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Among the state’s more than 4,000 tech startups, at least four are unicorns, venture-backed companies valued at more than $1 billion: Pluralsight,
Qualtrics, Domo (founded by Josh James, who’d previously founded Omniture), and
InsideSales. Many more could become billion-dollar companies if the stars align. Among them are
Health Catalyst, a platform for health-related data from different systems;
Workfront, an online project management software company;
MaritzCX, a customer experience platform; and
Owlet, makers of a high-tech baby sock monitor that FORBES named to its
2016 list of Next Billion-Dollar Startups. Instructure, an educational technology company that went public in 2015, has a market cap approaching $700 million, while
Vivint, a provider of security and home automation, was
acquired by Blackstone for $2 billion.
Utah’s Mormon culture, with its focus on family and hard work (and going door-to-door), lends itself to startups.
FORBES named it the best state to do business for the third time in 2016. Fast-growing companies can count on a deep pool of young, educated job candidates from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. And venture capital firms have caught on, pouring $2.5 billion into Utah in the last three years, compared to $1.1 billion the three years before that, according to the
PwC/CB Insights MoneyTree Report. “It’s not putting a huge dent in Silicon Valley, but what’s happening in the state is pretty significant,” says PwC’s Tom Ciccolella, who leads the firm’s U.S. venture capital practice.
Outsiders may not think of Utah as a tech hotspot, but history suggests otherwise. Back in 1927, Philo Farnsworth, of Beaver, Utah, produced the first electronic television transmission. Forty-five years later, Utah inventor Nolan Bushnell founded Atari. In 1978, Alan Ashton and Bruce Bastian – an instructor and his student at Brigham Young University – started WordPerfect. More recent success stories include Fusion.io (
acquired by SanDisk for $1.1 billion in 2014),
Ancestry, retailer
Overstock.com, Armada Skis, and headphone-maker
Skullcandy. “Utah has this very rich history that a lot of people don’t know, and we don’t do a good job of telling this story,” says Clint Betts, executive director of
Silicon Slopes, a nonprofit that set up recently to work with the state’s tech companies.
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