Solstice Analytics Bets on Madison as the Midwest's Next Tech Hub

Priya Nakamura-Voss remembers the exact desk she was sitting at when she landed Solstice Analytics' first paying client: a shared table near a window at a co-working space two blocks off Capitol Square, in the winter of 2016. She had left a data science role at a national insurance company six months earlier with a laptop, a small severance, and a conviction that mid-sized Midwestern businesses needed sophisticated analytics tools without the price tag of a coastal consulting firm. Today, Solstice Analytics occupies two full floors of a renovated office building near the Capitol, employs roughly 90 people, and builds forecasting and supply-chain software used by manufacturers and retailers across the region.

Nakamura-Voss's path to founding the company wound through Madison's biotech and university research ecosystem. After earning a graduate degree in statistics, she spent several years building predictive models for a health analytics startup that was eventually acquired, an experience she has described as both formative and frustrating. "I watched a lot of good work get shelved because the client didn't have anyone in-house who could act on it," she said. "I wanted to build something that closed that gap."

Building Without Venture Capital

Unlike many analytics startups that chase venture funding early, Nakamura-Voss financed Solstice's first four years almost entirely through client revenue, taking on contract projects for Wisconsin manufacturers and food producers while slowly building a subscription software product on the side. She has said the decision cost the company speed but preserved control. "Every board meeting I don't have to sit through is a decision I get to make with my own judgment instead of someone else's spreadsheet," she told a Madison business roundtable last year.

The company eventually raised a modest seed round in 2020 from a group of Midwest-focused investors, using the capital to build out its engineering team rather than fund rapid geographic expansion. That discipline paid off when several venture-backed competitors folded during a broader downturn in enterprise software spending; Solstice's revenue, tied to renewal contracts with established Wisconsin companies, kept growing.

A Different Pitch to Talent

Nakamura-Voss has built much of her recruiting pitch around what Madison offers that larger tech hubs do not: shorter commutes, access to the lakes, and a cost of living that lets junior engineers buy homes within a few years of graduating. She has hired heavily from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's computer science and statistics programs, building relationships with faculty and offering paid internships that convert into full-time offers at a rate she says exceeds 70 percent.

Pushing Madison's Tech Identity

Beyond her own company, Nakamura-Voss has become a visible advocate for positioning Madison as a serious technology hub rather than a satellite of Chicago or Minneapolis. She helped organize a recurring meetup for the city's data science and machine learning practitioners, now drawing more than 200 attendees to quarterly gatherings, and sits on an advisory committee for a regional workforce development initiative aimed at retraining manufacturing workers for data-adjacent roles.

Not every bet has paid off. An early attempt to expand Solstice's product into the health care analytics space stalled after two years, a setback Nakamura-Voss now describes candidly as a lesson in staying close to the industries the company already understood. The company shut down that product line in 2022 and redirected the engineering resources back toward manufacturing and logistics clients.

What Comes Next

Solstice recently opened a small satellite office in Green Bay to serve manufacturing clients in the Fox Valley region, a move Nakamura-Voss frames as proof that analytics talent does not need to cluster only in Madison. She continues to turn down acquisition interest from larger software companies, saying she wants to see whether a Wisconsin-headquartered analytics firm can reach national scale on its own terms. "We're not trying to be the next Silicon Valley story," she said. "We're trying to be the first good Madison one."