Category: Austin (Page 115 of 317)

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Well Beyond Care, an online caregiving matchmaker service, won the first Rice Alliance-Austin Chapter and Central Texas Angel Network pitch competition on Wednesday night at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar.

The Austin-based winner received a prize package worth more than $100,000 including “in kind” prizes from Andrews Kurth, Capital Factory and other companies.

Yip Yap, an Austin-based mobile communications company for kids, and Shower Stream, a water saving device maker based in Austin, tied for audience favorite.

Rice Alliance and CTAN picked ten Texas-based seed stage companies to present at the event from more than 60 applicants.

Jeffrey Fry, CEO and Co-Founder, came up with the idea for Well Beyond Care after caring for his ailing mom, who lived in Alexandria, Virginia for seven years.

Today, more than seven and half million people are getting in home care, Fry said. The market is $120 billion for in home care, but by the end of the decade it’s going to be $180 billion, he said.

And 95 percent of all the people who get in-home or private duty care use an agency, Fry said. The two biggest problems with those agencies are truancy and turnover of workers, he said.

“So, you get unreliable care,” Fry said.

As an engineer, Fry wanted to create something better than what’s out there. He created an online service that connects caregivers directly with families who need them. That saves the families money and they get a reliable caregiver that shows up because they are making more money, Fry said.

Well Beyond Care, founded in 2014, has raised $310,000 in seed stage capital so far, Fry said. The company is raising additional funds to build new features into its mobile app, Fry said.

One of the audience’s favorite’s Yip Yap, a mobile communications company for kids, has created a $99 kid-friendly mobile device called Pipsqueak. Angela Smith, co-founder and mother of four, created the device as an alternative to handing her kids her $600 smart phone.

Yip Yap makes money on the hardware, sells premium features and has in-app content purchases to make money, Smith said.

Yip Yap has already made 1,300 Pipsqueak devices manufactured in Shenzhen, China. The company has raised a little under $700,000 to date from friends, family and angel investors.

Another audience favorite, Shower Stream, created a motion activated shower head adapter which helps customers eliminate water waste, save energy and ultimately save money on their electric bills, said Greg Floyd, founder. People waste water when they turn on the shower to warm up the water and leave it unattended, he said.

The typical shower is ten minutes long and two minutes is wasted while people wait for the shower to warm up, Floyd said.

The company is targeting hotels and estimates it can save a typical 300 room hotel $30,000 annually, Floyd said. The company also provides a data and analytics dashboard that shows the savings from each shower device. The device costs $100. The company has created a prototype and is in talks with hotel operators about doing a pilot program, Floyd said.

The other finalists included:

Anderson Remplex: This Flower Mound-based startup created a product called ProROX to eliminate pathogens from food products for commercial kitchens and consumers.

HipPocket: This Dallas-based startup created a better search and marketing product for real estate listings using machine learning, data and analytics. The company says it transforms how buyer and sales agents connect and consumers buy homes.

Renovate Simply: This Austin-based startup created a home renovation platform for banks, credit unions and other lending institutions to automate the home renovation process and provide increased transparency and reduce risk.

Cingo: This Austin-based startup provides the technology for companies to embed real time in app customer support in their mobile apps.

Homads: This Austin-based startup created a marketplace for month to month rentals of 30 or more days.

Sandbox Commerce: This Austin-based startup created a simply to use system that allows retailers to create a mobile app easily without any knowledge of coding.

SigTrak – This Austin-based startup created technology for data extraction and analytics for microchip design.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Samba TV, a San Francisco-based company which provides real-time television data and analytics, opened an office in Austin two years ago.

Omar Zennadi, co-founder of Samba TV and director of engineering, heads up the local office with ten employees. It’s primarily engineering focused, he said.

Zennadi is a 2003 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin in electrical engineering. After graduation, he moved to San Francisco and started working at BitTorrent, a peer to peer file sharing company that lets people download large files quickly and easily. Zennadi and the other founders of Samba TV are ex-BitTorrent employees.

“Deep in my heart I always wanted to get back to Austin,” Zennadi said. “I saw this burgeoning startup scene starting to grow. It really fostered that desire. As we were looking at emerging tech talent pools, Austin was one that I would always bring up.”

Founded in 2008, formerly as Flingo, Samba TV develops software for televisions, set-top boxes, smart phones and tablets to enable interactive television and data tracking. Its technology is installed directly into the TV or set-top box to track onscreen content. Its applications are available on more than 30 million screens in 118 countries.

“When it comes down to it we’re a data company, but we have consumer products as well,” Zennadi said. “We build cool interactions with television. We build an environment where applications can be aware of the content you’re watching.”

Samba TV provides TV viewership data across millions of TVs, Zennadi said. The company disrupted the industry which previously involved consumer surveys via snail mail.

Samba TV is backed by $8 million in venture capital with investors including Mark Cuban. Co-Founder Ashwin Navin is the CEO and a former co-founder of BitTorrent. Other co-founders include David Harrison, Alvir Navin and Todd Johnson. Samba TV also has an office in Los Angeles and an engineering office in Warsaw, Poland, a team in Taipei, Taiwan and an office in Lake Tahoe. Altogether, the company has 150 employees and it allows them to do office rotation programs to work out of any of the other locations for a month at a time, Zennadi said.

Other perks include $5,000 educational grants, Tahoe Friday ski weekends, free lunch Wednesdays, gaming room with a HTC Vive Virtual Reality set and more.
Samba TV also gives every employee the ability to early exercise their equity in the startup. The company is profitable and has experienced 600 percent year over year growth, according to a news release.

Austin has been a great fit for Samba TV, Zennadi said. Samba TV continues to hire, primarily engineers, he said.

“We tend to be very choosy in picking our engineers,” he said. “We look for the best and brightest. There are some great engineers here in Austin. We’re working on a lot of cool problems for an engineer. The TV domain is fun. It’s not another enterprise software. There is a lot of data. A lot of big data problems. We’re working with a large number of TVs and advertisers.”

Samba TV has a lot of data. That allows engineers to solve problems at scale by processing that data, Zennadi said.

“We’re doing a lot of cool and innovative stuff,” he said. “It’s made recruiting a breeze.”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Venture capital investments in Austin dropped 7 percent in deal flow to 112 deals and $834 million invested in 2016, down 3 percent, compared to the previous year, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Still, Austin outperformed the U.S. market which saw a drop of 16 percent in deals to 4,520 with $58.6 billion invested, down 20 percent, in 2016, compared to 2015.

The fourth quarter saw an even steeper decline in Austin with $11 million invested, down 26 percent, in 26 deals, down 10 percent, compared to the same quarter a year ago, according to the MoneyTree report.

The uncertainty around the presidential election may have contributed to the decrease in investment in 2016 compared to 2015 both nationally and locally, said Larry Westall, partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, based in Austin.

“When I look at the Austin data and the types of companies that got funded this quarter, we, in Austin, remain in a good place,” Westall said. “We have good companies and quality deals that continue to get funded.”

Overall, 2017 was a solid year, Westall said.

“It was relatively flat in total dollars and deals,” he said. “The way I look at where we are at, 2017 should be another solid year. We expect the IPO market to rebound from where it was.”

Only 40 or so venture backed companies went public last year and only 15 of those were tech, Westall said.

“We’ll have more of a normalized year in 2017,” he said.

In Austin, the Internet industry captured the most investment for the fourth quarter and year with $51 million invested in 10 deals during the fourth quarter and $450 million invested in 59 deals during 2016, according to the MoneyTree Report. TrendKite landed $16.3 million in investment, making it the largest Internet deal in the fourth quarter.

Overall, the biggest deal in the fourth quarter was a $22 million investment in Phunware in the mobile and telecommunications industry. Phunware offers application development platforms.

In the fourth quarter of 2016, investors put $11.7 billion in U.S. venture capital-backed startup companies across 982 deals, down 17 percent in dollars and 14 percent in deals from the same quarter a year ago, according to the MoneyTree Report. This is the first time since the fourth quarter of 2011, that deal activity fell below 1,000 deals.

“Despite continued deceleration in venture capital investment activity, the startup ecosystem remains flush with quality deals,” Tom Ciccolella, US Venture Capital Leader at PwC said in a news release. “As industries continue to be disrupted by technology and Internet capabilities, new opportunities are emerging. It’s these opportunities, despite the decline, that continue to drive venture capital momentum.”

TOP 10 Austin VC Deals in the 2016 Fourth Quarter

Company	Industry	Venture Capital
Phunware	Mobile & Telecommunications	$22 million
Trendkite	Internet	$16.3 million
Twyla	Internet	$14 million
Hangar Technology	Software	$6.5 million
Isocline Engineering Corp.	Software	$6.3 million
M87	Mobile & Telecommunications	$5 million
Chiron Health	Internet	$4.79 million
Factom	Internet	$4.19 million
Illumitex	Electronics	$4 million
Xeris Pharmaceuticals	Healthcare	$4 million

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A tiger pistol shrimp is the planet’s loudest creature. With one claw larger than the other, when it snaps that claw, the sound can reach 218 decibels -louder than a gunshot.

And that’s why Steve Hibberd and his co-founder Troy Townsend named their startup, Tiger Pistol, when they founded it in 2011 in Melbourne, Australia. They were focused on helping small businesses have a big impact with customers in social media.

They had a global vision for the social advertising tech company from the start.

“Our focus is on delivering amazing outcomes for small business,” Hibberd said. “We’ve been small business operators ourselves. When small businesses are spending a dollar, they want something tangible in return.”

And Tiger Pistol is succeeding. “Tiger Pistol is the largest publisher of Facebook ads for small and medium-sized business globally,” Hibberd said. “No one publishes more SMB ads than Facebook itself,” he said. It became a Facebook small business marketing partner in early 2013, and then expanded to the U.S. in 2015.

Last year, Tiger Pistol relocated its headquarters from Los Angeles to Austin and it has been growing dramatically since, Hibberd said. They hired 20 people in the last three months in Austin, he said.

“We are super excited about how it’s worked out and the people we’ve been able to attract,” Hibberd said.

The company, with 30 employees in a 6,000-square foot space at Sixth and Brazos, is continuing to hire to accommodate its growth, he said. Tiger Pistol also has 60 employees altogether with offices in Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia.

Tiger Pistol is a software as a service company that sells its software to small and medium sized business resellers to create, deploy, manage and optimize Facebook and Instagram ads at scale. Tiger Pistol’s platform delivers campaign automation, creative testing, and real-time machine-learning to maximize performance, Hibberd said. The platform saves ad campaign managers a lot of time and allows them to get a better performing campaign, he said.

“Our software platform is focused on scale and how to make it possible for every small business to get more value from social ads,’’ Hibberd said.

Small businesses in 423 different industries use Tiger Pistol’s software. Some of the biggest categories are lawyers and real estate agents, health and wellbeing businesses and party planners. Newspapers also use Tiger Pistol’s software to serve small businesses and help them drive sales from Instagram and Facebook ads.

“It’s a really exciting time because of the number of organizations providing Facebook and Instagram ads is in huge demand,” Hibberd said.

Tiger Pistol, which bootstrapped until a few years ago, has taken on two rounds of capital for a total investment of $5 million. Its investors are high net worth individuals in Australia and the U.S., Hibberd said.

Last year, Tiger Pistol grew 300 percent over 2015, Hibberd said. And this year, the company is expected to grow up to another 300 percent, he said.

“Facebook is continuing to experience incredible growth and the ad spend by small businesses represents 80 percent of the growth,” Hibberd said. And Instagram advertising is growing, he said.

“Small businesses are getting value from social today,” Hibberd said. “We’re only in business if the florist or the plumber gets value for the money they are spending.”

Tiger Pistol is one of a handful of tech companies to move to Austin recently with ties to Australia. Eddie Machalaani and Mitch Harper founded BigCommerce in 2009 in Sydney, Australia and opened an Austin office that same year. It is now based in Austin with two locations and 285 employees. Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in 2002 in Sydney, Australia. They have a 75,000-square foot office in downtown Austin and more than 300 employees. And Katie May, Austin native and serial entrepreneur, relocated ShippingEasy from Sydney, Australia to Austin in 2012. Last year, Stamps.com bought the company for $55 million.

Tiger Pistol knows it made the right move relocating its headquarters to Austin, Hibberd said.

“The people in Austin are so genuine and nice and helpful,” Hibberd said. “For a company moving into Austin, you could have that competitive wariness, but the welcoming nature of the people is striking. That’s an important factor. That’s something for Austin to be extremely proud about.”

South by Southwest just announced four Austin startups made the finalists and two companies made the alternates list in the highly competitive SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event.

The finalists from Austin include Litmus Health in the Health and Wearables category, FishViews and Makerarm in the Innovative World Category and SPLT in the transportation category.

The alternates include Maidbot in the Innovative World category and Claimbot in the Payment & FinTech category.

Overall, 50 finalists in ten categories made the cut for the ninth annual SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event which takes place March 11-12 during SXSW Startup Village track at the Hilton Downtown Austin.

This year, the SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event received more than 500 applications from startups based in cities around the world. The event added three new categories: transportation, sports and security and privacy.

“This year’s class of finalists are the best we’ve ever seen in the nine years we have been organizing this competition. I’m particularly excited about the diverse innovation we are seeing from all over the world – it’s the globalization of the startup ecosystem, and Accelerator is right at the heart of it. A couple of the most prevalent trends reflected across SXSW as a whole involve artificial intelligence and health and wearable technologies, and we are seeing an anticipated rise of innovation in non-traditional sectors, highlighted by our new categories,” SXSW Accelerator Event Producer Chris Valentine said in a news statement.

This year’s finalists hail from global cities like Moscow; Istanbul; Cork, Ireland; Liverpool, UK; Brussels; Ahmedabad; Calgary, Canada; Frankfurt, Germany; London; Auckland, New Zealand; and more.

“SXSW Accelerator alums have raised over $3.1 billion in funding, and we are so excited to give these 50 companies the opportunity to add to these accomplishments,” Valentine said.

For a complete list of the 2017 Finalists, including alternates, and the Accelerator Pitch Event judges, visit the SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event website.

We’re still basking in the glow of the Austin Technology Calendar Party last Friday at Galvanize Austin.

It was a great event and a good time for all. If you missed it and you want a Austin 2017 Wall Sized Tech Calendar for $30 each, please contact Laura Lorek.

Austin always has a lot of events going on. This week, we’ve picked out five that should be on your radar.

TUESDAY: Austin Internet of Things Meetup at Sherlock’s Baker St Pub, 9012 Research Blvd from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Kevin Saye of Microsoft will give a talk about Azure Machine Learning, Cognitive Services, and IoT to secure a location and eliminate human error and false alarms.

Also on Tuesday, the VR Austin Meetup at The North Door, 502 Brushy St. from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. The meetup will feature demos of The Town by Troll House Games and VR Dungeon Crawler by Potato Face Games.

WEDNESDAY: The Rice Alliance – Austin Chapter and Central Texas Angel Network are hosting a pitch competition that kicks off at 6 p.m. at Alamo Drafthouse, 1120 S. Lamar Blvd. Tickets cost $25. The winner of the pitch competition will receive a prize package.

THURSDAY: Built In Brews at Procore Technologies at 221 W. 6th St, 18th floor from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Procore just moved into larger offices in Austin. This is a chance to check out their new space and to learn about the jobs they have open. (Full disclosure: Procore is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News)

SATURDAY: Business Fundamentals for Musicians at General Assembly from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at WeWork, 600 Congress Ave., 14th floor.

Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, announced Thursday its plans to acquire Planview, an Austin-based software company.

The two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for Thoma Bravo to acquire Planview form Insight Venture Partners. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Thoma Bravo will become the new majority shareholder of Planview upon the closing of the transaction, while Insight Venture Partners will maintain a minority stake in the company.

Planview’s CEO Patrick Durbin founded the company in 1989. The company makes project portfolio management tools and has offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia. It has more than 550 customers worldwide including Wells Fargo, WellPoint, Citi, Hallmark, Freddie Mac, BP, Aetna and others.

“Planview is on an exciting journey that is redefining our company, the market, and the value we can provide to our customers,” Greg Gilmore, CEO of Planview said in a news statement.

The company plans to keep its headquarters in Austin. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, subject to regulatory approval.

In 2013, Zac Maurais and Ben Doherty launched Favor in Austin to deliver food to people’s doorsteps.

The startup quickly grew and later that year, Favor attracted $2 million in seed stage funding. The next year, the company landed $13 million with plans to expand nationwide.

Those plans came to a halt this week.

Favor announced it is pulling out of all cities outside of Texas. At its peak, the company operated in 23 cities across the U.S. and Canada. But it began scaling back operations last June when it pulled out of five cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami and Washington, DC.

Favor faced a lot of competition in the food delivery business from Instacart, Postmates, Uber Eats, Amazon and others.

The Austin-based mobile delivery app reported it achieved “3X growth” in 2016 and it is “aggressively pursuing a clear path to profitability with a singular focus on continued rapid growth throughout Texas.”

“We’re incredibly proud of the strong growth we experienced in 2016, especially in Texas” Favor CEO and President Jag Bath said in a statement. “As part of our ongoing smart growth strategy, we are shifting our near-term focus back on Texas, creating a clear line of sight to profitability while still maintaining an impressive rate of growth.”

“As an Austin-based company, Texas makes up a significant part of our business, and as the second most populous state in the nation, we have ample room to continue growing our dominant presence throughout the state. Our approach mirrors the growth strategy of several successful Texas brands, including Alamo Drafthouse and HEB, that perfected their model within the state before expanding more broadly. We are excited about our prospect for growth and profitability in 2017 and beyond,” Bath said.

Last year, Favor reported more than $60 million in gross product sales. It has more than 20,000 active runners. The company did not comment on how its scaling back will affect contract and full time employees.

Last year, the company, with 121 local employees, moved into 12,000 square foot headquarters at 1705 Guadalupe Street.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Austin entrepreneurs Joseph Kopser and Bret Boyd have launched Grayline, a corporate consulting firm.

Kopser previously worked as global president of moovel, a subsidiary of Diamler AG. Moovel recently announced plans to consolidate operations to Portland.

Kopser cofounded RideScout and sold it in 2014 to Car2Go, an Austin-based subsidiary of Diamler. He has roots in Austin and has become deeply involved in its entrepreneurial ecosystem. With Grayline, he saw an opportunity to build something special with Boyd, who previously worked as a vice president for Stratfor, a geopolitical analysis and consulting firm. Boyd built and ran Austin-based Stratfor’s enterprise business. Both men graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and served in the U.S. Army. They met in Austin four years ago and they thought the timing was right now to partner.

Grayline provides strategy and corporate development support for companies, public institutions and investment groups. It is focused on the energy industry, manufacturing, smart cities, transportation and more.

“We’re not going to try to boil the ocean,” Kopser said.

The new company focuses on bringing together experts, data and solutions to help companies and public institutions manage disruptive change in areas like national security, energy security, strategy and leadership development, Kopser said.

Grayline will focus on helping senior executives plan around trends that impact their businesses, Boyd said.

“We are at a point and time right now when the global economy is more connected than ever before,” Boyd said. “It’s an engine of growth. But it’s also an engine of risk.”

One idea in an unrelated industry has ripple effects through other industries, Boyd said. Disruptive technologies like autonomous vehicles, 3D Printing and artificial intelligence are going to have a huge impact on a lot of industries, he said.

“These are issues everyone has to think about and prepare their organizations for,” he said. “Yet it’s difficult for them to cultivate the expertise to do that.”

That’s where Grayline comes in, Boyd said.

Grayline recently completed a project for the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada. They hired Kopser as the facilitator and lunchtime speaker for a large transportation technology summit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

In addition to Grayline, Kopser said he plans to continue working closely with The Bunker Labs Austin and he is going to become an entrepreneur in residence at the University of Texas at Austin and work with Professor of Innovation Bob Metcalfe at the Innovation Center. He also volunteers as chairman of NSTXL working to improve U.S. Energy Security policy.

Grayline works virtually right now but will most likely get an office at WeWork on Congress, Boyd said.

Grayline will also be contributing as investors in a fund that Joshua Baer, director of Capital Factory, is putting together, Kopser said.

Grayline also plans to develop its website as a resource for companies with articles by subject matter experts that understand the industries and speak the language of senior leaders.

“We built the site to be something between a blog and a publishing platform,” Boyd said. “We want to create a platform around these big issues. Trends of how people are living. Look at some of the emerging technologies within cities. That body of expertise is a very cross disciplinary look. It matters to consumer products companies. It matters to defense companies. We are really trying to stake out a deep body of expertise in these catalysts that are changing these systems.”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Roomify moved from Dallas to Austin last summer to plug into the city’s vibrant tech entrepreneurial scene.

“This is where we wanted to scale the company,” said Shanil Wazirali, the startup’s co-founder.

Last May, Wazirali, 27, and his cousin and co-founder, Sagar Hemani, 25, raised a seed stage round of funding from angel investors, as well as funds like Kombo Ventures, Marc Bell Capital, and FireStarter, which includes managing member Sam Yagan, CEO of Match.com. The investment allowed them to relocate and expand operations.

This year, they rebranded the company name from Dorm It Up to Roomify aiming to reach an even larger audience and building a brand around all college students, Wazirali said.

Moving to Austin made a lot of sense, Wazirali said. He and Hemani like Austin’s tech ecosystem and being around other like-minded entrepreneurs. They travelled to Austin for its annual startup crawl and immediately made plans to relocate here. He wrote about the experience on post called “Going All In” on Medium.

Austin, home to the University of Texas, is also the perfect college town for Roomify to cater to undergraduate and graduate students and young professionals looking to furnish their first apartment.

“We understand the college market is huge in itself and we haven’t even scratched the surface,” Wazirali said. “The idea is to establish the brand in that space first.”

Wazirali and his cousin first came up with the concept for Dorm It Up, now Roomify, when they went to college.

“We dragged our parents from store to store and realized there needed to be an easier way to shop for college. What if you could get everything delivered in a box?” Wazirali said.

“We looked at the market and we were like wow, there’s $20 billion in shopping every year in the U.S. for college supplies including dorm furnishings, text books and other items,” Wazirali said. “And we said if you look at it, students are going to Target, Wal-Mart and all these stores because they don’t have a brand to turn to.”

At that time, digitally-native brands like Warby Parker just launched and people developed their own brands, Wazirali said. They focused on staple necessities and owned their own brand from start to finish and that helped them succeed, he said.

In 2008, the founders of Warby Parker launched a new online business that allowed people to buy glasses for just $95 a pair. The company is now valued at more than $1 billion.

Wazirali and Hemani saw the same opportunity to build a vertically integrated brand in the college shopping space.

“In this space, we can control the experience, we can get students pumped and we can stand behind our designs and quality and say this is ours,” Wazirali said.

Wazirali graduated from Texas A&M University with a business degree in 2012 and Hemani graduated with a business degree from the University of Missouri in 2013. They founded the company in the summer of 2013.

Roomify markets its products online primarily through word of mouth advertising. Students show off its bright green boxes all over the internet. Other brands like Tide and Red Bull also include samples in the boxes as freebies for the customers.

It’s working. The company sells out of its inventory every year, Wazirali said. However, it’s no easy business, according to a statement from Hemani. The company is currently seasonal and has an intricate supply chain, dealing with more than 30 manufacturers and 500 products.

“We team up with designers from top fashion brands, brand our products, control the quality, and service students directly,” Hemani wrote in a statement. “This model allows us to provide high quality products, extreme convenience, and save students up to 50 percent versus retail.”

Right now, this market is full of incumbents, Wazirali said.

Students spent $6.23 billion in 2016 on dorm furnishings, up 43 percent from 2009, according to a study by the National Retail Federation. Other online competitors in the dorm furnishing space include DormCo, based in Cheektowaga, New York and LeighDeuxDorm.com, based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“It’s super fragmented,” Wazirali said. “Nobody’s innovating and giving students this unique experience.”

Roomify sells college students bundles of dorm room supplies including Twin XL sheets, comforter, pillowcases, towels, shower caddy and other supplies starting at $175 for 24 items to $299 for 42 items. It also offers items a la carte.

“You can pick your colors and within a matter of days you have everything you need right to your doorstep,” Wazirali said. The company offers more than 80 bundle combinations.

“There’s a lot of guess work out in the industry,” Wazirali said. “Students don’t know what to bring. We come in and avoid all the guesswork. Here’s what you need.”

Chegg, which started out doing text book rentals, became a leading student brand that’s public and they have revenue of more than $200 million a year, Wazirali said.

“They own about half of all college students on their platform,” he said. “Their founder is our advisor. We look up to them and how they started with one business model and created a student hub. We want to do that with physical goods and services.”

Roomify opened its office off 5th and Brazos. They have made their space feel like a college classroom and dorm with chalkboard walls, bright green walls, and even a dorm bed. They are hiring. They also recruit college students during the summer to provide customer service.