of those here, like the largest deals (all biotech, except Wayfair, naturally); median pre-money valuations; and the fastest-growing companies by a measure called "Pitchbook Signals."
Those are useful, but here are the chains we would use to measure the distance between Boston and Seattle in tech startups.
Anchor Companies: Advantage, Seattle.
This comparison doesn't need to be stated. Boston has a number of tech companies that operate at scale. EMC is the largest, with a market cap of $53.1 billion ($EMC) Raytheon ($RTN) is no slouch either; Its market cap is $31.1 billion right now.
but EMC is no Microsoft ($MSFT) and Raytheon is no Amazon ($AMZN). And even if they came close, neither is terribly active in the Boston startup community. From where I sit, Microsoft and Amazon loom larger in Boston than do either of the Hub's two tech anchors.
Unicorns: Advantage, Seattle (but just barely).
2013: Tableau ($DATA), "Big data's 1st IPO," raised $254 million in May 2013 for its interactive data visualizations. Its initial market cap of over $2 billion has more than doubled, since, to $4.7 billion.
2011: Zillow ($Z), probably the closest to a household name of any of these recent unicorns, IPO'd in 2011. It's been a few good years for the real-estate website since. It now has a market cap of $3.99 billion
2013: Zulily ($ZU) went public in 2013 at a market cap of $2.6 billion, but its fifth anniversary passed just a few days ago with shares slumping due to flagging revenue at the flash sale company. Now it's closed its UK office.
Boston, meanwhile, has had a lot of unicorn exits via merger and acquisition: Priceline bought Kayak in 2012 for $1.8 billion; IBM bought Endeca for $1.1 billion in 2011, the year after it dropped $1.8 billion on Netezza.
But that's the knock on Boston, isn't it? The best companies either get acquired, or they leave. In Boston tech then, 2014 was a little like 2004 was for Boston sports. Twin IPOs of Wayfair ($W) and HubSpot ($HUBS) reversed the curse of the Zuckerberg, but there have been others:
2013: Endurance International ($EIGI): This low-key Burlington web-hosting company IPO'd last year, raising $252 million. It now has a market cap of $2.3 billion.
And that's about it for the past four years in Boston, according to Kyle Alspach's August roundup. Zipcar's 2011 IPO was tremendously successful, with an IPO pop taking it above a billion dollars. But the company's stock price fell and got snapped up by Avis in 2013 for $500 million.
Tech IPO Pipeline: Advantage, Boston.
So, Seattle has a more consistent track record in of building unicorn companies that last. But can it continue? According to CB Insights, 44 tech companies are in Boston's IPO pipeline right now. That includes ActiFio, valued at a billion-plus on paper by its VC investors. Washington state has 16 and DocuSign is Seattle's big unicorn contender for a 2015 public offering.
