ACV Auctions’ initial public offering today provides a real-world seminar on what happens when a homegrown software company hits it big.
If the shares perform well – and that’s never a guarantee – it will be a wealth-generating event that ripples through the community for years to come.
With that said, here are five other companies based in Buffalo that are hot on ACV’s heels.
Circuit Clinical
Dr. Irfan Khan has dragged Circuit Clinical through some valleys since the firm was founded in 2015.
His fortitude is now paying off.
Circuit Clinical just closed on a $7.5 million round of funding that included contributions from local investors, venture capital firms and big-name corporate partners, part of a bigger plan to spread its clinical trials network throughout the U.S.
Khan is now joined by an experienced leadership team and has a clear vision of his own company’s future. Circuit Clinical is approaching 40 employees in Buffalo, a number that is expanding quickly.
Tackle.io
“Tacklers,” as they call themselves, are spread in clusters throughout the country, as the firm embraced a remote-first culture years before Covid-19 acquainted it to everyone else.
But company CEO John Jahnke is a native Western New Yorker, and he is surrounded by a growing cluster of employees who live and work here. ACV co-founder Jack Greco was an early angel investor in the company.
In the meantime, Tackle is an ascendant company in the boom time of web-based software sales, and it just raised $35 million in Series B venture capital, with contributions from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners (Bessemer led several investment rounds ACV Auctions).
Squire Technologies
Buffalo has the biggest cluster of Squire Technologies employees, even if co-founders Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant live elsewhere.
The company – which was introduced to Buffalo after winning a 43North award – became a story of national significance in 2020 when it raised nearly $100 million in venture capital, a statistically rare instance of a startup led by Black men attracting large sums of institutional funding.
Squire is now seen as a kind of a civic litmus test for the Buffalo economy as a surging company that any city would love to have. About a third of its 100-person workforce is in Western New York (with space at the 43North incubator, though employees are still working from home). How much more talent can LaRon and Salvant find here?
HiOperator
Unlike the other companies on this list, HiOperator is not coming off a major funding round.
That’s simply because founder/CEO Liz Tsai prefers organic growth where possible, and since moving to Buffalo, she is proving beyond any doubt that it’s possible.
HiOperator, which moved here with a handful of employees after winning a 43North award in 2018, now has hundreds of employees in Buffalo. The company recently signed on to lease a few floors of the Roblin Building, at a total of 25,000 square feet, for its new downtown headquarters.
HiOperator spent 2020 rapidly onboarding new clients as its tech-enabled customer service model found demand in new industries and expanded within existing ones.
Tsai has nothing short of national ambitions and a major share of a multibillion market on her mind.
Centivo
Yes, Centivo’s top leaders are in Manhattan, which is where the company baked as an early-stage startup. But as the high-tech health care plan has grown, it’s become increasingly clear that Buffalo has a major place in the company’s future.
Centivo founder and CEO Ashok Subramanian is from Buffalo, left a major business legacy here already with Liazon (now a Willis Towers Watson hub in downtown Buffalo) and never has Buffalo far from his mind. He said recently that to the extent the company could find talent in Buffalo, that’s where the main source of employment growth is expected.
And growth is the order of the day at Centivo, which closed on $34 million in Series B venture capital funding this December. Buffalo-based Rand Capital Corp. (now effectively owned by Terry and Kim Pegula) is an investor. Rand also backed Liazon and scored a multi-million-dollar windfall when it was sold.
