Vivek Bhaskaran, CEO, and Founder of QuestionPro in downtown Austin

QuestionPro has moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin.

The company, which has 200 employees including 15 in Austin, creates online survey and insights solutions software.

The company’s Austin headquarters is in the Arboretum area.

“Austin is like where Seattle used to be in 2005, small, but ready to go,” said Vivek Bhaskaran, CEO and Founder of QuestionPro. He started QuestionPro in Seattle before moving it to the San Francisco Bay area.

Now a lot of tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple all have big campuses in Austin. That’s what happened in Seattle, Bhaskaran said. Tech companies opened their second office out of the Bay area in Seattle. Now they are spreading their footprint even farther to Austin, he said.

Austin’s cost of living, culture and growing prominence as a tech center attracted QuestionPro here, Bhaskaran said.

“Austin is the perfect tech-friendly city for QuestionPro to place our roots and to drive our business to the next level,”  Bhaskaran said. “It offers a mix of vibrant startups, incubators, and classic technology corporations that we’re excited to be a part of.”

QuestionPro, founded in 2002, has made three acquisitions throughout the years of WorkXO, RapidEngage, and PollBob. It’s a privately held company that generates revenue of $30 million annually and it is growing at 35 percent annually, Bhaskaran said. He’s focused on growing a $100 million company in the next few years. Its customers come from travel, financial services, retail, education, IT and technology, manufacturing, hospitality, government contractors and other industries. It has more than 3.5 million users in more than 100 countries worldwide.

QuestionPro is a software as a service company that offers a free version and a paid version with more features at $85 monthly and special pricing for enterprise customers.

In 2008, QuestionPro made Inc. magazine’s list of the fastest-growing private companies, ranking 172nd overall and 25th among business-service providers. Its customers include Microsoft, Intuit, Intel, Yahoo, HP, and others.

 “The market is big,” Bhaskaran said. “Everybody needs feedback.”