Accumula focuses on seamless integration with biggest names in retail to create custom platform experience for businesses

In Evan Brubaker’s family, the “entrepreneurial spirit” appears to be a heritable trait. From his great great grandfather’s Columbia river fisheries business, to his father’s work restoring historic downtown Tacoma buildings, Evan has taken his place as a fourth generation Tacoma entrepreneur. He’s delivering the software toolset to help businesses in Tacoma and beyond connect and optimize their omnichannel retail operations as the CEO of Accumula.

A 20-year stint as a record producer offered Evan a different kind of entrepreneurial experience and a glimpse into the importance of maintaining autonomy in a small business. In 2011, when Evan’s friend asked him to put his computer science degree to work by helping him set up a custom point-of-sale (POS) system for his new store, he
jumped at the opportunity. That first solution led to more opportunities building point-of-sale systems for small businesses. Four years later, Evan’s endeavour grew to a team of six employees and 500 customers—and those customers were asking for more tailored and integrated solutions.

“My customers would come to me and say ‘The software is great, can you connect it to these other things?’” shared Evan. “So we started looking at how we could partner with major players in the industry, like Shopify, Lightspeed, and Adobe.”

In January of 2015, Evan found his co-founder Eric Peterson and Accumula was born. Today, the company has 1,000 customers across 22 countries and partners with some of the biggest names in the retail space including Marine Layer, MeUndies and Schutz.

The Accumula CEO stresses that a good retail management system should seamlessly integrate with solutions businesses are already using—not disrupt them. “In retail where there’s a lot of turnover, changing all of your software can cause a business to fall apart, especially in the context of the past year,” he shared. In contrast to marketing themselves as a one-stop-shop, Accumula allows customers to keep the existing systems that work for them, but connects each system for seamless communication across all areas of the business, from POS, to customer relationship management, to inventory and shipping. “We have this concept of distributed truth,” said Brubaker, “We’re making these systems function as one platform, because at the end of the day it’s one business.”

To Evan, Tacoma’s smaller, tight knit community offers the perfect space for the company to focus on building and growing Accumula, free of distractions. “We’re in the process of building the second version of our platform, which will set a new standard in the industry,” he shared. “Tacoma
has worked really well for us because it allowed us to just focus on building the best product possible.”

To learn more about Accumula, visit accumula.com and follow them on Linkedin. Follow Startup253 to keep up with stories from the local startup ecosystem.

About the Tacoma-Pierce County Economic Development Board: Since 1978, the private, 501(c)(6) nonprofit EDB has been laser-focused on recruiting new firms to Pierce County, retaining those that are here, and helping all of them  expand. The EDB supports companies to create new jobs and to grow the economy of the South Sound and Washington State, USA. In the past two decades, the EDB has worked with companies that have made over $1.6 billion in capital investments and created over 25,000 jobs.