Category: Austin (Page 125 of 318)

Speachme, a two year old educational technology company, announced Tuesday the launch of its U.S. operations, based in Austin.

The French company makes a peer-to-peer knowledge transfer platform used by global brands such as Tesla, Airbus, PwC, Nissan and Coca-Cola. It was founded in 2012 and has 41 employees.

The company is also hiring 10 employees in Austin to fill several position in the next six months and it is moving two employees from San Francisco. It also announced it received $2.2 million in funding for its U.S. expansion led by Alven Capital Partners, based in Paris.

The company set up its offices at WeWork on Congress with four employees. But it will be moving to the new WeWork location at the Domain to get a bigger office. Speachme set up offices at WeWork on Congress and will be moving to WeWork at the Domain to get a bigger office.

“speachme is a total departure from traditional online training programs and learning management systems. We put the user in the driver’s seat of content creation, and our platform allows workers – on the shop floor or in the office – to capture and share technical skills and physical gestures in a completely innovative way,” speachme Chief Executive Officer Najette Fellache, said in a news release. “The innovation and unique needs of the manufacturing and industrial business sectors are the primary driver for the expansion of our operations. And basing the company in Austin is a strategic move – the city has long been a center of innovation and often breaks with convention. We share this DNA and look forward to contributing to the thriving local business community.”

The company is targeting customers in the automotive and airline industries, food service, and manufacturing. It’s aimed at large workplaces of 10,000 or more employees.

“The Center for Creative Leadership found that 70 percent of workplace learning comes from real, on-the-job experiences. Compare that to only about 10 percent coming from formal, structured training programs. This finding is the basis for our innovative model for skills-based learning and knowledge transfer,” Kader Garnier Aw, Chief Operating Officer of speachme said in a news release. “At speachme, we believe that employees should be empowered to train and learn from each other, on-demand and in the moment, versus relying solely on classroom-style or basic slideshow learning methods.”

Speachme’s platform can be used on any device and uses what the company calls “knowledge capsules.” Those training programs can be created by managers or workers. They contain interactive visual content. The speachme platform provides the tools for employees to record audio, video, audio with slides, screencast and enables you to mix multiple types of media to create compelling, interactive content. Speachme also provides data and analytics and dashboard to monitor how effective the content is.

The platform works best for manufacturing companies that need to train employees but not all at the same time for specific tasks.

“The skills transfer between workers relies on a keen understanding of important technical procedures,” Garnier Aw said in a news release. “The physical gestures that perform these procedures are not easily captured in standard training tools or manuals. speachme’s ‘trainer’s-eye’ point of view allows the trainee to virtually and visually shadow the trainer through every step of the procedure. This approach, combined with our multi-media interface, is unlike any other solution available.”

Able Lending announced Tuesday that it has secured $100 million in debt financing from Community Investment Management to provide low-cost loans to small businesses.

The Austin-based online lender reports that the money will be used to fund approximately 500 small businesses in the United States. To qualify for a loan, the businesses need to be operating for at least one year with at lest $100,000 in revenue. Able’s loans have a unique structure built on a collaborative lending platform. The borrowers lower their interest rate by raising part of the loan from friends and family, who act as co-lenders with Able. The loans range in size from $25,000 to up to 41 million with rates starting at 8 percent.

“We are excited about CIM’s investment so that we can fund more deserving small businesses,” Able’s CEO and Cofounder Will Davis said in a news release. “During a time when investors’ confidence in alternative lending has plunged, this investment is a vote of confidence in our loan model and our team.”

Able, founded in 2014, lends to consumer products, tech, and main street businesses of all types. Loan recipients look to Able for working capital and to purchase inventory, open a new location, hire employees, invest in marketing, or as a bridge round to retain more equity. Able also helps small businesses get out of high-interest, short-term debt by refinancing cash advances and credit cards, which saves entrepreneurs $5,000 a month on average.

Silicon Hills News did this profile on the company in 2014.

There once was a startup in Austin
WP Engine grew lickety-split like Boston
It set out to expand to Ireland’s land of opportunity
Its website hosting business grew with such unity
And now it’s part of a bigger European economic community
– Anonymous

The big news for WP Engine Monday is it has expanded to Limerick, Ireland.

The Austin-based startup specializes in hosting websites based on the WordPress publishing platform. It is opening a Technical Support & Innovation Center in Limerick which is expected to create 100 jobs during the next three years.

WP Engine reports it works with more than 350,000 digital brands in 136 countries. WP Engine’s customers include AMD, Network Rail, New Relic, Soundcloud, UnderArmour and Warby Parker. WP Engine opened a London office in 2015 and reports its customer base has doubled since then. The new center in Ireland will help to further its expansion in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The announcement is being celebrated at an event Monday in Limerick with the Irish Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Mary Mitchell O’Conner, Finance Minister Michael Noonan, Minister of State for Employment & Small Business Pat Breen and Mary Buckley, executive director of IDA Ireland along with WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner, Chief Financial Officer April Downing and Fabio Torlini, managing director of EMEA.

The project is supported by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation through IDA Ireland.

“WP Engine is focused on building the best managed WordPress platform in the world and we’re incredibly proud to be opening our new Technical Support and Innovation Centre in Ireland,“ Heather Brunner, CEO of WP Engine, said in a news release. “As a company we aim to be present in cities that are successful in terms of job creation and attracting businesses – as represented by our offices in Austin, San Antonio, San Francisco, and more recently London. Limerick, similarly, has a terrific environment and culture where the community, government and business leaders are committed to building local talent and creating a technology innovation and incubation center. We wanted to help further build and be a part of that ecosystem.”

In 2010, Jason Cohen founded WP Engine at Capital Factory in downtown Austin. It has quickly grown into a global brand with offices in San Francisco, San Antonio, London and now Limerick.

Like a lot of educational programs, driver’s ed hasn’t changed much in the past 30 years.

For the most part, it’s still taught in a classroom with an instructor, worksheets, quizzes, videos and some time spent driving with an instructor.

That’s where the founders of Aceable saw an opportunity to disrupt the driver’s education industry. They created classroom materials and videos and put all the original, up to date, content into a mobile phone app.

That app has resonated with the teenage market and on Friday, Austin-based Aceable announced it has raised an additional $4 million to fuel its growth. Silverton Partners and Floodgate led the Series A funding round. The company previously raised $4.7 million in seed stage funding last year and $1.1 million in 2014.

Aceable currently has more than 300,000 users in Texas, California, Florida, Ohio and Illinois, and maintains a 98 percent pass rate for the course.

With the money, Aceable plans to continue to expand its driver ed app state by state but also plans to branch into new industries that require professional certifications such as real estate, corporate HR, nursing and food safety.

“The rapid adoption of our drivers ed app proves that demand exists for not only engaging but also cutting edge mobile learning experiences,” Blake Garrett, Founder and CEO, Aceable, said in a news release. “Astoundingly, 1 in 3 jobs in the United States require some form of professional certification; however, despite that opportunity, the number one complaint we hear from professionals in the fields we’re exploring is that course content is boring at best – and irrelevant at worst. We know we can fix both of these problems the same way we did with driving.”

Already, Aceable, which launched in 2014, has captured more than 35 percent of the market for online drivers ed courses in Texas and California. It now plans to expand into Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Indiana.

“The future of professional education is in mobile learning. Aceable’s outstanding app store reviews and user growth prove their product is best-in-class, making them well poised to continue tremendous growth into new fields,” Morgan Flager of Silverton Partners, said in a news release. “It’s rare to see a company reach profitability with such explosive growth.”

Silicon Hills News did this profile on the company last year.

Kahoot, a Norwegian-based educational startup with its U.S. headquarters based at Capital Factory in Austin, has closed on $10 million in funding.

The company’s founder, Johan Brand, made the announcement in a post on Medium. Fredrik Cassel at Creandum led the funding round with participation from current investor Tellef Thorleifsson at Northzone and Nagraj Kashyap at Microsoft Ventures. To date, the company has raised $17 million, Brand said in a brief interview from New York.

Kahoot, which launched in 2013, makes a game-based learning platform for the K-12 market. Its platform reaches 33 million monthly active users, according to Brand. It also reaches a community of more than 3.5 million teachers. And the game platform has more than 10 million learning games, created and shared by fans in 180 countries.

Kahoot plans to use the funds to support the “development of additional game formats, our global team, and new applications for brands, publishers and audiences in the Kahoot! game space.”

“The capital is giving us the runway to do that globally,” Brand said. “We can roll out new products now because we have the capital to back them.”

Kahoot built its platform on the Web through getkahoot.com and kahoot.it. But the company recently released an Android app which has been a serial Top Performing App in Google Play. And its iOS app, just released this past Monday, is in the top 50 apps in the Apple Store and number one in educational apps.

Kahoot plans to stay at Capital Factory. It has four employees based there and it’s a perfect location to participate in conferences like SXSW.edu in March and the ISTE 2017 Conference and Expo in San Antonio next June.

“We love Austin,” Brand said.

Susan Lahey did this profile on Kahoot last year.

In Austin, the hunt for venture capital is not easy.

But one group plans to make it a little easier. The TEN Capital Group is holding the Texas Venture Summit 2016 on Oct. 6th at the Brazos Hall in downtown Austin.

The event is invitation only and brings together national and statewide investors and qualified Texas technology companies for one-on-one sessions. To request an invitation, visit the organization’s website.

This is the second annual Texas Venture Summit. Last year, 27 companies connected with 42 investors. Since then, seven of those startups have received funding worth $84 million.

This year, the event will bring together over 40 expansion stage and over 60 growth stage technology companies with over 100 investors from across the US.

From the first Texas Venture Summit, in 2015, Delta-v Capital met Austin-based NSS Labs and invested $16 million in its Series B, along with initial investor Live Oak Venture Partners.

TEN Capital Group, formerly known as Texas Growth Capital Forum, a financial services company, produces the summit.

“Our mission is to measurably increase venture capital and investor presence throughout the state,” Hall T. Martin, director, TEN Capital Group, said in a news release. “Startups founded in Texas need broader access to capital at every stage of growth to maximize their potential to achieve global scale.”

TEN Capital Group also put on its first “HealthCare Texas” conference earlier this year with more than 20 speakers, 30 investors, and 40 company innovators in healthcare information technology, digital health, life science, and therapeutics.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Justin Stewart, co-founder of New York-based Industrious, visited Austin on Tuesday for the launch party of his company’s latest coworking space.

During a brief interview, Stewart recounted how he and his childhood friend, Jamie Hodari, founded Industrious. Stewart was running the U.S. division for a Chinese-based company. He was the only one in the U.S. and his boss told him to get some office space in Chicago to host clients.

“I wanted to be around that energy that I was so used to,” Stewart said.

At first he tried an open floor coworking space, but even though it had a ton of energy it was the wrong kind of energy, Stewart said.

“It was kind of young,” he said. “There was a keg in the corner and people were on razor scooters. It was good for traditional out of the box startups who were just thinking up an idea. But it wasn’t right for someone like myself who wanted to bring clients in and meet later stage companies.”

Stewart left and went to an executive suites office, which had an even worse vibe, he said.

“If I wanted to introduce myself to someone in the hallway, no one cared,” Stewart said. “I said this isn’t any good. There has got to be a hybrid between the high energy and the professional. There has got to be an in between. So I decided to start one of my own. I brought my business partner (Hodari, co-founder) on and I said let’s do one of these.”

In 2013, they picked Chicago for their first location, close to their Midwestern roots. Both founders grew up as next door neighbors in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

“Before we had any dry wall up, we had room for 82 spots and we had well over 600 applications,” Stewart said. They were full from day one and they’ve been full ever since, he said.

Then they launched a second location in Atlanta and both of them quit their full time jobs to work solely on Industrious.

Today, Industrious has 12 locations around the country including its only site in Texas on the entire 11th floor of a brand new high rise office building at 201 W.Fifth St., in the heart of Austin’s downtown area. The 19,000 square foot space boasts lots of natural light with floor to ceiling windows in the offices and gorgeous views of Austin. The space has 83 private offices and lots of common spaces. Desks start at $500 a month with private offices starting at $925. The space has superfast Internet. It also plans to have a fitness room with showers, a new mother’s room, concierge service, huddle rooms and members-only events. It also features indoor parking on a first come, first serve basis and a monthly discounted rate with Luxe Valet service.

The core customer for Industrious is later stage, more mature companies, Stewart said.

“Not that there is anything wrong with the startup world,” he said. “I just think people can appreciate being around other like-minded people later in their career. People aren’t trying to sell something or looking for funding. It’s a place where people are on the same page.”

Industrious also works with later stage companies like Pinterest, Spotify and Pandora. They work with established companies looking for flexible workspace, Stewart said.

“You won’t see the name Industrious anywhere in this space,” Stewart said. “We want people to feel like they are coming into their own space – not like they are coming into an Industrious. We want to represent them well.”

The companies are here to showcase themselves, not to showcase us, Stewart said.

The Austin Industrious location is 64 percent full right now. Its members include sole proprietors like a graphic designer or up to 20 person teams like Zynga, the gaming company.

“We put a lot of our energy and efforts into hospitality,” Stewart said.

Industrious members also get access to all the other offices nationwide, Stewart said.

Austin was actually slated to be Industrious’ second location after its Chicago launch, Stewart said. But he couldn’t find the right office space, he said. He began looking in 2013 and he made six trips to Austin before finding the space.

“We wanted a building that would allow a lot of light in and that wouldn’t be super-corporate,” he said.

Industrious faces a lot of competition in the coworking space now in Austin. The coworking options for individuals, startups and companies has just exploded in last five years. Capital Factory was the first downtown coworking space that opened up in 2011. Since then, TechSpace, WeWork, Galvanize and Fiber Cove all have launched downtown co-working offices.

But that doesn’t worry Stewart. He thinks of the coworking space as a similar model to a hotel. It’s all about the hospitality experience and how the staff treat people on whether they want to maintain an office there, Stewart said. He thinks that is Industrious’ competitive advantage in creating an atmosphere where people feel comfortable and like coming to work.

“Anyone can put glass walls up,” Stewart said. “But it’s about effectively managing the space and getting people to stay….If you are not managed effectively, it’s going to be very hard for you to be sustainable.”

Industrious has two employees in Austin: a community manager and a community coordinator. Sarah Lawton Hawkins is the community manager and Jeremiah Dalmacio is the operations associate for Industrious Austin.

Overall, the company has 44 people nationwide. The company also has retreats twice a year to bring everyone together. The last one was in New Orleans in January and the next one is later this month in New York.

“We don’t want people to feel like they are here for no purpose,” Stewart said. “We believe in them and they’ll believe in our members.”

Industrious this month closed on $37 million in financing. The company is looking at opening up additional locations in Dallas and Houston and it might open a second Austin location in the future, Stewart said.

William Hurley, known as Whurley and co-founder of Honest Dollar and Chaotic Moon in Austin, is on a global mission to help women and girls learn technology skills and find jobs.

International Telecommunications Union and United Nations Women announced Tuesday that they have teamed up with Whurley to drive an intensive global engagement and outreach effort.

“I’ve been an advocate of the widespread access to information and technologies my entire career,” Whurley said in a news release. “These technologies have the power to change lives, reinvent industries and create entire new economies. Women and girls play a vital role and are fundamental to an ecosystem of innovation. Gender equality must be the focus of the technology industry if we are to continue to innovate in the future.”

ITU and UN Women launched on Tuesday Equals: the Global Partnership for Gender Equality in Digital Age, which will focus on getting more women to use information and communications technology worldwide to promote the empowerment of women. Today, 250 million fewer women are online than men, according to UN Women data. The global Internet user gap grew from 11 percent in 2013 to 12 percent in 2016. And in third world countries, the digital divide is even worse with a 31 percent the gap.

In particular, the new effort will focus on three areas of action including access with the goal of achieving equal access to digital technologies. The second goal is skills and empowering women and girls with skills to become ICT creators and lastly to focus on leadership to promote women as ICT leaders and entrepreneurs.

Whurley began working on issues of equality for women a few years ago.

“I have been advocating for women in STEM for some time now,” he said. “I started working with the UN ITU on the British Airways UnGrounded flight a few years ago. Since then I’ve become friends with most of the ITU staff so when Doreen Bogdan reached about starting a new effort to help meet the United Nations SDG goals for gender equality by 2030 I jumped on the opportunity.”

The organization is based at the ITU in Geneva, Switzerland with team members based around the world. Whurley has put together a small team in Austin that’s been helping with the initial efforts in getting the program kicked off.

“For me there simply couldn’t be a better cause to put my efforts into,” he said. “It’s something I’m extremely passionate about, have a lot of experience with, and most importantly an area where I can make an impact. I really feel that if more men got involved with programs like this we would be a lot further in solving the gender equality equation.”

Whurley plans to remain in his role at Honest Dollar, the Austin-based financial technology company which he co-founded that Goldman Sachs acquired earlier this year. He believes Austin can play a big role in helping the world to achieve gender equality.

“I believe that Austin can become an example for the world in this area,” Whurley said.”We live in a very progressive city. However even in Austin you can see some of the inequality Equals aims to address.”

How can people get involved?

“Right now we’re looking for people to help raise awareness of the issue, and the new organization,” Whurley said. “We’ve started a campaign where people take a photo of themselves making the “Equals sign” and tweet/post about it with the hash tag #beEquals. Organizations interested in partnering can email partners@equals.org for more information.”

By Laura Lorek
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Nurturing professor led startups to help them take their inventions out of the laboratory and into the marketplace is the focus of the Innovation Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The center, which is part of the Cockrell School of Engineering runs The StARTup Studio, which is held monthly during the Fall and Spring semesters to bring together professors, investors, engineers and other invited guests to hear 15-minute-long presentations from startups followed by a question and answer session.

UT Professor of Innovation Bob Metcalfe, Ph.D., leads the center. Louise Epstein is its managing director and Ben Dyer serves as entrepreneur in residence.

On Thursday, three professors took to the podium in a conference room on the 10th floor of Ernest Cockrell Jr. Hall to present a diverse mix of ideas including a new type of cement block, a fiber optic catheter to deliver drugs to treat glioblastomas or brain tumors more effectively and a random number generator to ensure encryption of data.

The audience included several UT faculty members including Professor Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and Professor John Goodenough, the inventor of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

First up, Professor Francisco Gomes, associate dean for graduate programs in the school of architecture, presented MineralBuilt, which is creating better, cheaper and more energy efficient cement building blocks. Gomes, who also founded Gomes+Staub Architects in 1999, began working on the idea a few years ago and formed his company in the last year to take its invention to market.

“It’s lighter and uses less material than a normal concrete block wall,” Gomes said.

A builder can get 50 percent more efficiency per wall using the MineralBuilt blocks, he said. The blocks use a new mold that is configured in a way that uses less materials and still provides for structural integrity.

Gomes has gone through the iCorp Program, based at UT’s IC2 Institute, which helps researchers commercialize technology.

The initial customer for the MineralBuilt blocks are owners and developers of low-rise buildings like retail stores, schools and warehouses. The company’s business model is to charge the manufacturers of cement blocks a licensing fee to use its mold. The company has two utility patents on its product and one patent application pending. It is also working with the University of Texas’ Office of Technology Commercialization to license the technology.

MineralBuilt is raising $100,000 to complete its structural testing. It is also building a house to showcase the blocks to potential customers and it’s working with a company based in Round Rock to produce its production molds.

Next up, Chris Rylander, Ph.D., assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering, presented the Arborizer, a new kind of catheter to deliver drugs more effectively to eliminate brain tumors at the root. He hasn’t yet created a startup company.

Rylander has been working on the Arborizer project for several years. The intellectual property behind the technology is owned by Virginia Tech. Rylander moved to UT two years and has been working with the Austin Technology Incubator and IC2 Institute since then. He also went through the I-Corp program.

The Arborizer focuses on treating glioblastomas, which is a deadly brain form of brain cancer that afflicts 12,120 people every year in the U.S. And 95 percent of those people die within five years of diagnosis, Rylander said. The treatment is surgery, radiation and systemic chemotherapy. The challenge to treatment is the brain blood barrier that makes accessing the entire tumor difficult. With the Arborizer, the treatment involves inserting a catheter in the brain and pushing drugs directly into the brain to kill the tumor cells. With the Arborizer, drug companies can push large molecules into the brain in a much more targeted way.

The Arborizer has received one patent and a second patent application is pending review. Rylander has raised $1.2 million in funding so far. The next step is to apply for additional grants and funding and to begin pre-clinical trials in animals, he said.

The market for the Arborizer has potential beyond treatment of brain tumors, Rylander said. It can also be used as a platform technology to treat soft tissue tumors such as colon, pancreas, prostate and others, he said. And it also could have applications in the cosmetic surgery industry, he said.

Lastly, Benito Fernandez, associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering, presented “CHECK,” a chaotic hybrid encryption communications kit. The hardware solution combines analog and digital signals to create encryption technology for a random number generator device used to secure data. The project has received National Science Foundation funding and the team has gone through the I-Corp program at UT.

The startup is in the process of building a prototype and then selling it, Fernandez said.

The technology can be used to secure power plants, data centers and other facilities, Fernandez said.