Author: LauraLorek@gmail.com (Page 50 of 352)

It’s a good time to be in the disinfectant and cleaning products business.

Curtis Eggemeyer, CEO of Lemi Shine, has seen demand for Lemi Shine, multi-surface antibacterial cleaner, disinfectant wipes, liquid dish soap and laundry detergent, skyrocket in sales since March.

“This isn’t something you can plan for,” Eggemeyer said. “Our demand is off the charts.”

Eggemeyer participated in a SKU Town Hall meeting on Coping with COVID-19: Amazon and D2C (Direct to Consumer), which was broadcast online at noon on Wednesday. It’s one in a series of online broadcasts SKU Accelerator has done since the Pandemic lockdown began in March. SKU Accelerator, based in Austin, works with consumer packaged goods companies, helping them to scale their businesses, launch new products, do marketing and sales, and attract investment. Kirstin Ross, managing director for SKU, led the discussion.

Austin-based Envirocon Technologies, doing business as Lemi Shine, has been making non-toxic cleaning products since 2007. It has 26 employees and more than $35 million in annual revenue, according to the company.

Lemi Shine bills itself as the “Better for You” household cleaning products brand. The active ingredient in its products is citric acid, which cleans grease and grime and also kills 99 percent of all bacteria.

In March, Lemi Shine saw a 50 percent increase in sales of its products and that is a trend that is going to continue, Eggemeyer said. It saw a 350 percent increase for disinfectant in March alone, he said. Lemi Shine sells 90 percent of its products through brick and mortar retailers with the rest of its online sales coming from Amazon. Its Amazon sales have increased 270 percent, he said.

The cleaning products industry overall is $59 billion industry in the U.S. with $16 billion of that in retail sales, and the industry accounts for 64,800 jobs, according to the American Cleaning Institute.

In March, H-E-B and other retailers saw consumers buying cleaning products with disinfectant properties as soon as they put them on the shelves. H-E-B placed limits on purchasing the cleaning products. Amazon has been sold out of most household disinfecting products.

Lemi Shine has faced some supply chain challenges with getting packaging from plastics makers, Eggemeyer said. But it is working to get products to its existing retail partners as quickly as possible, he said.

Puracy, an Austin-based maker of non-toxic, plant-based cleaning and personal care products, has seen a huge increase in the demand for its hand sanitizers and other products, said Sean Busch, one of its founders. Puracy, founded in 2014, sells its products online through its website and Amazon and through select retailers like Target.

Amazon has prioritized the shipment of many products to essential items only during the pandemic, said Carolyn Lowe, CEO of ROI Swift, an Austin-based digital marketing firm focused on retailers. Amazon also is not accepting any new retailers or products during this time, she said. A lot of the brands ROI Swift works with had four weeks of inventory at Amazon’s distribution centers at the time of the lockdown and they have fared well during these difficult times, she said.

Puracy is making alcohol-based hand sanitizers that are being produced at a distillery, Busch said. He’s also looking at expanding Puracy’s line of products to include surface disinfectants, he said.

Puracy has been bullish on direct to consumer and e-commerce sales in general since it launched, Busch said. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of online shopping by consumers and he expects that to continue, he said.

Editor’s note: this article has been updated to provide the latest employee count and revenue figures for Lemi Shine.

Airbrake, which makes software that tracks errors in web apps, announced this week it has raised $11 million in funding.

The company, founded in 2010, is based in San Francisco but has a large presence and office in Austin.

Austin-based Elsewhere Partners led the financing round. Airbrake has an interesting history. Exceptional bought Airbrake and merged operations in 2012. Then the company was acquired by San Antonio-based Rackspace in March of 2013 and the spun out of Rackspace as an independent company in 2015.

“Airbrake grew rapidly and profitably under the product-focused leadership of Joe Godfrey,” Nick Stoffregen, Vice President at Elsewhere Partners, said in a news release. “The company created a product that developers love, and Airbrake has grown organically as a result, without dedicated sales and marketing teams.”

Airbrake recently added several executives to its staff including Shelley Perry, executive chairman, Treb Ryan, CEO, Eric Anderson, CTO, Chad Savoy, CRO, and Joe Godfrey as CPO.

“We’re excited to continue nurturing the strong relationships Airbrake has built with customers in the developer community,” Ryan, CEO of Airbrake, said in a news release. “Once dev teams try Airbrake, they uncover real-world errors across the entire solution that they never knew existed,” Ryan said. 

“Airbrake is a textbook example of the success of product-led growth,” Perry, Executive Chairman of Airbrake, said in a news release. “This investment allows Airbrake to focus on value-led growth, which includes increasing customer feedback, building community, and investing in partnerships within the CI/CD ecosystem,” Perry said. 

Airbrake makes application monitoring service software that alerts developers when it finds an error in the code. The program can provide real-time feedback that allows developers to improve the software quickly. Airbrake has thousands of customers including Netflix, Twitch, Salesforce, TED and Adobe.

SourceDay, which makes supply chain management software, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $12.5 million in venture capital funding.

The Austin-based startup, founded in 2013, has raised $23.3 million to date. The company’s latest Series B round of funding was led by Baird Capital with participation from existing investors Silverton Partners, ATX Ventures and Draper Associates.

SourceDay is filling a need for manufacturers and distributors that depend on supply chain management software now more than ever because of the impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

“As businesses face unprecedented times, they are seeking faster answers to bigger challenges,” Joanna Arras, Principal at Baird Capital and SourceDay’s newest board member said in a news release. “More than ever, companies need resilient and agile supply chains. Poor supply chain visibility and inefficient collaboration will be crippling during this time of rapidly shifting demand. Baird Capital is proud to invest in SourceDay to help companies face these challenges head-on.” 

SourceDay has more than 6,000 global manufacturers as customers. The latest funding will “enhance SourceDay’s ability to help its customers mitigate supply chain risk as the pandemic continues to play out and prepare for when the eventual rebound hits,” according to a news release.

SourceDay expects to use the funds from this round on product development and marketing.  

“The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing the ways that outdated supply chain practices make manufacturers vulnerable,” Tom Kieley, CEO, SourceDay, said in a news release. “I’m excited to add Baird Capital to our team of investors. Baird’s experience with leading SaaS companies and its relationships across the manufacturing sector will help SourceDay achieve our mission to make companies less vulnerable to current supply chain disruptions and to all kinds of shifts in demand.”

Last year, SourceDay landed thousands of new customers. The company also doubled in size to more than 50 employees.

The show isn’t going on after all.

On Friday, City of Austin officials held a press conference and announced the cancellation of SXSW and SXSW.EDU, set to take place next week.

“We are devastated to share this news with you. “The show must go on” is in our DNA, and this is the first time in 34 years that the March event will not take place,” according to a statement from SXSW. “We are now working through the ramifications of this unprecedented situation.”

Earlier in the week, City Officials said the show would go on. But on Friday, Mayor Steve Adler, Travis County officials and a health advisory board, decided to cancel the event amid growing concerns about the spread of the Coronavirus.

“We are exploring options to reschedule the event and are working to provide a virtual SXSW online experience as soon as possible for 2020 participants, starting with SXSW EDU,” according to a SXSW statement. “For our registrants, clients, and participants we will be in touch as soon as possible and will publish an FAQ.”

SXSW is a huge event for Austin. Last year, SXSW attracted 417,400 people to Austin including participation from more than 100 countries. It also had an impact on the Austin economy of $355.9 million, according to SXSW.

And even before the SXSW cancellation, several tech companies announced plans to withdraw from various panels, keynote talks, parties and other events. 

There are no confirmed cases of the Coronavirus in Austin. But Texas now has five cases of people testing positive for the Coronavirus in the Houston area. The cases are among a group that travelled overseas together.

San Antonio also had some people who tested positive for the Coronavirus that were evacuated from China and from a cruise ship off the coast of Japan to Lackland Air Force Base. They were being held in quarantine.

The ripple effect of SXSW being cancelled will be felt throughout the local economy in hotels, restaurants, bars and stores.

“I’m not surprised SXSW was cancelled but I’m worried about the local restaurants that needed the revenue,” said Tony Tovar, head of community for Sana Benefits, an Austin-based healthcare startup. “I asked all of my coworkers to support their neighborhood restaurants, bars, coffeeshops, etc.”

Earlier in the week, Joshua Baer announced Capital Factory would not be hosting its Austin Startup Crawl, an annual ritual involving hordes of people visiting various tech centers around town. He also said Capital Factory cancelled Capital Factory House at SXSW and would not be hosting activities at its offices as it originally planned.

“Safety is our top priority,” Baer wrote in a post on Medium. “There is no hesitation about this decision after reviewing all of the available information and speaking at length with all of our team, our members, our partners, and our advisors.”

Ben Lamm, co-founder, and CEO of Hypergiant, also announced Friday that it was no longer hosting three days of special events focused on the space industry and artificial intelligence at its headquarters downtown.

Zoho, which has a large and growing campus in Austin, announced on Wednesday plans to cancel its annual Zoholics event in Austin, in late April.

“After consulting with global health experts across our various regions, we believe that this is the safest and most responsible decision for the entire Zoho community,” ccording to an email from Sandra Lo, Zoho spokeswoman. 

Zoholics is Zoho’s annual user conference. It was set to take place April 28 to April 30th at the Palmer Events Center. Zoholics featured keynote speeches, panel discussions, product demonstrations, parties and more.

Zoho is not the only tech company to cancel annual events. In February, the organizers behind the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona canceled the event because of fears of spreading the Coronavirus. Other tech giants have followed suit. Google cancelled Google I/O and Facebook nixed F8, its developers conference and the Adobe Summit is now an online event. The economic impact of those cancellations is expected to exceed $500 million, according to Recode, citing data from PredictHQ.

SXSW, which kicks off on March 13, is still going on as scheduled with a few alterations to its programming from a few cancelled speakers and pullback from a few tech companies.

The Coronavirus is now in 22 countries with more than 90,000 confirmed cases and more than 3,100 confirmed deaths, according to the World Health Organization. The virus can bring on flu-like symptoms, ranging from mild to severe illness and death. Symptoms may appear between two days and 14 days after exposure. Symptoms include fever, cough, and shortness of breath.

“We are proud of the time and attention we always give to our guests at events, from customers, partners to influencers, but this requires a large global employee presence on our end to provide the 1-1 access Zoho is known for,” Lo said in the email.  “Without the support of our international teams, we cannot deliver the extensive agenda we had planned for this year’s Zoholics.  This would have been the largest Zoholics to date — 3X larger than last year’s in projected attendance and number of sessions.”

The 2019 Zoholics event at the Palmer Events Center attracted more than 1,600 people attending, including 200 Zoho employees.

At Zoho’s 2019 event, Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s founder, announced the software company is moving its headquarters from Pleasanton, Calif. to a 369-acre campus near the Austin airport.

Zoho has more than 100 local employees and it has leased office space int he Bergstrom Tech Center. It is building a 100,000 square foot building on its campus, which it expects to complete next year. That building is expected to house 500 employees.

Zoho, founded 24 years ago, has more 7,000 employees with many of them based at a 45-acre campus in Chennai, India. Zoho makes a suite of software applications to run a business. It calls its Zoho One product “an operating system for business.”

The show will go on.

South by Southwest is not cancelled.

“There’s no evidence to suggest cancelling SXSW makes the community safer,” Mayor Steve Adler said during a press conference Wednesday morning. 

If that changes, the city, county and a health advisory panel will take action, Adler said. They are continually evaluating the evidence and data around the coronavirus, he said. 

SXSW organizers said the conference will still take place and they have posted extensive information about the Covid-19 Coronavirus on its website with information on how the conference is dealing with the threat. The conference kicks off March 13^thand runs through March 22^nd.

SXSW is a huge event for Austin. Last year, SXSW attracted 417,400 people to Austin including participation from more than 100 countries. It also had an impact on the Austin economy of $355.9 million, according to SXSW.

And even though city, county and SXSW officials have not cancelled the conference, several tech companies have announced plans to withdraw from various panels, keynote talks, parties and other events. 

Facebook and Twitter have both announced plans to withdraw from SXSW amid growing concerns about the spread of the coronavirus.

Earlier, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was scheduled to give a keynote talk at SXSW, announced he would not be participating because of the coronavirus. 

As of Wednesday, the list of tech companies withdrawing from participating has grown to include Intel, SAP, Vevo, Mashable and Tik Tok, according to CNN.  And Amazon Studios just announced plans to curtail its participation, according to Deadline.com.

And Author and Podcaster Tim Ferriss has announced he will not participate in SXSW and he took to Twitter to ask Mayor Adler to cancel the event to prevent a widespread outbreak of the virus in Austin.

An online petition calling for SXSW to be cancelled has also garnered more than 44,000 signatures.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 80 cases of Coronavirus in the U.S. resulting in nine deaths, and 13 states reporting cases. 

The outbreak first started in Wuhan China with the first reported cases on Dec. 31^st, 2019. 

To date, there are 90,893 reported cases of Covid-19 in 22 countries globally and 3,110 deaths, according to the World Health Organization press briefing on Wednesday.  Officials with the World Health Organizations did not recommend cancelling large events unless there is an immediate threat posed to those participating.

There are no confirmed cases in Texas, according to the Texas Department of Health Services. There are a number of people who tested positive for Covid-19 in people evacuated from China to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, according to the agency. But those people are under federal; quarantine and do not pose a risk to the general population. “The individuals will remain isolated at medical facilities until they test negative for the virus and are no longer at risk of spreading it.”

“The risk for all Texans remains low,” according to the Texas Department of Health Services.

The Coronavirus can bring on flu-like symptoms, ranging from mild to severe illness and death. Symptoms may appear between two days and 14 days after exposure. Symptoms include fever, cough, and shortness of breath.

The best way to prevent the spread of the disease is to stay home if you’re sick. The other recommendations from the CDC include:

• Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.
• Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
• Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces using a regular household cleaning spray or wipe.
• Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing. If soap and water are not readily available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol. Always wash hands with soap and water if hands are visibly dirty.

SXSW is less than three weeks away and Austin is going to be hopping.

There’s a ton of great programming for those with badges, but there are also some great activities going on for the general public.

This year, Hypergiant, a startup in downtown Austin cofounded by Ben Lamm, is hosting two special events and three days of panels, speakers and programming open to the public.

The first event kicks off at 10 a.m. on Saturday, March 14^th, at Hypergiant’s headquarters at 522 W 6th St. It’s the first ever, SpaceCom and it explores how aerospace and industry come together to connect space technologies and business innovation.

Space is limited, so make sure to grab a ticket on Eventbrite.

The second event is Hypergiant Presents: The AI Collective, which runs Sunday, March 15^ththrough Monday March 16^thfrom 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

“The AI Collective is an inclusive space for education, conversation, and collaboration around AI and emerging technologies for social good,” according to Hypergiant.

The AI Collective also requires tickets.

Hypergiant is also hosting some invite-only events like the Texas Takeover on Friday, March 14^that The Venue from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. It is an “invite-only VIP party for the who’s who of SXSW,” according to Hypergiant. The party will feature special musical guests Paul Wall and Slim Thug.

The Wall Street Journal has ranked Austin as the hottest big city labor market in the country.

Austin beat out number two, Nashville, on the list.

The Wall Street Journal ranked Austin, which has an unemployment rate of 2.7 percent, as its top spot because of big expansion projects announced in the area, particularly Apple’s $1 billion new campus in North Austin. That campus is expected to employ 15,000 when fully operational. Already, Apple has more than 7,000 local employees.

The Wall Street Journal, using Moody’s Analytics, examined the labor markets in 381 metro areas. It ranked the cities based on the unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, job growth, labor-force growth and wage growth.

Austin had 70.3 percent labor force job participation rate, 2.3 percent job growth, labor force job growth of 1.6 percent and wage growth of 5 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

That means in a job market with relatively tight supply, people are getting paid more in Austin in recent years. 

It’s no secret Austin is booming. Take a look at the city’s skyline and count the cranes to see how many new skyscrapers are going up around town. The city of Austin also has a map detailing all of the project underway. Contributing to its growth is Austin’s booming tech sector with lots of startup activity as well as big tech giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple having large campuses here. The city also has an emerging medical technology industry with Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin making an impact.

The other cities on the top ten list included Denver, 3, and Seattle, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City, Utah, all tied for fourth place, followed by Raleigh, North Carolina, 7, Orlando, 8, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, 9, and San Jose, 10^th.

San Antonio-New Braunfels ranked 13^thon the list.  Houston, The Woodlands and Sugar Land, ranked 21^st. 

In the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of small cities with less than 1 million people, two Texas cities ranked near the top, Midland, 2, followed by Odessa and Boulder, Colorado took the number one spot.