Category: Austin (Page 127 of 318)

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

San Antonio has a robust bioscience and healthcare industry which contributes more than $23.9 billion to the city’s economy annually, according to the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation.

In fact, one in every six San Antonio employees works in the bioscience and healthcare industry.
The industry is constantly creating new jobs and its startups and innovative bioscience companies are key to its continued growth. Here’s ten companies with cutting edge research and products worth watching in the coming year.

BIO2 Medical – The company, founded in 2007, has created the Angel catheter, which provides access to the central venous system and traps blood clots before they reach the lungs. It completed clinical trials last year. The U.S. Food and Drug approved the device in July. The company also recently received funding to roll out its product. To date, it has received $51.2 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase.

Bluegrass Vascular Technologies – The company, founded in 2010 in Kentucky and relocated to San Antonio in 2014, has created the Surface Inside-Out Access Catheter System. It announced on Aug. 30th that the company received CE Mark approval and is launching limited commercial sale of its medical device in Europe. The company also announced the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently issued two patents related to Bluegrass Vascular’s technology for its catheter system. The company has raised $4.5 million so far.

Cytocentrics – The company, founded in Rostock, Germany in 2001, moved to San Antonio last year. It specializes in cellular patch clamp testing. “Patch clamping is a technique for measuring microscopic voltage changes caused by the movement of molecules through the membrane ion channels of a cell, a function that is central to cellular physiology and drug-cell interactions.” With the company’s patch clamp technology, drug makers can develop better medicines. Its instrument, known as the Cytopatch 4, is available for sale worldwide.

Invictus Medical – The company, founded in 2010 by University of Texas at San Antonio students, created a medical device known as the GELShield. It provides extracranial pressure relief for newborn babies. Invictus received FDA clearance last year and is now selling the device nationwide.

Mobile Stem Care – The company, founded in 2013 by a University of Texas at San Antonio student, provides stem cell therapy to pets. It uses adult stem cells, taken from the animal, to treat traumatic injuries, degenerative diseases, non-healing wounds and other ailments in pets.

Nebulab – The company, founded in 2014, has created a contextual data management portal for scientists. It’s a platform for research scientists to store and manage data and papers. It spun out of a 3 Day Startup program and received an initial $25,000 investment from the Geekdom Fund. It went on to participate in the 2015 Techstars Cloud program. The company has raised $253,000 since its inception, according to Crunchbase.

Fe3 Medical – The company, founded in 2008 in San Jose, announced in August that it raised $14.5 million in Series B funding, including $3.5 million from the State of Texas. The company is developing a transdermal patch that delivers iron across the skin for patients suffering from iron-deficiency anemia. Fe3 Medical, an InCubes Lab company, moved to San Antonio in 2010.

Pronucleotein Biotechnologies – The company, founded in 2005, won the runner up title in last year’s first ever U.S. Food and Drug Administration Food Safety Challenge. The received a $100,000 prize for their portable rapid pathogen screening system. The device is aimed at making e-coli, listeria, campylobacter and salmonella detection easier and faster.

Rapamycin Holdings – The company, founded in 2012, makes drugs to slow the aging process and to treat age-related diseases in people and animals. It raised a $2.5 million Series A round in 2015. It licensed the formulation of rapamycin from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Xenex Disinfection Services – The company, founded in 2008 in Austin, moved operations to San Antonio a year later. It makes a $100,000 robot that eradicates dangerous bacteria and viruses in hospitals and clinics by using pulsed Xenon UV light to disinfect patient care environments.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

For most people the concept of the “corner drugstore,” with or without a soda fountain, is a quaint anachronism befitting the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but not modern society.

In fact, though, there are more than 22,000 small, independently owned pharmacies in the U.S. Some will still make you a Black Cow. Many will mix up your medications right on site without the gluten, lactose or other binders that make some patients sick. RxWiki was launched to help those little pharmacies.

RxWiki is essentially a digital marketing company for independent pharmacies. The company’s website offers a “medication encyclopedia” written by pharmacists, news updates around medical issues and medications, and encyclopedic content around medical conditions, similar to a WebMD site. It has more than 20,000 original articles, 7,500 health-related videos, 100 disease condition channels and co-pay assistance programs. More than 5,000 community based pharmacies use its content.

But its primary function is to create websites, mobile apps—including medication reminders–and handle social media and content for the independent pharmacies who fill a niche among the big boxes. RxWiki runs a software as a service platform that supports 1,300 specialty and community websites, mobile applications and newsletters.

RxWiki raised $5.75 million in funding last October from investors including LiveOak Venture Partners and Milestone Venture Partners LP. The company hired Chris Loughlin as its CEO last February.

Today, most medications are pretty standardized—coming in doses of a specific number of milligrams–and don’t serve people who might require a higher or lower dose, Loughlin said. Nor do many pharmacies offer compounding services in which pharmacists will create medicines without ingredients patients don’t tolerate well. While many people may never meet their pharmacist, independent pharmacists strive to play a role in patients’ medical care, ensuring they’re getting their medication and following doctors’ orders.

As “designer drugs” become more popular and we learn more about our individual bodies’ reactions to medications, the role of such specialty pharmacies might increase dramatically.

But today, it’s tough to compete when small pharmacies can’t be open 24/7 like a lot of big chains. RxWiki tries to level the field through mobile apps where patients can order refills at any time. A new feature of the app is to set up reminders at the appropriate times to take medications purchased through the pharmacy.

The Corner Drugstore Goes Digital

Austin’s MedSavers is one of these specialty pharmacies. Owner/pharmacist Chris Johnson says he may be the only one left with his business model. He doesn’t take insurance; but he does claim to have much lower prices than his competitors. Johnson had worked for the big boxes for years and was frustrated with the prices they were forced, by agreements with insurance companies, to charge for medications. One of the worst he remembers was an anti-nausea medication for chemotherapy patients that cost only $20-$30 for a bottle but he was supposed to charge closer to $1,000. So he launched his own, independent pharmacy. He only wanted a website, but RxWiki offered a lot of other services for little or no extra charge. That was a deal he didn’t want to pass up.

CEO Loughlin knows all about supporting independent businesses in a world of giants. The co-founder of Weekends.com, an internet travel company, his business was purchased by Travelzoo in 2001. Loughlin worked his way up, eventually serving as Travelzoo CEO from 2010 to 2015. Because of his background he could look at the problem with “different eyes.” For example, while many pharmacies were getting apps, few of their customers were downloading the apps. It just never occurred to them. So Loughlin, thinking of the buttons worn by airline staff, suggested pharmacists and sales associates wear buttons to remind customers to download the app.

The added technology is meant to augment, not replace, service in the independent pharmacies, he said. For example, RxWiki might offer a quiz on a particular condition and discover that patients who have that condition actually know very little about it. That can allow RxWiki to share more information about the condition and alert the pharmacist that their patient doesn’t really understand their medical condition, so the pharmacist can take proactive steps to help.

In Remington, Virginia, population 615, pharmacist and co-owner of Remington Drug Al Roberts knows his customers pretty well. The pharmacy, which has been there since 1913, is the place to go when you want to know what’s happening in Remington. But it’s also a bedroom community for Washington, D.C. and a lot of residents work in the city. They don’t make it in to order refills when the pharmacy is open. Having RxWiki has helped a lot of customers connect with the pharmacy, Roberts said.

“We had customers who went to different pharmacies because, they would tell us ‘I forget to call you when you’re open.’ They don’t have to remember now.” The store receives faxes at all hours of the night coming in from people’s apps. “It removes one more blockade from the patient to us.”

Of course, he said, he also gives people his cell number so they can call if they’d rather do that.

“I tell them ‘I’m available to you 24/7.”

athenahealth, the nation’s largest healthcare network, announced Monday its acquisition of Austin-based Filament Labs, doing business as Patient IO.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Patient IO, a mobile and web-based app, is a care coordination platform used by healthcare providers to engage patients and caregivers outside the clinic. Patient IO, which currently works with more more than 30 clinics, allows patients to manage medications, review educational material and record data. Patient IO will form the the basis for athenahealth’s patient-facing mobile application, athenaWell, the company said in a news release.

Silicon Hills News did this profile of Patient IO last year.

“Care coordination and patient self-management is the next big ground on which healthcare will compete,” Jon Porter, senior vice president of emerging services at athenahealth, said in a news release. “By adding Patient IO to our portfolio and delivering their solution as a native component of athenahealth’s population health services, we’ve been able to strengthen our ability to partner with providers as they enter into and become masters of value-based care delivery. Patient IO accelerates our movement towards an exciting strategic milestone: becoming a trusted resource and partner to the patient.”

Jason Bornhorst, Colin Anawaty, and Brian Gambs founded the company in 2013. They also participated in the first Techstars Austin class in 2013. And CEO Bornhorst was recently named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare list. They will all join athenahealth Austin and Bornhorst will serve as executive director of product strategy.

“We are eager to marry our mobile care management competencies with athenahealth’s unique, network-enabled services,” Bornhorst, co-founder and CEO of Patient IO said in a news release. “By taking a patient-centered approach to development and embracing the potential of mobile, together we can reach more healthcare organizations than ever before.”

Initially, athenahealth made an investment in Patient IO last October through its ‘More Disruption Please’ Accelerator program.

Patient IO initially raised $1.5 million in seed rounding funding from Corinthian Health, Arcadia, Mercury Fund, Techstar Ventures, Geekdom Fund and angel investors. It also closed on $3.3 million in venture funding last November, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Monica Berrondo pulls up a digital schematic of an antibody. It resembles remnants of different-colored ribbon stuck together by someone with no sense of design. Each color and bend represents information about the amino acids that comprise the antibody, explains Berrondo, whose company, Macromoltek, made this model possible. If the antibody shown in this image works, it may one day be deployed in the body of a sick person, where it will hunt down and cling to a specific pathogen. There, this colored squiggle may stimulate the immune system to go after the pathogen, mark it as an enemy for other immune system cells to take out, or attack it outright.

Antibodies, unlike many older pharmaceuticals, don’t have to carpet bomb healthy cells to attack specific pathogens. They’re efficient.

It used to take months to design an antibody like this, just to get it to the point where it could be created and tested. With Macromoltek it takes hours.

Researchers who subscribe to Macromoltek can log in to a secure workstation on the website and design a digital antibody using color-coded amino acids to read and track the sequence. The digital model helps researchers evaluate and edit their work, since one error can mess up the entire sequence. In general, Berrondo said, scientists will design maybe 10 antibodies that they hope will destroy a specific pathogen. They choose the best to go to a lab to be created and tested. But the digital design process significantly reduces both the time it takes to create an antibody, and the labor to test multiple iterations. Other companies have similar digital design capabilities, but Berrondo said Macromoltek is the only one she knows of that focuses on the creation of antibodies. The company has another distinction: it is the only one that lets researchers “humanize” antibodies that were originally created using mice.

User friendly science software

Berrondo is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University where she received her PhD in chemical and biomolecular engineering.

“I’ve always been a computer person,” she said. “I did a lot of internships in high school and I hated the applications. I didn’t find them very meaningful. So starting out in college I wondered ‘How can I find a software project that’s meaningful?’” She found the answer in computational biology and molecular modeling, using computers to help researchers solve medical problems.

She also knew she wanted, one day, to start her own company. During her post-graduate work, while she was serving as a software consultant for laboratories, she got the inspiration for Macromoltek.

Most of the software laboratories were working with were difficult to use, for a lot of reasons. Some were too clunky and complicated, some too slow to do the calculations, some didn’t support object design, and so forth. Berrondo found herself returning to the same labs over and over to solve the same problems. So she launched into extensive market research to understand whether labs even used digital design—most didn’t—and if not why. She also asked the ones who did use it what issues they were having. Ultimately, she knew what she needed to make and spent six-to-nine months writing the software.

To find out if her software worked, Berrondo collaborated with the University of Texas on validation studies, designing antibodies and having them produced in the lab. With a dozen or so verified and another dozen in the works, the real world seems to be bearing out her software’s efficacy.

“Their protein modeling capabilities have provided us with a novel and reliable alternative to costly and occasionally challenging wet-lab experiments,” said molecular biologist Curt Hewitt of Signature Science, an Austin based subsidiary of Southwest Research Institute and Macromoltek customer. “Working with them has allowed us to focus on the bigger-picture scientific problems at hand with the confidence that the modeling and technical assumptions we’re operating under are solid.”

Last spring, Macromoltek became a Capital Factory Accelerator company. Since it was the accelerator’s first life science company, adviser Gordon Dougherty said he focused primarily on company strategy, customer acquisition, pricing and similar issues. Berrondo hired her mother, Susana Kaufman, a chemical engineer and software developer with experience in the financial services industry as her CFO.

“Monica is a quiet lion,” he said. “She’s reserved in her demeanor but unbelievably smart. When she asks a question, it’s a question with a purpose. I really respect that about her. I meet with a lot of entrepreneurs who shoot from the hip. She is different, in a good way.”

Though Berrondo has received grants, including recently receiving a National Science Foundation Phase II funding for $750,000 over the next two years, Dougherty said, she has come a long way without receiving investment money.

“She’s waiting until she proves things out to a certain level across her business plan. That’s hard to do. It takes a lot of patience.”

Now if she could design a program for that….

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A panel of Austin entrepreneurs talked about the integration of marketing, sales, and software yesterday at a Salesforce event for small business users of the monolithic Customer Relationship Management platform.

Key takeaways included: Just because you can build your own solution doesn’t make it a good idea if it’s not your core business; having all the information regarding customer relationships in one place keeps the sales and marketing departments from killing each other; and having a big, robust CRM saves you from falling through the gaps while you’re scaling.

In essence it was a sales presentation for Salesforce, but one in which Ted Irani, vice president of sales for BP3 Global, Clint Smith, president of CareerPlug, Ryan Deiss, CEO and founder of DigitalMarketer, and Bernard Briggs of Humm Systems, shared a lot of useful information about the perils growing businesses face in managing customer relationships and the solutions that work.

One of these perils is the adversarial relationship often forged between marketing and sales people, because one or the other is blamed for dropping the ball on cultivating and nurturing customers. Deiss described this relationship as “You’re slimy. Well you suck at everything, except logos.” Having the entire customer “journey” in one place, where everyone is required to record all that happens resolves the bulk of this issue, he said, because everyone can see the efforts the others are making and the focus becomes the customer experience.

Irani said BP3 Global uses the data on the system to track how many sales pitches it’s actually winning. When they started, he said, they were winning about 50 percent. But with ongoing iterations in their sales process they got the percentage up to 75 percent within a few months, which helped them decide when it was the right time to add more sales people.

All the organizations said that having a scalable system helped them grow faster than having to move from a spreadsheet to another system, then another, then another.

Smith admitted that he “wrote a big check” earlier this year to get Salesforce implemented and ramped up, a process many small business owners dread because of the time and money that must be diverted from getting product out the door today. Salesforce has reputation for being both complex and expensive, a problem it has tried to solve partly through acquisitions of simpler, more user friendly interface software companies and partly through development of its own, according to Jamie Domenici, vice president of product marketing and SMB marketing.

But all of the entrepreneurs said that, once in place, anyone with a basic understanding of CRM systems—even without coding experience—could make tweaks.

“It’s a line item” Deiss said. “And not even one of the ones I worry about.”

ThousandEyes, a San Francisco-based network intelligence company, announced Wednesday plans to open a sales and customer service office in Austin.

The company also named Victoria Abeling to head up the office as director of corporate sales.

ThousandEyes plans to hire about 30 sales and customer service employees by the end of the year to staff its new Austin office.

“Organizations of all sizes across all verticals are increasingly adopting cloud technologies relying on the Internet for business agility and efficiency, but struggle to maintain visibility into the network infrastructures they don’t own or directly manage. Our highly specialized sales and customer success team in Austin will provide expert support for customers across North America and ensure they get the most value from our Network Intelligence platform,” Anthony Narducci, vice president of sales at ThousandEyes, said in a news release. “As one of the fastest growing tech communities in the country and a key hub for tech talent, Austin is the perfect location for this team. I look forward to working with Victoria to expand ThousandEyes’ success with a high-performing Austin-based team.”

Abeling has 16 years of experience managing sales programs and previously worked for Oracle, VMware and Zenoss.

ThousandEyes’ new office is located in TechSpace at 98 San Jacinto Boulevard in downtown Austin. For information on jobs at ThousandEyes’ Austin office visit its website.

ThousandEyes’ customers include Equinix, ServiceNow, Twitter and eBay.

The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, Tenaya Capital and GV (formerly Google Ventures). It has raised $60.5 million in three rounds of funding, according to its Crunchbase profile.

One of the things Austin is known for is its runners, bikers, hikers, swimmers and endurance athletes looking for the next challenge.

A new site, Thea.com just launched a search engine and events site this week that makes finding that next sporting challenge easier.

Thea.com lists events in the greater Austin area for cyclists, triathletes, runners and more. People can search by type of event or location, race dates and times and other keywords. The site also lists training groups and their schedules and free activities like group rides and runs. And it lets users book a variety of leisure bike tours to explore guided tours of cities and scenic routes across the country.

Efim Gendler and Dennis Lastochkin founded Thea.com in February of 2015.

“The goal with Thea over the next few years is to develop a social marketplace for endurance activities, spanning across the US,” Gendler said in a news release. “It will be the place where athletes and active lifestyle enthusiasts come for information on races, events, trainers, and to connect with one another. Nothing this comprehensive exists presently; and like Austin, I’m sure Thea will continue to evolve and grow. ”

“Thea is a crowd-sourced marketplace so anybody can add a listing. There are also relationships between the listings, for example, between locations and group rides, and training programs. It’s also a wholesale platform that can be white labeled to running stores and bike shops,” Lastochkin said in a news release.

Bike Austin Organization and Violet Crown Sports Association already use Thea.com for organizing their events calendar and to drive greater user engagement.

By TIM GREEN
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

In July, after several years of preparation and construction, the Dell Medical School started instruction with its first class of students. The school, students and the Central Texas Community are walking hand-in-hand not only for a medical education, but to change how health care and medicine are done.

Part of the Dell Medical School (DMS) and community interaction involves the Austin startup community. Silicon Hills News talked to Maninder “Mini” Kahlon, vice dean for strategy and partnerships, and Mellie Price, executive director of technology innovation who has been an Austin company founder, CEO, funder and mentor, about how the school intends to engage with the startup community.

The interview has been condensed and edited.

Mini Kahlon: From my perspective, enabling the entrepreneurial community here is very important to us. It’s a model of how academic medicine can relate to an entrepreneurial community so we would hope to learn some lessons to spread to other places.

My biggest success, so far, is the recruitment of Mellie Price into our ecosystem not only because of her own history as an entrepreneur and a CEO but also as an obvious catalyst already in the Austin ecosystem.

Mellie Price: Two programs are helping turn research into health and medical products and services.

The Texas Health Catalyst program helps University of Texas faculty and clinicians affiliated with DMS and Seton Healthcare. It provides consulting and funding of up to $100,000. The first requests for proposals covered comprehensive joint replacement and women’s health.

The catalyst program received 83 proposals from some 30 organizations and a dozen academic institutions.

The other program, The Health Technology Innovation Platform, is an opportunity for DMS to identify companies in various stages of development that are interested in pivoting their product offering or their service offering into value-based care.

What Dell Medical School can provide to startups

MK: Given the expertise not only of the clinical domain but our ability to pull together industry expertise, we will leverage the people who have seen products go to market over and over again within the domain, so they will get feedback on whether these people think that their idea or product has potential or not.

If it does find a match within our care opportunities they get to be tested out within an actual clinical opportunity. That’s a very important de-risking. They can have their product used by leaders in healthcare and in these new models of healthcare. That’s part of what’s new is because we’re interested in products that help drive transformation.

They actually would have proven their value within a real demonstration that includes a real payer (such as an insurer). Other payers will recognize that this was a real implementation with a real payer.

Those things in a real setting that is hard to get especially for those that want to produce products for the future of care and the connection to a sustainable funding model.

MP: The medical school is really at the epicenter of creating these new models of care.

When you move from putting the doctor at the center to putting the patient at the center of all the business processes around that change. All of a sudden you’ve got data inputs and software and things that need to be built that simply don’t exist yet.

It’s health transformation at its root. So our innovation initiative has to encompass not just the traditional creating new molecules for pharmaceutical opportunities and running clinical trials. It’s literally business process re-engineering.

DMS as a catalyst

MK: What we’re working on is catalyzing the growth of health innovation in Austin. Our ideal metrics of success across various domains around health innovation are going to be the growth of this region almost independently of us.

MP: You hear that this is the first medical school to be built in 40-50 years tied to a Tier 1 research facility. But that’s not the cool part.

The cool part is that it’s very likely to be one of the last ones because there’re no major metropolitan areas that don’t have a medical school and those medical schools are beholden to traditional healthcare. It’s extremely difficult to change your revenue model.

We’re the lucky place on the planet that gets to work on this problem and really focus on how do we realign reimbursement incentives so that people are staying healthy longer and if they have to have a surgical episode, we’re reducing re-admissions and improving the outcomes.

It’s literally a once in a lifetime opportunity.

If we can really get that message out to the community as a whole and galvanize the community around the opportunity to get involved. Maybe you’re not a doctor maybe you’re not an entrepreneur but maybe you’re a community leader that can raise awareness in your church or your school about ways to engage with this unique opportunity that we have.

By HOJUN CHOI
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The culture that Chris Dillie has implemented into his company is simple: be passionate about what you’re doing, and the money will follow.

ESO Solutions, a health data exchange startup, provides software to help ambulance services better monitor their performance, and helps hospitals use that data to improve patient care.

The Austin-based company started in 2004, when Dillie, its CEO, decided to drop his real estate business to follow his passion of helping people in need. Before he began investing in real estate, Dillie served as a volunteer firefighter and an emergency medical service paramedic.

“I really enjoyed helping people,” Dillie said. “At the same time you’re put in situations where you’re forced to think a lot; you’re constantly solving puzzles.”

After spending time as a paramedic, Dillie also worked as a manager of an EMS station, where he was in charge of quality control.

“We had a really hard time knowing how well we were providing services because we didn’t have data,” Dillie said.

It was during this time that Dillie’s real estate business became too large to juggle with the managerial position at the EMS station. However, When John Dadey, who would serve as the president of the company, approached him with the idea of developing what would become ESO Solutions in 2003, Dillie could not resist.

“The reason I left real estate is because this very quickly became my passion,” Dillie said. “I saw what the market could hold and I was really passionate about how our product could change the industry.”

In order to address the gap that Dillie learned of as a manager of a EMS station, ESO Solutions offers software suites that allows for data exchange between hospitals and EMS providers to ensure higher quality care.

From the moment a 911 operator is contacted to provide emergency services, the company’s software tracks what type of diagnosis is made, as well as what types of treatments and medications are given to the patient on-site.

As the patient is passed along to a hospital, the software also helps deliver that data to the hospital to see what mistakes -if any, were made during that process.

Because many hospitals use different types of databases to maintain their patient information, ESO Solutions translates that data into language that can be used by both EMS services as well as hospital systems.

Allen Johnson, the company’s vice president of health data exchange, said that previous forms of monitoring performance was based on a flawed system.

“We were measuring performance of paramedics based off of what we thought was wrong with the patient with no way of being able to tell if our diagnosis was correct in the first place,” Johnson said.

Johnson -who like Dillie, also has a background as a paramedic, said that prehospital ambulance services have changed over the years, making data exchange and analysis more pertinent to quality service.

“I think it’s a maturation of the industry,” Johnson said. “Over the last ten years or so, we went from medical directors being a local person who is nice enough to volunteer to many ambulance services today having directors that are on-site, full time.”

Kenny Schnell, the director of Williamson County Emergency Services, said that his station has used ESO’s data exchange software for three years. He said the software has helped not only the station, but the region that his station serves, manage their performance.

“Paramedics want to know how well they did,” Schnell said. “Getting the outcome data is big, because we want to see if we were on the right page.”

With the outcome data, Schnell said EMS stations can learn how to better educate their paramedics and come up with effective solutions for concentrating time and resources in the areas of care that are lacking.

ESO Solutions has more than 100 employees in the Austin area, and on July 12, announced an investment from Accel-KKR, a private equity firm with a focus in technology. Though the terms of that investment were not publicly disclosed, Dillie said the money will be used towards further developing the company’s software suite, as well as for team expansion.

“Again it’s the culture we have here,” Dillie said. “If you follow your passion, and do what you do passionately, money tends to follow.”