Category: Austin (Page 111 of 317)

Atlas Wearables, a member of the first Techstars Austin cohort, officially debuted its smart fitness tracker in 2013.

A year later, Atlas launched an IndieGoGo campaign and raised $638,029, more than 500 percent above its goal, to create the Atlas Wristband, which identified exercises, reps and calculated calories burned and evaluated form.

The startup has also since raised $3.42 million in venture capital financing. Pre-school friends Peter Li and Michael Kasparian founded the company. In 2015, they made Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” list.

In November of 2015, Atlas fulfilled its IndieGoGo Atlas wristband orders and it has since created the Atlas Wristband 2: Digital Trainer and Heart Rate Band that sells for about $95 on Amazon and other retailers like Wal-Mart.

Now the company has a new product called Shape, a 24/7 Digital Fitness Coach inside a slim heart rate band. The device tracks daily activity and sleep and also tracks and guides users through personalized workouts. The band works with an app, available for both iOS and Android phones.

The device relies on metrics from Atlas Motion Tracking which is the company’s machine learning system that was built based on experience from the original Atlas Wristband, Wristband2, Atlas for Wear and Atlas Engine fitness products.

“Shape considers metrics from Atlas Motion Tracking, including form and personal bests, to find the ideal workout to help users reach their goals,” according to a news release. “Shape leverages Motion Tracking to automatically track workouts including recognizing specific exercises, counting reps, generating metrics, and logging rest intervals. For example, if a user does jumping jacks when they should be doing push-ups Shape knows, or if they’re not reaching up after they burpees, Shape knows.”

In February, Atlas launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise awareness about its latest product, Shape. It already has more than 900 backers and has raised $72,000, exceeding its goal of $50,000 with 15 days to go. Shape sells at an early bird price of $59 through the Kickstarter campaign.

The Shape product reaches a broader customer base, Li said. Since launching the Atlas wristband, the company has had thousands of users who have used Atlas nonstop and it has become a core part of their lifestyle, Li said.

Atlas has five full time developers focused on hardware and software in Austin. The company runs a lean operation, Li said.

Dropoff has expanded its same day delivery for business service to Denver, Colorado and Phoenix, Arizona.

The Austin-based startup expanded to other markets in Texas and to Florida and California last year.

With the addition of these new markets, Dropoff’s same day delivery service now reaches more than 55 million people across the U.S.

“There is usually a variety of factors in how we pick a market: population size, economy, existing carriers in that market, do we have currently have active customers in those markets. Those are things we look at,” said Sean Spector, CEO of Dropoff. “Denver and Phoenix check all those boxes.”

Dropoff provides same day deliver for everything from food to legal documents. Its clients include Sprinkles, Whole Foods, Neiman Marcus, Zazzle, AirBnB, JW Marriott and CarePoint Partners.

Dropoff is disrupting the courier industry. It has created a proprietary technology platform which includes online and mobile ordering, a native mobile app, real-time tracking and confirmations, a fast, scaleable, around the clock dispatch automation system called Intelligent Dispatch, an API for easy integration into ecommerce sites or warehouse management software.

“It’s our vision to totally reinvent the courier industry through our technology,” Spector said.
Dropoff plans to expand to more cities this year, Spector said. The goal is to expand to four to eight cities this year. It’s currently in 12 markets and its plans ultimately are to expand to 40 to 50 markets, Spector said.

“Our goal is to be that trusted brand/service in the top 40 to 50 cities in the U.S.,” he said. “We’ve taken a very thoughtful and methodical approach on how we roll out. We don’t just launch cities for the sake of launching.”

The company’s main business comes from companies in the commercial and industrial industry like large printing jobs and auto parts, healthcare, food and groceries and retail.

Same day delivery is its sweet spot. Dropoff recently delivered 10,000 Voodoo donuts to a University of Texas football game, Spector said.

Among its more unusual requests, Dropoff has picked up placentas at the hospital from mothers who have just given birth, dropped them off at a processing plant to be made into pills and taken the pills back to the mothers, Spector said.

Dropoff has 52 employees with 32 in Austin at its offices at Mopac and Ranch to Market 2244. The company, founded in 2014, has raised $7 million to date.

TrendKite, a public relations analytics company for agencies and corporate brands, has opened a new office in London.

The Austin-based startup, founded in 2012, closed on $16.6 million in funding last year and to date has raised $37 million.

TrendKite hired Gerard McNamara as its vice president of sales for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. He previously worked Vuelio.

“I joined TrendKite because I saw the opportunity to bring real value to a disruptive, operationally excellent, hyper-growth company,” McNamara said in a news release. “TrendKite redefines how PR professionals quantify their success, and has exciting plans to redefine earned media, and I look forward to scaling operations in the EMEA region.”

TrendKite has experienced strong growth in the past year and envisions its London office as strategic way to serve its growing international customer base.

“After experiencing TrendKite’s triple-digit growth and increased interest in future investments, opening a European office was reinforced as our obvious next step,” Erik Huddleston, CEO TrendKite said in a news release. “This lets us serve our already-global customer base more effectively, covering all timezones, while increasing growth in some of the strongest markets for both PR and marketing technology.”

In Austin, new entrepreneurs often struggle to get cash, especially that early investment to fuel their startups from inception to billion dollar ventures.

Austin is also known for bootstrapping.

But lately, a number of venture capital firms have launched big funds here and others from Silicon Valley, Houston and Boston have offices here or regularly travel to Austin to hunt for good investments.

Last Tuesday, Lowenstein Sandler and ATX Factory, hosted VentureCrushATX to give startups advice on preparing their company for an investment. A panel discussion featured advice from Adam Marcus, general partner of OpenView Venture Partners, based in Boston, and L.K. Pryzant, senior analyst with Mercury Fund, an early stage investment fund based in Houston. Kathi Rawnsley, partner with Lowenstein Sandler, moderated the discussion.

About 100 people from the Austin technology community attended the gathering held at ATX Factory. Here’s 10 takeaways from the event.

1. It’s hard to get venture capital. Marcus said his firm receives 185,000 pitches in its database and shifts through all that to find about 5,000 companies that someone from the firm contacts and it’s narrowed down to about 40 companies they meet with and then ultimately, they invest in four to five companies each year.
2. What do they look for to make an investment? Reoccurring revenue, customer retention, growth with ability to scale and become a multi-billion-dollar company, Marcus said.
3. Don’t just talk to the VC partners. It’s important to talk to associates and analysts, Marcus said. Partners in a VC firm don’t have time to meet with everyone and associates and analysts are often the first line of communication with a firm. At the end of the day, it’s about getting the junior people excited about the profile of the company so they refer it to a partner, Marcus said.
4. Startups in Austin need to get their brand noticed by the coasts by participating in leadership activities, Pryzant said. There is a lot of hype in Silicon Valley, she said. But that doesn’t mean those companies have better metrics or better teams than they have here, she said.
5. In Austin, entrepreneurs are more transparent and less full of shit, Marcus said. But the entrepreneurs here need to have more bravado and present their ideas bigger, he said. There’s a balance between being obnoxiously audacious and being a little more ambitious with your goals, Marcus said. The middle of the country is modest to a fault sometimes, he said. A $4 million to $5 million annual revenue run rate company in Austin needs to be able to tell a story about how they can get that to $3 billion or $4 billion, he said. It’s all about how you pitch your story and get people really excited about it, he said.
6. Entrepreneurs also need to understand the VC firm they pitch to and what they invest in and what their expectations are, Marcus said. For example, his company has a $300 million fund. If they invest $10 million, and they get $50 million return, they are happy. If they get a $100 million return they are jumping up and down and you’ll probably get a car, he said.
7. Who you pick as your VC partner is extremely important because if you get a big name to invest in the company early on and not in follow on rounds, everyone will wonder why they are not investing, Marcus said. Also, if things go sideways, some firms in Silicon Valley cut off the entrepreneurs. They stop returning phone calls and attending board meetings, he said. “If they think you are no longer a winner, you’re kind of dead to them,” he said.
8. There’s a lot of hype in Silicon Valley. A startup company valued at more than $1 billion isn’t really a unicorn, Marcus said. Most unicorns will be sold for pennies on the dollar, he said.
9. It isn’t always all about the team. The team in place is not as important as whether the entrepreneur can express the vision so they can recruit good people, Marcus said.
10. Make sure when pitch you can tell how you are going to spend the money you raise, Marcus said. Building a company is really hard, he said. You are not going to get everything right, But you have to have a plan. You can’t just act like you’re just throwing something against the wall and hoping it will work.

Localeur, a community of locals who share their favorite places to eat, drink and play online, Thursday announced its expansion to London.

The Austin-based company also recently announced expansion to Toronto and Vancouver.

The company created a website and free iOS and Android apps that allow travelers to discover unique places in a city that only a local might know about. Its target market is a service created by and for millennials.

Last October, Localeur closed on $4.2 million in venture capital financing. Joah Spearman and Chase White, both former employees of Bazaarvoice, founded the company in 2013 and launched right before SXSW. Silicon Hills News did this profile of the company.

“In 2013, Localeur was named the best new startup by Austin Monthly and has been named one of the top travel apps by “The Today Show”, Forbes, TIME, Travel & Leisure, BET, Black Enterprise, Examiner, MSN, MTV, Men’s Journal, and others since,” according to a news release. “To date, Localeur has captured local recommendations exclusively from locals on more than 10,000 of the best local bars, restaurants, shops and points of interest in more than 40 major U.S. cities from Austin and Boston to Los Angeles and New York City, and, now, Toronto and Vancouver and London.”

Conversable, an intelligent conversation platform for businesses, Thursday announced the launch of a new product called AQUA, which stands for Answer Questions Using AI.

With AQUA, any employee in a company can push automated responses live to a bot without any knowledge of how to code.

“Bots are stupid,” said Ben Lamm, CEO of Conversable. “2016 was the year of bot hype.”

What Conversable has created is a software program that relies on a machine learning engine that learns from consumer interactions. That allows the intelligent program to sort through costumer queries and flag the most important ones for product managers. The managers can then respond to those questions and push them live to a bot for distribution.

“Andrew and I are big believers that words matter,” Lamm said. “We think of bots as the eyes, ears, nose and mouth of a company but they are not really the brain.” Andrew Busey is the co-founder and chief product officer of Conversable.

AQUA reaches consumers on all a company’s conversational channels, Lamm said. It also automates the flow of information and it provides data and insights back to the brand, he said.

For example, if a customer visits the restaurant chain Wingstop’s homepage, the program can recognize that customer and based on past purchases, it can tell she has a food allergy and requires gluten-free options. Instead of having the customer go looking for that information, the program can serve them up with suggestions for gluten-free entrees.

Like Amazon’s Alexa home management system that relies on artificial intelligence and becomes smarter with use, so does the AQUA program. It continually learns from interactions with consumers and employees.

“It gives the brand the ability to have better interactions and to better serve that consumer,” Lamm said.

“The combination of advances in AI with the rapid adoption of messaging platforms has opened up broad new opportunities to drive dramatic improvements in customer care,” Busey said in a news release. “The AQUA system combines human-assisted machine learning with adaptive systems and an easy to use console to let business managers deliver answers quickly, easily, and correctly, to their customers.”

AQUA manages frequently asked consumer questions, whether they are routine or obscure, and frees up the company’s employees to work on harder customer problems, Lamm said.

Conversable launched a little over a year ago, the company has raised about $3 million in seed stage capital from a handful of angel investors locally. Lamm and Busey have also invested in the company. Conversable has already attracted major brands like Budweiser, Whole Foods, Domino’s Pizza, Viacom, Wingstop, Victoria Secret, Ernst & Young and others as customers.

“We haven’t even built out a sales and marketing team yet,” Lamm said. “Conversable has zero sales people.”

The brands have been calling Conversable directly to solve problems they encounter. For example, Budweiser released a special Internet of Things cup in Canada for hockey fans. Every time their team scored, the cup would light up. That created a huge buzz for the company. But it also created a huge headache for their social media and consumer help teams that got swamped with customer inquiries about the cup. Budweiser turned to Conversable to create an automated response program to handle the huge volume of questions, Lamm said.

Conversable is building a multi-billion-dollar business in Austin with an office in Dallas, Lamm said. Its artificial intelligence driven platform helps brands reach their customers with automated experiences on all major messaging and voice applications. The company, which is currently based at Capital Factory, has 28 employees in Austin and five in Dallas. It expects to expand to 100 employees or more by the end of the year, Lamm said.

Asked if Conservable is a call center killer, Lamm said it will disrupt that industry.

“Automation has the potential to change jobs,” he said.

People need to evolve and adapt as artificial intelligence takes on a greater role in the workplace, Lamm said.

“Artificial intelligence can create new kinds of jobs,” he said. “Machines can’t do everything. They still need humans.”

Conversable is thinking big and has big goals, Lamm said.

“The machine learning, artificial intelligence space really matters,” he said. Conversational artificial intelligence, data, voice communications is going to lead to better conversations and better customer interactions, he said.

“It’s going to have a massive impact and change the world,” Lamm said.

Next Coast Ventures announced Thursday that it has closed on its debut fund at $85 million.

The fund was oversubscribed by $25 million and its limited partners include leading institutional investors, funds of funds and family offices.

Next Coast Ventures is looking at investing in deals in Austin and in the middle part of the country in emerging tech hubs – between the coasts, said Mike Smerklo, co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures.

Next Coast Ventures plans to invest in software-powered, full stack business models designed for digital natives as well as innovative companies in the education, retail, business to business and business to consumer sectors. It has already invested in four Austin startups including Umuse, Dropoff, OnRamp and Phlur and one San Francisco-based startup Cloverpop and one New York-based startup Clarity Money, said Tom Ball, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Next Coast Ventures. It has also invested in another company, which it has not publicly announced yet.

“Tom and I have known each other for almost 20 years,” said Smerklo. “We’ve both been entrepreneurs.”

Before launching the firm, Smerklo ran ServiceSource and took it from a small startup to a public company with more than 3,000 employees. Ball was general partner with Austin Ventures. Before that, he founded Tahoe Domains, an ICANN accredited registrar and he worked as CEO and Co-Founder of Openfield and Razorgator Interactive; and Chairman, CEO and Founder of eCoupons.

They decided to launch Next Coast Ventures because of serendipity and market opportunity, Smerklo said.

“We wanted to create a different type of venture firm,” he said.

They are both from the Midwest and they’re both drawn to investing there. They also worked in Silicon Valley. So they have a strong network for future financing opportunities for companies in their portfolio.

Next Coast Ventures plans to invest in 20 to 30 companies over a three to five year period, Ball said. It invests in about five to seven companies a year or 1 percent to 2 percent of the overall companies it looks at, he said.

“At the end of the day, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said.

What makes the process easier is that Next Coast Ventures takes a thematic approach to investing and is very specific in the themes it looks at, Smerklo said.

“It’s a service to the entrepreneurs because we’re able to say no faster than most,” he said.

With traditional VCs, a lot of the investments flow around a software team and a hardware team, Ball said. That doesn’t allow you to be efficient, he said.

“We’re looking at what are the three or four things happening now and how they are going to change over the next five to ten years,” Smerklo said.

Another way to say it, using a hockey analogy, is they look for entrepreneurs who are skating to where the puck is going, not where it is, Ball said.

Twenty years ago, most venture capital investing was done by former entrepreneurs, Smerklo said.

“We’re just returning to its roots,” he said. “We’ve both been operators. We’ve both been entrepreneurs and we both had exits. When you run that gamut of the life cycle you’re able to give entrepreneurs relevant advice.”

A lot of talk in the Austin technology community for the past few years has been about a lack of funding for early stage entrepreneurs, but firms like Next Coast Ventures have formed to fill that gap. Other local VC firms include LiveOak Venture Partners, Silverton Partners, S3 Ventures, Sante Ventures, ATX Seed Ventures, True Wealth Venture Partners and angel investors like the Central Texas Angel Network. There’s also local technology accelerators with funds like Techstars Austin and Capital Factory.

“I’ve lived here 11 years and I think it’s better than it’s ever been,” Ball said. “There are more options for entrepreneurs in terms of firms now than in the last decade. There’s a good balance and a competitiveness and collaboration among the firms. I think it’s great right now… Good ideas are getting funded in Austin and it’s a great time to be in Austin.”

The super early seed and accelerator networks have filled in the gap left by Austin Ventures when it decided not to raise another fund after having raised a $900 million fund of which $300 million targeted early stage investing, Smerklo said.

“The challenge is Series A and Series B for companies,” Smerklo said.

That’s the role Next Coast Ventures plays. It can tap into its Silicon Valley network to help those investors find some great Austin-based investment opportunities at the later stages, Smerklo said.

Next Coast Ventures bought a house at 12th and Nueces and remodeled it into a cool office with entrepreneurs in mind, Smerklo said. It’s an open work space. They plan to move in by the end of March. They are also bringing on a new venture partner and they are hiring for a few more positions.

The talent in Austin is also great for building tech companies, but Austin can always use more, Ball said.

“A ridiculous number of people move to Austin every day,” Ball said. “The good news is with the successes of the last decade there’s no risk in moving to Austin anymore. When I first moved here it was hard to recruit people.”

Austin’s universities graduate talented students and those students are getting to stick around because of all the tech companies here now, Ball said. Established companies like Oracle, Facebook, Apple and Google allow the younger workforce to stay in town.

“You have all the ingredients that makes this a great talent pool for the tech industry,” he said.

And Austin is the best place to launch a company for a few years running, according to the Kauffman Foundation.

“It has a national buzz,” Smerklo said

And it’s cheaper to build a company here, Ball said.

The downside of that is Austin has venture-backed companies that aren’t going to have big exits and they stick around for a long time, Ball said. In Silicon Valley, there is a huge velocity of turnover, he said.

“Things just fail fast out there,” he said.

Austin needs a better flushing mechanism, Ball said. That way some of the great talent working on things that are never going to hit it big, can roll out and work on another startup, he said.

Silverton Partners, a venture capital firm founded in 2005, is raising a $100 million Silverton Partners V fund, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Austin-based venture capital firm lists Adam Chibib, Michael Dodd, Morgan Flagler and Kip McClanahan as its general partners. Bill Wood, Silverton Partners’ founder, was not listed on the latest filing.

Silverton Partners previously raised funds totaling $150 million. It has made 82 investments in 40 companies, according to its Crunchbase profile. Its portfolio has had two Initial Public Offerings and ten acquisitions, according to Crunchbase.

Silverton provides seed stage and early stage funding and later stage venture funding as well as debt financing. The firm targets investments in software, enterprise software and identity management. Its initial investments usually range between $200,000 and $4 million, according to information on its website.

It invests primarily in Austin-based companies. Silverton has invested in OutboundEngine, WP Engine, The Zebra, Favor, TrendKite, Turnkey Vacation Rentals and more.

Max Hoberman grew up in Austin, graduated from the LBJ High School, now called the Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy of Austin.

Then he went on to get a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism from the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Communications. After graduation, he decided to pursue a career as a game developer and spent 10 years with Bungie Studios.

In 2006, Hoberman launched Certain Affinity, which is now Austin’s largest independent game studio. It has 125 employees currently with plans to hire 105 more game developers, Hoberman said.

And Certain Affinity just purchased the 55,000 square foot building which previously housed the Texas Association of School Boards at 7620 Guadalupe Street.

Mayor Steve Adler made the announcement Friday, noting its the first construction project to benefit from the Texas’ Media Production Facilities Development Program, according to a news release.

Hoberman said the project has been in the works for a year and construction began in November. The company expects to move from its 25,000 square feet of leased space in North Austin at 3107 Oak Creek Dr. in June. The new building will include two floors of creative development space, amenities, playtest labs, sound design suites and a virtual reality development lab.

The first floor will feature an open design and will be available for lease to other companies in June. STG Architects designed the site plans and Balfour Beatty is the general contractor.

“Everything we’ve done has been designed around fitting the maximum number of developers on the second and third floor of the building,” Hoberman said. “A lot of the work we do tends to be high profile and confidential.” And that’s why the company doesn’t plan to use the first floor, he said.

Certain Affinity also has plans down the road to expand further with plans for a parking garage and another 50,000 square foot building, Hoberman said.

Certain Affinity is entirely bootstrapped. The company has been profitable every year and has grown every year, Hoberman said. It has generated more than $100 million in revenue. For the first time, Hoberman said he’s looking at venture capital investment to expand the company even faster.

Certain Affinity co-develops major games such as Call of Duty, Halo and Doom. Currently, the company is working on four game titles, including two it has developed internally, Hoberman said.

“Austin is a city where good ideas become real, and this is one of the best. Certain Affinity is leveraging Austin’s strength as a game-developing center to create opportunities where, for too long, inequities have held entire communities back. This is exactly how we should be using economic incentives – in this case, sales tax exemptions – to target jobs and opportunity where Austin needs it most,” Mayor Adler said in a news release.

“Certain Affinity is a leader in digital gaming and home entertainment. It is fitting to have Certain Affinity as the first company in the state to be the recipient of this new incentive, which reinforces Austin’s standing as a center of innovation and creativity in digital media. The Chamber through Opportunity Austin is pleased to have worked alongside their leadership to reach this successful moment that will benefit the entire local community,” Kerry Hall, 2017 Chair, Opportunity Austin, said in a news release.