One of the Seattle region’s most notable tech startups is moving its headquarters to Texas.
Supply chain technology startup Auger will maintain a major engineering office in Bellevue, Wash., where it got started. But the company’s co-founder and CEO, Dave Clark, the former Amazon operations chief, is officially back in Dallas, and he took the company’s HQ with him.
Founded in 2024, Auger has raised $150 million, including a $50 million Series B round led by Eclipse in July. Its software connects the systems that companies use to run their supply chains, integrating AI to help automate them. Its customers include Meta, Fanatics and Kimberly-Clark.
Clark, in an interview with GeekWire, said the move is about talent and family, not taxes. For one thing, Texas happens to better suit him and Auger co-founder Leigh Anne Clark, his wife. They’re running toward something rather than away, he said. They both grew up in the Southeast, and they had always intended to return to Texas at some point.
“I’d rather have a really hot month of August than a really gray month of February,” he said.
Dallas is also a place where you run into supply chain specialists at the coffee shop like you do software engineers in Seattle, he said. That’s a key talent pool for Auger at this stage in its evolution. Another bonus: Texas is more central to corporate customers across the country.
The magazine D CEO in Dallas, which first reported the news of Auger’s HQ relocation this week, noted that the company did not seek state or local incentives as part of the move.
Clark confirmed in the GeekWire interview Tuesday that taxes weren’t a factor, noting that he couldn’t even quantify what the tax advantages would be. However, he said, “There’s a lot I like about the way the state of Texas manages and works with business.”
When asked what he would say to people in Seattle who might see another warning sign in a startup like Auger moving its HQ somewhere else, he didn’t shoot down the premise.
“If you’re in that position, I think you’re right to be worried, in the sense that there’s a lot of discussion about things in the state of Washington and Seattle that are not particularly friendly to business,” he said.
Washington state lawmakers approved a “millionaires tax” this year, a 9.9% levy on personal income above $1 million. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson drew criticism from some in tech after saying of wealthy residents who leave the state, “like, bye.”
Clark didn’t point to any particular policy or issue but said he has sensed an “anti-business” sentiment that concerns him since moving back to the Seattle area from Texas to launch Auger.
“Seattle should just be careful,” he said. “It’s not preordained that they win these things. It’s not preordained that these big companies stay in town.”
The Pacific Northwest has enormous resources to compete globally, he added, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be “a phenomenal draw to anybody and everybody coming in.”
The region has “many, many strengths, and we should leverage them to the advantage of the community,” he said. “And sometimes I think the rhetoric gets in the way of it.”
Auger has about 115 people in Bellevue — engineers and supply chain data scientists — and Clark said he expects that office to grow 20% to 30% over the next year or two. He and Leigh Anne will both be back there regularly, he said, working alongside the team.
“Nothing’s changing there,” he said.
The company’s new HQ in North Dallas occupies part of the 15th floor of One Galleria Tower, centrally located between neighborhoods north and south of the city, with a quick run to DFW International Airport, as Clark pointed out in the D CEO article.
The office currently has about 15 people, most hired in recent months for sales, go-to-market and supply chain roles. Many of them had been traveling to Bellevue until the new space opened. Clark expects to add another 20 to 30 people in Dallas by the middle of next year.
As in Bellevue, where Auger subleased its space from Microsoft and bought the furniture for $1, the Dallas office came furnished. This time the furniture cost $10. (There goes Texas’ reputation for affordability.)
“It cost me 10 times more for the furniture in Dallas,” Clark joked. “I like nice things, cheap.”
Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, rising to lead its global operations and later its worldwide consumer business, and was one of the chief architects of the logistics network behind the company’s delivery operation. He left in 2022 to become CEO of Flexport, departing the freight startup the following year, before starting Auger.
Leigh Anne Clark is Auger’s president of fashion and beauty, leading the company’s work in an industry known for waste-prone supply chains. The couple, who met in Kentucky in 2000 while Dave Clark was at Amazon, have two sons, ages 14 and 11.
With its rapid hiring and significant early funding rounds, Auger rose quickly to No. 31 on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of Pacific Northwest tech startups. Because the GeekWire 200 is limited to companies based in the region, the headquarters move puts Auger’s standing in jeopardy.
Informed of this predicament, Clark made his pitch to stay on. “We still have a lot of dev there,” he said of the Bellevue office. “I think you get grandfathered into the list in some way, right?”
Meanwhile, the business keeps growing. Clark said Auger signed two major contracts Tuesday with customers he declined to name. The Bellevue office marked them with a bell-ringing, and the two offices celebrated together over a video call. A second bell is on order for Dallas.
“We’ll have dual bells that we’ll ring together,” Clark said.
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