Startups are growing in the Soundside

The Soundside region, just south of Seattle, is home to a number of startups that will push their industries in 2019. Here are three we are watching this year.

Beta Hatch is rethinking how we feed the food we eat in SeaTac. Currently, about 30 percent of food grown around the world goes to feeding livestock. According to Geekwire, Beta Hatch founder Virginia Emery thinks there is a better way to feeds some of our favorite foods like fish and chicken. In a pre-commercial facility located in SeaTac, Beta Hatch is bioengineering bugs, or as Emery explained to GeekWire, “We’ve done a lot of experimentation with different strains of mealworms, basically running the mealworm Olympics to figure out who’s performing best…What we’ve been trying to do is breed the biggest, fastest growing, most nutritious insect.” In the future, the company is planning to grow and continue shifting the livestock industry to a new and more sustainable food source.

Faster growing fruit trees are taking sprout in Burien. Startup Phytelligence is pioneering a new way to grow trees in its 8-acre greenhouse in Burien. The company’s tree cultivation process, which uses a nutritious substance, helps accelerate the growth process of fruit trees to a point they can be planted in an orchard. Since moving out of the WSU labs in 2012, Phytelligence has raised $16.8 million according to Geekwire by mid-2018. The companies process is cheaper and faster than traditional growing methods according to the company’s website.

LeoStella is growing the space industry in Tukwila. LeoStella, which is a joint venture between Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries and French-Italian Thales Alenia Space, is building two to three satellites per month in its new headquarters and manufacturing space in Tukwila according to GreekWire. GeekWire reports, the company is producing “24 satellites designed to provide visual and multispectral Earth imagery at resolutions as fine as 1 meter per pixel, at a rapid orbital revisit rate [for Black Sky, a global intelligence company that utilizes satellite images.] The goal is to make on-demand pictures available within 90 minutes of an overflight, at a cost of $90 per image.”