Category: Austin (Page 113 of 317)

Austin-based Javelin Networks, a cybersecurity startup, announced it has closed on $5 million in funding.

Investors participating in the Series A round included RSL Capital, Hillsven Capital, UpWest Labs, Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne and pother private investors.

Javelin Networks makes software that provides autonomous breach prevention, containment, threat hunting and incident response capabilities in a platform using artificial intelligence.

In addition, Javeline appointed Greg Fitzgerald to Chief Operating Officer to handle operations, sales and marketing. He previously worked as vice president for marketing for TippingPoint, which was acquired by 3COM and HP, senior vice president for Sourcefire, acquired by Cisco and senior vice president for Fortinet and chief marketing officer at Cylance.

“Cybersecurity is challenging vendors to innovate protection ahead of the attack. Javelin is disrupting the attacker by focusing on protecting the most sensitive and most exposed target, the Active Directory. After almost 22 years of bringing innovative companies to market and exceptional growth, Javelin is the first company I’ve experienced that actually stops attackers from gaining unfettered access to the organization,” Fitzgerald said in a news release.

Roi Abutbul is the founder and CEO of Javelin Networks.

“By combining A.I., obfuscation and advanced forensics methodologies right at the point of breach, we can respond automatically and in real time to contain the attack,” he said.

Austin-based uShip, an online shipping marketplace and freight automation software provider, on Wednesday announced Mike Williams has joined the company as its new Chief Executive Officer and board member.

uShip also announced that Jim Martell, the company’s interim CEO since last December, has been named Executive Chairman of uShip’s board.

Williams previously served as general manager of corporate real estate services with Accruent. He handled revenue growth and profitability and during his time there, the company’s software revenues tripled. In addition to Accruent, Williams served as president or CEO for Socialware, Nextance and PurchasingNet, as well as roles at Motorla, Trilogy and Memento.

His job at uShip will be to grow its consumer shipping marketplace and small and midsize business platform, which has generated $1 billion in total sales since uShip began in 2004, according to a news release.

“What the uShip team has built to date around key products and milestone partnerships has put it on the doorstep of explosive growth, especially in its enterprise and SMB segments,” Williams, who begins his role on Feb. 13, said in a news release. “There’s tremendous opportunity to drive more value for our current marketplace customers and partners as the logistics industry navigates a new wave of transformation, led in part by uShip’s online marketplace experience and technology.”

Williams has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Finance from Murray State University. He’s also worked with the FBI, the U.S. Embassy in Athens and The White House.

“Mike’s enthusiasm, business acumen, disciplined management and track record of revenue growth make him an ideal fit for this role,” Martell said in a news release. “In uShip, Mike will be guiding a true market leader that’s advancing in this space at a time when logistics is seeing unprecedented disruption, innovation and investment, unlike anything I’ve seen in my four decades in the industry.”

In 2004, UT graduate students, Jay Manickam, Shawn Bose and Matt Chasen started UShip. All three have since left the company. Chasen stepped down last year as CEO. uShip has raised $44.7 million in funding, according to its Crunchbase profile.

Last year, uShip moved into new headquarters located at 205 East Riverside Drive. The three-story, 45,000-square-foot campus houses the company’s entire 200-person workforce,

SubVRsive, a cinematic virtual reality production house, announced it has received $4 million in funding and hired a new Chief Executive Officer.

WPP, a global communications services company, invested in the Series A round.

The Austin-based startup, founded in 2015, hired Johannes Larcher as its CEO. He most recently served as executive at Hulu, the video on demand service owned by Disney, Fox, NBC and Time Warner.

The funding will allow SubVRsive to “accelerate our growth and continue to build our team with the best talent in the industry,” according to a blog post on the company’s website.

SubVRsive creates Virtual Reality experiences that help brands engage their audiences more deeply than ever before. Its customers include Lionsgate, MTV, and Downy Unstopables. The company was nominated for an Emmy for its work with Showtime Networks in capturing a boxing match in virtual reality.

“If our experience in immersive storytelling has taught us anything, it’s that Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are fundamentally redefining the ways in which brands connect with their audiences,” according to its blog post. “While the sight, sound, and motion of traditional video allow brands to explain their benefits to consumers, the immersive nature of Virtual Reality allows consumers to experience those benefits for themselves – and that experience is captivating. We are convinced that Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality will continue to push the envelope of storytelling and will offer brands more and more effective ways to deepen their engagement with their audiences.”

Just like buying a can of Coke, a giant Carvana fully-automated coin-operated car vending machine will deliver consumers cars.

It opens in Austin Tuesday morning.

Carvana, the online used car buying platform, has installed a car vending machine located to the South of Stassney Lane at 6014 S. IH 35. It has a similar machine in Houston and another one in Nashville.

The Austin Car Vending Machine is an all-glass structure that stands five stories tall, contains three delivery bays and stores up to 20 vehicles that are loaded in advance of a customer’s pick-up.

“We launched our free car delivery service in Austin in late 2015, and we’ve received positive feedback from customers in the area since then. The demand has been so great that it made sense for us to deepen our service in Austin with a Car Vending Machine,” Ernie Garcia, founder and CEO of Carvana, said in a news release.

After a consumer buys a car on Carvana’s website, they can choose to have it delivered directly or they can pick it up at one of Carvana’s car vending machines.

At the vending machine, customers get an oversized Carvana coin to drop in the coin slot and then the machine retrieves their car automatically from the tower and delivers it to the customer. The Austin Carvana Vending Machine is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Carvana, based in Phoenix, Arizona, has raised $460 million since its founding in 2013. The company closed on a $160 million Series C funding round last August. It has more than doubled the number of markets where it offers free, as soon as next day delivery, to 21. It also reports year over year revenue exceeding more than $350 million in 2016.

Diversity in tech is one of the most pressing issues facing Austin’s technology industry and the technology industry as a whole.

Getting more women and minorities involved in the technology industry is a key to innovation and growth of the overall ecosystem, said Preston James, one of the founding members of DivInc, a 12-week accelerator program promoting diversity. The other founding partners are Ashley Jennings and Dana Callender.

The accelerator is looking for early-stage tech startups or tech-enabled startups run by women or ethnically diverse founders.

“We are looking for those with a good attitude, who are persistent and really want to build a highly scalable business,” James said.

DivInc held its first cohort last fall with nine startup companies that culminated with a Demo Day at Google Fiber. The startups can be from anywhere as long as they commit to being in Austin for 12 weeks, James said. In the last cohort, two of the companies came from Houston and one from San Antonio, he said.

The startups in the original cohort have done well. Just last week, ConfirmX, one of the DivInc member startups based in Austin, launched in cities throughout Texas.

DivInc’s Spring cohort will run from April to June. It is based at Galvanize in downtown Austin. The deadline to apply is Friday.

“We welcome all to come experience the energy, the joy and the journey of building a successful startup business,” James said. “And DivInc is here to help them be successful and set them on a path for greater things.”

Austin-based OwnLocal announced its acquisition of Print2Web, a digital service provider to the newspaper industry, on Monday.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Print2Web, founded in 2001 in St. Petersburg, Florida, was one of the first companies to digitize print ads for newspapers. The company works with more than 450 newspapers and tens of thousands of local businesses, according to a news release.

“We look forward to leveraging OwnLocal’s global network and vast resources to help more local media organizations empower businesses in their communities,” Al Corey, founder and president of Print2Web, said in a news statement. With the acquisition, he is retiring. Print2Web’s other 30 employees will join OwnLocal.

The acquisition fits the mission of OwnLocal’s business which is to use technology to automatically turn traditional print, audio and video advertisements into online marketing campaigns. The company works with more than 3,000 newspapers including Gannet, tronc and Gatehouse Media. It handles digital ad campaigns for more than 100,000 local businesses every month. The addition of Print2Web allows OwnLocal to expand its partner network and the services it provides to its media partners.

“Newspapers have a difficult time offering affective and affordable digital solutions to their advertisers,” Lloyd Armbrust, founder and CEO of OwnLocal, said in a news statement. OwnLocal fills that need for small to medium sized businesses, he said.

OwnLocal, founded in 2010, has raised $3.45 million from 22 investors, according to Crunchbase. It is backed by Y-Combinator, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Knight Foundation, Baseline Ventures and angel investors. OwnLocal has acquired four companies since 2011 including Whoosh Traffic, Sidengo, Smart Media Kit and Print2Web. It has 70 employees.

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

The shortage of tech talent is acute in Austin and every U.S. city.

The U.S. faces a shortage of as many as 21 million skilled workers by 2020 in manufacturing, energy, health care, technology, education and other fields, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To fill job vacancies, Austin tech companies are going global.

Four Austin-based tech startups are finding software developers in Africa thanks to three-year-old Andela. The company, founded by Jeremy Johnson, Christina Sass, Ian Carnevale and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, has hired around 250 developers based in its Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya campuses.

Africa is the continent with the fastest growing population in the world with 1.2 billion people and a median age of 19.5, according to Andela. The company provides selected applicants with training and mentoring to become world-class software developers.

“Outside of New York and San Francisco, Austin is the largest location for Andela,” said Johnson. He spoke last week at The Zebra, an insurance aggregation startup, based in downtown Austin.

Andela hosted a panel discussion on “The Future of Work Will Be Distributed” last Thursday at The Zebra’s headquarters.

Right now, Andela works with four companies in Austin including The Zebra.

The company doesn’t like to call what it does outsourcing. It calls it distributed work.

“Andela basically finds and connects people to top developers,” Johnson said.

The developers work out of Andela campuses around the world and serve as team members of high growth companies like The Zebra, he said. Andela is well funded to pull off such a massive endeavor. To date, Andela has raised $39 million including $24 million last June in a Series B investment led by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and GV, formerly Google Ventures.

In the past two years, Andela has hired around 250 developers, of which 22 percent are women, from more than 50,000 applicants. The company has worked with more than 50 companies including Google and IBM. Each of its employees commit to working for four years with the company they are placed with, Johnson said. The retention rate is 97 percent, he said. At the end of the period, the developers either go to work directly for the companies they work with or they go to launch new companies.

In Austin, software developers change jobs, on average, every 18 months, said Meetesh Karia, Chief Technology Officer of The Zebra. He likes working with Andela’s developers. He also works with a small team in India and a small team in the Ukraine. The difference with the Andela developers is that they are more like a team member, he said. Technology tools like video conferencing, skype and Slack make it easy for developers in Austin to collaborate with developers in Lagos, Nigeria, he said. Those developers also travel to Austin to meet their team members in person and that makes creating great software even better, Karia said.

Kosy Anyanwa, Andela software developer based in Lagos, Nigeria, is working with The Zebra. She has been with Andela for a couple of years.

“Being at Andela I’ve worked with really smart people and I’ve learned a lot,” she said. “Working with The Zebra is a good company to work with.”

The company has a good cultural and her coworkers at The Zebra have a great sense of humor and that makes working with them even easier, she said.

Andela isn’t like outsourcing in the classical sense, Johnson said.

“We wanted to create a system that would allow for great software to get built,” he said. “The caliber of the people and the way they interact with each other. They engage like a teammate.”