Boulder Startups

In honor and memory of the tragic events in Boston on Monday, BoulderStartups is dedicating this week's post to all our fellow startups and human beings in Boston. If you're feeling so inclined, please donate to TUGG, or Technology Underwriting a Greater Good: an amazing effort uniting the technology community to help support the victims and families of those affected by the bombing.

We love you Boston. Stay strong.

Author's Note: You know the Daily Camera building on 11th and Pearl? Well, what used to be the Daily Camera building? Now it sports a shiny "Trada" sign. With an office space that large, you know there's bound to be some awesome stuff in there, and if you had scooters, a mini golf course and big wheels in mind, you'd be right. Trada's space boasts it all.

What's Their Background Story? The idea of Trada came to CEO Niel Robertson while he was on vacation in Ireland. Or so I once read. Founded in 2008, they're built on the method of crowdsourcing the best ad optimizers in the world to work on your paid ad campaigns. Their clients range from corporations to small startups and in the last few years they've exploded, taking over the Daily Camera building in downtown Boulder as their office space and expanding their team to almost 100 employees.

Who Are The Founders? Niel Robertson

What Do They Do? "Trada engages multiple paid search experts which they call "optimizers" who work on a small business ad campaign at the same time, providing results no single person could ever achieve. Speed, optimization, diversity of thinking, and lower cost are the benefits of crowdsourced paid search with Trada. The search experts - and Trada - get paid when the experts are more efficient in cost per click or cost per sale than the agreed-upon targeted rate."

Are They Hiring? Yes! And their team enjoys some awesome perks. Check out their Careers Page to learn more.

Author's Note: I had the pleasure of going through the TechStars Boulder 2012 program with multiple amazing companies, including Birdbox. Their team's passion, sense of humor and dedication was one of the things I remember most when I think back to those long summer days in the TechStars Mothership.

What's Their Background Story? Founded in 2012, Birdbox was born out of the frustration of having ones photos scattered across the world-wide-web. They graduated from the 2012 TechStars Boulder program with flying colors and are now kicking ass and taking names through their product's beta launch. Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, you name it; there are dozens of places you can store your photos, but only one service can bring them all together, and that's Birdbox. You can request access to their beta at birdbox.com.

Who Are The Founders? Ben Nunez Kevin Cawley

What Do They Do? "Albums with Friends: Birdbox is the easiest way to collect photos with lots of people. Through shared photo albums that collect from social networks and photo services you already use, Birdbox makes it easy for a group to contribute to a unified photo experience around vacations, events, families & interests."

Are They Hiring? Not proactively, but if you think you've got amazing talents to bring to the table, shoot them a message at [email protected] to learn more about how you can join their team.

Author's Note: Living on the West End of Pearl, I walk by the absolutely breathtaking Quick Left office everyday on my way home. With their massive indoor garden, fabulous glass-walled conference rooms, and awesome hack-a-thons, they really are one of the coolest web shops in town.

What's Their Background Story? Founded in 2007, web development shop Quick Left was named after a mountain biking trail just outside of Boulder. Pretty nifty, huh? But getting down to the nitty-gritty, behind those beautiful glass walls they've built some of the most awesome custom web and mobile apps you can imagine; just check out their client list.

Who Are The Founders? Ingrid Alongi Sam Breed

What Do They Do? "Quick Left is a custom software development company specializing in advanced JavaScript, Backbone.js and Ruby on Rails applications. We help startups and established companies get their applications into production with speed and precision."

Are They Hiring? Yup! Check out their careers page to learn more about how you can join their team of wicked smart engineers.

Author's Note: For a while, I was lucky enough to work in the same office as the FlixMaster team, getting to know their co-founders and some of their employees pretty well. They've since moved on to their own office in Boulder, and have been growing & evolving ever since.

What's Their Background Story? FlixMaster is a 2011 TechStars Boulder graduate, specializing in "choose your own adventure" interactive video. Their husband and wife co-founders, Cameron and Erika, have since put together a multi-talented team in their west-end Pearl Street office in downtown Boulder, and have doing some amazing things for huge clients like HBO.

Who Are The Founders? Erika Trautman Cameron McCaddon

What Do They Do? "FlixMaster is a cloud-based video editing and publishing platform that enables content creators to build dynamic, interactive videos with drag-and-drop ease. Your viewers delight in being the masters of their video experience, while you gather valuable data about their preferences through powerful analytics that help you maximize your return on investment."

Are They Hiring? Yes! Check out their careers page to learn more about how you can join their awesome team.

Author's Note: I've been following SendGrid since I first moved to Boulder in 2010 and met their Community Guy, Tim Falls. I've learned a lot about what they do for the email world, and have had the pleasure of watching them expand from just a few people to almost 200 to date.

What's Their Background Story? SendGrid is a Foundry-backed, 2009 TechStars Boulder graduate specializing in automated email delivery and background analytics. While you may not have heard of them, you've certainly heard of the companies they power: Pinterest and Foursquare to name a few! They're one of the most rapidly expanding companies to come out of TechStars, now boasting five offices across the world (including one in both downtown Denver and downtown Boulder.)

Who Are The Founders? Jim Franklin Isaac Saldana Jose Lopez Tim Jenkins

What Do They Do? "SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability and real-time analytics along with flexible APIs that make custom integration a breeze."

Are They Hiring? Always! As one of the fastest expanding companies to come out of TechStars, SendGrid constantly has new jobs opening up across their five offices. Check out their careers page and see if there's one that could be a fit for you!

Author's Note: I met the co-founders of Rafflecopter (and their awesome dog / mascot Shiner) when they first moved to Boulder to grow their startup. I've watched them blossom from a simple widget with just a feature or two, to a fully armed solution for bloggers hosting raffles and giveaways.

What's Their Background Story? Rafflecopter is a fully bootstrapped, three person startup that got its roots in Atlanta, GA where the founders went to school. With Greg and JR making the move to Boulder first and Justin following shortly after, their team now boasts an amazing new office right above "Two Spoons" on downtown Pearl Street. They've invited anyone interested to stop by and grab a brand spankin' new t-shirt; just shoot them a tweet before popping in!

Who Are The Founders? Greg Goodson JR Patten Justin Ratner

What Do They Do? "Rafflecopter makes it easy to run a giveaway online. Popular with bloggers in many different niches, including mom/parenting blogs, food blogs, tech blogs, photography blogs, personal finance blogs, and more, their software allows you to customize and embed an entry form on your site or Facebook page that incentivizes your audience to perform tasks in exchange for entries into a sweepstakes. Examples include Liking a Page on Facebook, Following on Twitter, etc. Rafflecopter has a free plan and just introduced two feature-packed paid plans priced for both bloggers and businesses."

Author's Note: I learned about Precog at this past Boulder Beta (December 2012) where they were a presenting startup. Having not known anything about them before, I was pleased to learn that it's yet another fantastic service made possible by a brilliant Boulder team.

What's Their Background Story? Precog is the next generation of ReportGrid, which many will recall was a 2011 TechStars graduate. Headquartered on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder, Precog made raised a round of 2MM in early 2012, when they announced themselves as the world's first data intelligence-as-a-service offering and vowing to become the "Twilio of their space", referring to their super simple API.

Who Are The Founders? John De Goes Kris Nuttycombe Franco Ponticelli

What Do They Do? "Precog is a cloud-based analytics platform designed for developers to make it easy to build data-driven apps. With Precog's data science APIs, developers can capture, analyze, visualize, and deploy advanced analytical functionality inside their applications. Precog's powerful analytics API lets you perform deep analysis on your data, ranging from analytics, to statistics, to machine learning. You can focus on what you want to do with your data, instead of how to do it. With Precog, you never need to write any code to do any kind of data analysis."

Are They Hiring? No positions currently posted, but they're always reviewing resumes if you're interested in working there! Check out the Precog Jobs Page to learn more.

Author's Note: Before moving to Boulder in the summer of 2010, Lijit was the very first startup I learned about from a friend of mine who worked there at the time. Therefore it's only fitting that Boulder Startups begins it's adventure with Lijit as it's first feature.

What's Their Background Story? Founded in June 2006, Lijit became the experts in their space in just five short years creating tools for online publishers. They positioned themselves as a perfect fit for an acquisition by Federated Media Publishing in October of 2011. Now as a wholly-owned subsidiary of their parent company, they've recently moved into (what I've heard) are some amazing new digs in Boulder's 29th Street Mall.

Who Are The Founders? Todd Vernon Stan James

What Do They Do? "By providing innovative advertising services, audience analytics, and reader engagement tools to over 40,000 online publishers, commercial websites and content networks, Lijit helps publishers grow their website, build their business and make more money. Lijit connects publishers with premium online advertising campaigns that are highly targeted and contextually relevant to the publisher’s audience."

Are They Hiring? Absolutely! Check out the Lijit Networks Jobs Page to learn more.

Two and a half years ago I moved to Boulder, Colorado: A mountain town with a huge story to tell. Over the years, I've learned about and fell in love with it's incredible start-up scene. There are close to, if not over, a hundred that call Boulder home.

It's high time they're all featured in one place, don't you think?

Coming in 2013: One Boulder startup per week.

What's their background story?

Who are the founders?

What do they do?

Are they hiring?