Category: Austin (Page 128 of 318)

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A few years ago, Michael Klug left his job as co-founder and chief technology officer at Zebra Imaging.

At Zebra, Klug worked for 17 years on its dynamic 3D holographic and light-field display products. He helped the company raise money and launch its products.

Klug, who has also worked at the MIT Media Laboratory, was looking for his next challenge. That’s when he joined Magic Leap, a highly stealth technology company. Wired Magazine has called Magic Leap “the world’s most secretive startup.” Magic Leap is creating mixed reality technology that overlays virtual reality onto the real world and although it’s not the only company tackling this technology it is doing the best job, according to the Wired article. And that has helped Magic Leap raise $1.4 billion so far, Wired reports.

Klug, who heads up Magic Leap’s Austin office, will not provide any details on its product other than to say it is aimed at consumers and it will be a wearable device that includes goggles or some kind of glasses and it is transformative technology. On his LinkedIn profile, Klug, who is listed as vice president of advanced photonics for Magic Leap, says he is “constructing a rocket ship for the mind.”

Magic Leap has applications in gaming and entertainment, but it is also looking to tackle personal computing and communications. Its wearable device seeks to become something we rely on as much as our cell phones and if it’s done right, it will become a normal part of our everyday lives. That’s why Magic Leap could become the next big transformative technology company.

Magic Leap is creating technology that is going to change the way we work, live and play, said Barbary Brunner, president of the Austin Technology Council.

“It’s about blurring the lines between the virtual and the real either partially or completely,” Brunner said. “This is a technology that once it’s perfected is going to impact every part of our lives.”

On Wednesday morning, Magic Leap officially opened its 23,000 square foot Austin office, which includes 5,000 square feet of clean room space. The clean room space gives off a strange orange glow and makes Magic Leap’s operations look all the more mysterious. Signs posted around the office warn visitors not to take photos. But through the windows, visitors can see workers dressed in white “bunny suits” working on components of Magic Leap’s product. The office currently has 40 employees but the company is hiring and plans to expand.

“Obviously, Austin is really critical for us. The most significant R&D and manufacturing setup is happening right here,” said Brian Wallace, chief marketing officer with Magic Leap. “As with all things with Magic Leap I can’t say to the public exactly what we are doing here. We have some of the best and brightest minds literally in Austin right now helping to bring Magic Leap’s vision to the world.”

The main manufacturing operations will be in Plantation, Florida, in an old Motorola plant, Klug said. The Austin operations grew out of Magic Leap’s original office, a garage belonging to Zebra Imaging in Pflugerville. That’s where Klug worked with a few other people. Magic Leap’s operations are based in Dania, Florida, just outside Fort Lauderdale. But Klug didn’t want to leave Austin. And that’s how the Florida-Texas Magic Leap connection began. Magic Leap also has a software office in Mountain View, California.

Magic Leap’s Austin office is located at 9801 Metric Blvd. on the opposite end of a shared building with Zebra Imaging.

Congressman Michael Thomas McCaul, R-Austin, attended the event Wednesday. Previously he toured the facility in Florida and was blown away by Magic Leap’s technology, he said.

“3D virtual technology…basically living in that space,” McCaul said. He is chairman of the U.S. House of Representative’s homeland security committee and he’s on the science, space and technology committee as well. He wanted to attend the Magic Leap office opening to show his support for what they do, he said. It’s a $10 million investment and it’s creating tech jobs in Austin, McCaul said.

There is a wide range of national security applications for Magic Leap’s technology, McCaul said.

To some it may be surprising to have one of the next big things in tech being created outside of Silicon Valley. But having a skunk works operation based in Florida does have some roots in computer history. In fact, Boca Raton is where a group of IBM engineers fled from the New York IBM headquarters to create the IBM PC, which debuted in 1981.

So when will Magic Leap introduce its transformative mixed realty products? The only thing the company would say is soon.

Austin-based Magnitude Software announced Tuesday plans to buy Simba Technologies, a data and analytics firm.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“This acquisition furthers our strategic vision to enable enterprise-wide visibility and insights for corporate performance management,” Chris Ney, Chairman & CEO of Magnitude Software, said in a news release. “As data heterogeneity expands exponentially, so does the complexity of connectivity challenges that Simba can help solve, accelerating our ability to put data into the hands of business users.”

Simba Technologies provides data access between front-end applications and back-end data sources. Its customers include Microsoft Corp.

“We are thrilled to become part of the Magnitude Software family,” Amyn Rajan, CEO of Simba Technologies said in a news release. “Simba perfectly complements the existing Magnitude Software solutions, allowing for connectivity to more diverse applications and a wide array of data environments.”

Ten years ago, FloSports started out with just two brothers driving a used van around the country to cover track and field events and wrestling tournaments.

Today, Austin-based FloSports has 165 employees and they report on 14 different sports categories including gymnastics, cheerleading and boxing.

And Monday, the online sports network announced it has closed on $21.2 million in funding for its Series B round. To date, the company has raised $32.2 million in funding.

DCM Ventures and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments led the latest financing with participation from World Wrestling Entertainment, Discovery Communications and existing investors Causeway Media Partners.

“This investment allows us to add more fuel to our over-the-top model and provides a vote of confidence as we continue in our mission to deliver the sports you love in the breadth and manner that they deserve to be covered,” FloSports cofounder and CEO Martin Floreani wrote in a letter to his community. “We’ll be using the funds to improve our digital platform and add OTT apps like Roku and Apple TV. We’ll be enhancing your user experience and adding new features to our live streams. And we’ll put more resources towards research and development so we can stay on the cutting edge of technology as we continue our mission to bring you more of the sports you love.”

FloSports focuses on covering live events through its subscription-based network. This year, FloSports expanded its cover to include volleyball, combat, tennis and the fighting game community. It live streams events such as the PGF National Championship on FloSoftball.com, the 2016 World Jiu-Jitsu IBJJF Championship on FloGrappling.com, the 2016 Pan-American Championship and the 2016 Pan-American Olympic Games Qualifying Tournament on FloWrestling.com and the Cheerleading Worlds and the Dance Worlds on FloCheer.com.

“Over the top video services will disrupt the media ecosystem from top to bottom over the next 5-7 years,” Jason Krikorian, general partner at DCM Ventures and Co-founder of Sling Media, said in a news release. “Of particular interest to me are companies that create content with an authentic voice that appeals to and cultivates passionate communities.”

“The van my brother and I drove around the country, dreaming of a future where we could easily and instantly access the sports we loved, is still here,” Floreani wrote in his letter. “We parked it behind our office. It reminds us of how far we’ve come, but it also reminds us that we still have roads to travel.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Apoorva Bapat had a whole academic year to learn the concepts that she and other teachers imparted to 17 girls in Austin during the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program this summer.

“They would learn the concepts in the morning and by afternoon they were using them to make really amazing projects,” said Bapat, who spoke at a graduation ceremony for the girls at St. Edward’s University Thursday evening. The participants, mostly high-school aged girls from Texas, were hand-picked from 7,000 applicants to be among the 1,600 to do the seven-week program this summer, according to Girls Who Code founder, Reshma Saujani.

Saujani, who lives in New York but attends all Girls Who Code graduations, told the story of the organization’s founding in 2010. An attorney and politician, Saujani became aware of the gender gap in tech when she ran for U.S. Congress and, as part of her campaign, visited schools.

Computer classes at the schools, she noticed, were full of boys wanting “to be the next Steve Jobs.” Recognizing that technology infiltrated every aspect of society, and that girls were missing the boat for future economic opportunity, she started a pilot class of 20 girls in New York City, buying the url: girlswhocode.com for $1.99

Since then, 40,000 girls have gone through the program. They weren’t chosen Saujani said, because they were coding superstars—some of them had never coded anything. But because they have the potential to be leaders.

“What is the problem you want to solve?” Saujani asked the girls. “We don’t want you to walk out of this room and be ordinary. We want you to solve problems…. I bet when people asked ‘What are you doing this summer?’ they might have thought this was not a great choice, to hang out with a bunch of dorky girls….” Here she paused and smiled, nodding at the participants “Made the best friends of your life, right?”

The girls had broken into several teams based on their interests and created programs from a robot dance party in which they programmed 500 robots in C++, to a fantasy video game, to an app that tells you everything you need to know to recycle your waste and where to take it.

One team created a website, College Safe Search, that collects the sexual safety and assault policies of colleges all over the U.S., pairs them with campus crime statistics and makes the information available to prospective students. Putting all the information in one, user-friendly place, the girls decided, would help high school juniors and seniors choose a safer college. Team mates Amanda Chandler, Mali Nichols, Aja Boateng, and Karla Coronado were teamed up because of their mutual interest in learning to code to address social issues.

With a leaderboard, something like College Safe Search could make it very clear which colleges are taking effective measures to stop sexual assault and the best ones could have a distinct competitive advantage. This might raise the bar for all universities.

“I see technology on the internet a lot and all the cool stuff you can do on there and I thought ‘I want to do some of that cool stuff too,’” said Boateng, who grew up in Chicago and moved to Austin in 2008. “In my art program there was this little fire here for Girls Who Code and I thought ‘I want to go.’”

The hardest part was learning persistence, they said: “Learning that we’re going to fail a lot and how much is trial and error, because it’s not one time and done; it’s a million times and done,” said Nichols.

And that, Saujani said in her address, is one of the most important lessons of Girls Who Code. Having graduated with honors from both Harvard and Yale and started a successful career she said, she “Woke up one morning at 33 in the fetal position…. I hated my job. I hated my life. I wasn’t doing what I had been put on this earth to do.” So many girls, she said, are protected from failing and from messes. Learning to code is about learning “to practice sucking at things, failing and pursing the things you’re not already good at.”

After the ceremony, Saujani said many of the girls who join the program are those who have an idea and want to learn to build it. But there’s no one type of girl. The 17 in the Austin class represented different races and backgrounds with different levels of exposure to tech and myriad reasons for joining.

The event was also sponsored by AT&T Aspire which has provided $3 million in funding to Girls Who Code since 2014.

By HOJUN CHOI
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

When Charlie Kolb, co-founder of telemedicine startup Chiron Health, made the decision to enroll in classes for his master’s degree at the University of Texas at Austin, he did so with the dreams of one day starting his own company.

“I wasn’t interested in investment banking, or consulting,” Kolb said. “I was very focused on starting a company and I wanted to meet people who wanted to do the same.”

Kolb got significantly closer to achieving his dream when he met fellow classmate Andrew O’Hara, the founder and CEO of the Austin-based startup, who was looking to bring his experiences from the health information technology industry into the startup world.

O’Hara, who had worked as a stock analyst in Chicago, told Kolb about a gap in the telemedicine space, which had previously been bogged down by regulations that made it difficult for physicians to receive reimbursements for telemedicine services.

Though telemedicine companies like American Well and Teledoc were garnering positive buzz about their services, Kolb said O’Hara envisioned a service that would help doctors connect with their existing patients, rather than offering a platform that locates a physician for the customer.

“[O’Hara] said a bolt-on telemedicine solution that plugs right into the systems that are already installed in basically every doctor’s office in the country would be a good strategy,” Kolb said.

With their compass pointing North, Kolb and O’Hara began developing their venture.

In addition to taking graduate-level courses, the two-man team began putting together pitch decks and started their initial market research. With their concept in mind, Kolb and O’Hara participated in “3 Day Startup,” a workshop hosted by the Austin Technology Incubator.

“We had some phenomenal research on reimbursement and regulations -which are two big hurdles for practices when adopting telemedicine,” Kolb said.

Their vision caught the attention of fellow participants in the three-day workshop, which places individuals into teams and pairs them up with advisors who help teams conduct market research and develop business models.

The workshop became a launching point for Kolb and O’Hara, who now looked to develop a minimal viable product to pitch to investors. Shortly after the success at the workshop, O’Hara told Kolb that he would be leaving the master’s program -a decision that Kolb would later make himself.

“I think you can get some great experience from learning in a classroom, but it’s nothing compared to the hands on experience you get from building and operating your own company -so no regrets, really.” Kolb said.

By late 2013, Kolb and O’Hara had found a developer to create the first version of their telemedicine platform, and by the summer of 2014, Chiron Health had 12 customers using and paying for their platform.

“What we were selling fit into a viable economic model, and I think a big part of that was the fact that these were visits that they could get reimbursed for,” Kolb said.

Through their market research, Kolb’s team learned that doctors conduct a large volume of visits over the telephone on a daily basis, many times for post-hospital care for outpatients. Kolb said that though these services over the phone were frequent, doctors could not be reimbursed for the time they spent for these remote visits.

If these same visits were conducted over a video conference call, however, physicians are able to collect reimbursements for their treatment.

“Most physicians, regardless of where they are, are not aware there are laws that require that video visits be reimbursed,” Kolb said. “Doctors just think you can’t get paid for them, so a lot of our job on the sales side is educating and spreading awareness around those regulations.”

Kavita Radhakrishnan, a nursing professor at the University of Texas at Austin, specializes in telehealth, and has conducted research on the effects of telehealth on patients. She said the issue of reimbursement was a large barrier for many practices trying to adopt telemedicine technologies during her research.

“At that time, insurance companies were not reimbursing for telehealth, so their biggest selling point is probably the fact that they take care of the reimbursement,” Radhakrishnan said.

In the past, Radhakrishnan said that healthcare providers were also wary of the costs related with upgrades needed to maintain telemedicine platforms.

“Telemedicine definitely has value which is why being aware of some of the negative aspects and being prepared for that is really going to increase the value of telehealth,” Radhakrishnan said.

Dr. Adriana Guerra, who owns a family health practice in central Austin, said she has been using Chiron Health services for almost two years. She said the company’s platform has not run into any technical issues, and said the company’s costs have not been taxing on her practice.

“If there were any problems, they were on the patient side, and they were rare,” Guerra said.

Guerra said Chiron Health’s customer support service allows her patients to deal with any questions or problems they have with the software, and she had not received any complaints about the platform.

“If I feel like a patient is struggling with getting online or logging in, I can use the ‘help’ button to get in contact with the customer service team to reach out to the patient immediately,” Guerra said.

The company, which recently competed in “Google Demo Day” in May, has raised more than $3 million in funding. Kolb said that Capital Factory’s incubator program has greatly helped the company gain the momentum to attract more institutional funding.

And despite having received very few complaints about their telemedicine software, Kolb said the company looks to use the money to further streamline their platform.

“You can make a change on the product that directly impacts our ability to sell, or our ability to provide better customer support.” Kolb said. “We’re very comfortable with the foundations that are in place, so we feel like we can get the most leverage out of investing more in the product at this point.”

Alafair Biosciences, an Austin-based medical device startup, announced Wednesday it has received $2 million in venture funding.

ATP Fund led the Series A investment with participation form existing and new investors including the UT Horizon Fund. To date, the company, founded in 2011, has raised $5.9 million.

The latest funds will help Alafair Biosciences expand its sales and marketing efforts and help with product development. As part of the deal, ATP Fund managing partner and representative Kyle Cox has joined Alafair’s board.

“The UT Horizon Fund’s investment in Alafair is part of an amazing story, in which discoveries born in the lab at UT Austin have grown into a technology platform that is set to make a difference in the lives of people here in Texas and beyond,” Julie Goonewardene, Associate Vice Chancellor for innovation and strategic investment and Managing Director for the UT Horizon Fund, said in a news release.

Alafair recently announced it has received FDA clearance for its first product, VersaWrap Tendon Protector. It is used for the treatment of tendon injuries.

“The closing of our Series A funding round is a significant milestone for Alafair. This funding will support the launch of VersaWrap Tendon Protector and the development of our suite of VersaWrap products, developed to meet the needs of surgeons and their patients,” Daniel Peterson, MD, Alafair’s Chairman and CEO, said in a news release.

Alafair Biosciences has developed patented surgical products for a broad spectrum of soft tissue repair and protection applications. It will be launching its VersaWrap Tendon Protector directly and through partnerships with some of the world’s major medical device companies.

Owlchemy Labs, an independent virtual reality game developer, announced this week the company has closed on $5 million in venture capital.

The Austin-based startup moved here from Boston, where Alex Schwartz founded the company in 2010.

Owlchemy Labs raised a $5 million Series A round from Qualcomm Ventures, HTC, The VR Fund, Colopl VR Fund, Capital Factory and other Austin-based investors, according to a blog post by the company.

“This is an incredibly exciting time in Owlchemy’s history,” according to the blog post. “Job Simulator is making waves as a bundled launch title for HTC Vive, making it one of the most played VR games to date. Job Simulator is also slated to be a launch title for both Oculus Touch and PlayStation VR later this year.”

The company, with 16 employees, plans to continue expanding its “Job Simulator” game with new content. It also recently announced a partnership with Adult Swim to bring hit animated series “Rick and Morty” into virtual reality. “Both titles, along with forthcoming unannounced titles, are powered by the company’s proprietary “Owlchemy VR” technology, enabling rapid simultaneous development across multiple VR platforms,” according to a news release.