Category: Austin (Page 133 of 318)

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

After a grueling 35-mile bicycle ride in the Hill Country to prepare for a triathlon, Steven Welch felt some aches and pains in his legs.

He agreed to go to a Cryotherapy session with his friend. He didn’t much believe that it would help his recovery, but his friend, Jim Donnelly, who was also training for a triathlon, insisted that he would feel a lot better the next day.
And Welch did.

“Normally, the next day, after a ride like that, my legs would feel like Jell-O,” Welch said. But thanks to the Cryotherapy session he felt great, he said.

Much like the tale of Victor Kiam, an entrepreneur who liked Remington shavers so much he bought the company, Welch and Donnelly, the founder of IgoUgo.com, founded Restore Cryotherapy, a consumer medical business.

Cryotherapy involves a person being put into a device, which resembles a cylindrical tank, with their head remaining outside the chamber at the top. During the Whole Body Cryotherapy session, liquid nitrogen is injected into the chamber that cools the temperature inside the chamber to well below freezing. The sessions generally last three minutes and result in a sharp decrease in overall body temperature.

Restore Cryotherapy also offers oxygen therapy, drip therapy with IV filled with vitamin solutions, Welch said.

In 2015, they opened one store in Austin and one store in Charlotte, North Carolina and the stores have done phenomenally well, Welch said. So they have decided to build out more than 100 stores in the next five years. And they have just raised a seed round of $1 million to expand the business. Most of the investors were doctors but the round also included some well-known angel investors like Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo and professional athletes like Jeff Foster.

The stores offer Whole Body Cryotherapy, IV infusion, compression therapy and hyperbaric chambers directly to consumers in a retail setting. Welch likes to say they are “the anti-doctor’s office.”

“They are fun, have quick in and out times and a cool, hip look to them,” Welch said.

Each service is tailored to reduce pain and recovery times for customers, he said.

As a founder of DreamIt, which runs the country’s largest healthcare accelerator, Welch has noticed a trend in the startups participating in the program focused on the health wellness industry.

“Consumers are taking ownership of their healthcare,” Welch said. “They are spending money in more wellness focused areas.”

Some customers buy a monthly visitors package that lets them get multiple treatments during the month, Welch said. All payments are by cash and insurance is not taken, he said. Monthly memberships costs $300 and a session runs $30, he said.

The customers include everyone from professional tennis players to a white collar worker with chronic lower back pain. Some of the back pain suffers visit the store three times a week. Some customers with Rheumatoid arthritis visit the store every day, Welch said.

“It’s hard to grasp until you’ve done it,” Welch said. But for chronic pain sufferers, this therapy offers an alternative to addictive pain relieving drugs, he said.

“This is a much lower cost process,” he said. “A huge percentage of our customers are people who are trying to do things that are more natural.”

Cryotherapy was developed in the ’70s primarily to treat professional athletes and it does not require FDA approval. And Restore Cryotherapy has licensed nurses at every location, Welch said.

Within the next 60 days, Welch and Donnelly plan to have three stores in the Austin area.

The search engine giant, Google, want to deliver packages to shoppers in Austin through its Google Express service.

Google on Wednesday launched the service, which offers overnight and two-day shopping and delivery service, in Austin and surrounding areas. It also launched the service in Oklahoma and other Texas markets including Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth. Google Express is not yet available in San Antonio.

Google Express lets Austin residents shop using their phones or computers online at stores like Costco and Whole Foods and delivers goods to their doorstep.

The on-demand delivery service competes with Amazon’s Prime one-hour delivery, Instacart and Austin-based Favor.

Google Express launched in 2013 in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The company has greatly expanded the scope of its service. Its now available in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C. and other areas. In some markets, Google Express offers one hour delivery.

Google Express began delivering produce, meat, eggs and other perishable goods in February in San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“Our goal with Google Express is to offer a great shopping experience and connect people with their favorite stores,” Brian Elliott, general manager of Google Express, said in a news release. “Today, we’re very excited to be further expanding our efforts — making it easy for millions in Texas, Oklahoma and beyond to get things they need from stores they love — delivered fast.

The Google Express service is available with a $95 annual membership or $4.99 for each order. Google offers a free six month trial membership.

Google Express provides overnight delivery for Barnes & Noble, Costco, PetSmart, Walgreens and Whole Foods Market. Two day delivery is available for Fry’s, Guitar Center, L’Occitane, Ulta, Vitamin Shop, Moosejaw, Sur La Table, Ace Hardware, Kohl’s, Treasure Island Foods, Roadrunner Sports, Bed Bath & Beyond, buybuy Baby

One of Austin’s newest spirit companies, Milestone Brands is on a buying spree.

The company announced Wednesday its acquisition of American Born Moonshine from Windy Hill Spirits, based in Nashville. Milestone recently acquired Dulce Vida Tequila. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Chad Auler, co-founder of Deep Eddy Vodka,and Eric Dopkins, former CEO of Deep Eddy Vodka, founded the company in February of 2016.

“American Born Moonshine is an amazing brand that represents the incredible history of American moonshine,” Dopkins, CEO and chairman of Milestone Brands, said in a news release. “Pat Dillingham and Sean Koffel did a wonderful job bringing American Born to life in an authentic way, with quality and detail, and we are thrilled to be adding a brand to our portfolio that I truly feel will be a leader in its category.”

Dillingham and Koffel founded Windy Hill Spirits in 2013 expanded its distribution to over 25 states and doubled its sales volume over the past year. Milestone Brands plans to keep Windy Hill Spirits’ leadership team and its field sales employees.

“Pat and I are proud that the brand we are so passionate about and the team that has worked so hard alongside us will be a key part of Milestone Brands’ exciting future,” Koffel said in a news release. “Milestone Brands is poised to be a disruptive leader in the spirits industry and we look forward to working with Eric and Chad to continue building American Born Moonshine into the long-run category leader.”

Austin is a hotbed for social media marketing and the city’s biggest startup focused on the industry, Spredfast, just raised $50 million to further expand its business.

New investor Riverwood Capital led the Series F financing round. Other existing investors in the round include Austin Ventures, InterWest Partners, OpenView Venture Partners and Lead Edge Capital.

Social media outreach is an important function for every business, said Manish Mehta, Spredfast’s Chief Product Officer. Marketers are connecting with customers daily on social media site and forging stronger bonds in the process, he said.

Those social media feeds from Twitter frequently showcased in the Orange Room on the Today Show come from Spredfast.

The Austin-based startup works with some of the world’s largest media companies including NBC, the parent company of the Today Show. It also works with major sports organizations like the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.

And it doesn’t just focus on Twitter. Spredfast keeps its customers on top of all of the social media networks whether its Facebook and Twitter or Instagram and Snapchat, Mehta said.

“We have to stay on the cutting edge and provide support to every social network and every tool, not just a limited few,” he said.

The company plans to use the $50 million in funding to invest in research and development and sales, Mehta said. To date, Spredfast has raised $116 million including this round.

Spredfast operates in three major categories: direct customers in the retail, financial, services and travel industry such as Target, Brooks Brothers, Bank of America and AirBnB, indirect customers such as Whirlpool and media companies like Viacom and NBC, NBA and the NFL, Mehta said.

Although Spredfast is a privately held company, Mehta did report the company closed 2015 with $100 million in sales.

Spredfast also merged with Austin-based Mass Relevance in 2014 and last year it acquired Shoutlet. Today, the company has 500 employees, five global offices and it supports more than 650 customers. About 300 of those employees are based in Austin. The company is hiring across all part of the company, Mehta said.

Spredfast’s social media marketing platform integrates with more than 50 partners, including Actiance, Kenshoo, Google Analytics, Opal, Bitly, and all major listening tools.

Spredfast has also made some key hires lately including Eric Anderson as its Chief Revenue Officer, Melisa Fruge, Chief Legal Officer, Tim Collin, General Manager of EMEA, Leo Ryan, Vice President, EMEA.

Rocket Software, a Waltham, Mass.-based company, announced Tuesday the opening of its first office in Austin.

Rocket Software’s local office is located at The Domain in the same building as Amazon and across the street from IBM, according to a news release.

Rocket Software also recently opened offices in Japan and China. Rocket Chief Technology Officer Bryan Smith, who is based in Austin, is heading up the new office. The company has 35 employees and is hiring technical writers, technical support professionals and software developers and testers. It also recently hired nine interns for the summer including six from the University of Texas at Austin.

“We’ve had employees in Austin for over a decade, but we have all worked remotely,” Smith said in a news release. “I am excited that our team can now sit together in the same physical space because collaborating in person supports innovation in ways that email and videoconferencing just can’t. We are also looking to fill a number of positions this year, and this office will help us attract top talent in a very competitive market.”

The Rocket Software Austin office has open spaces and a “two-sided “Idea Wall,” several comfortable seating areas, a full service kitchen, a game room, and a guest refreshment area,” according to the news release.

Rocket Software, founded in 1990, it builds software and solutions for big companies like IBM.

San Francisco-based Wingz announced it has launched a peer-to-peer ride service in Austin with a focus on providing rides to and from the airport.

Wingz allows customers to pre-book a driver to take them around town at a flat rate, surge-free price, according to a news release. The rides start with a minimum price tag of $20 and the service requests customers to book up to two hours in advance of when they need a ride.

Wingz is backed by Expedia, Altimeter Capital and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. It is available in ten markets and 18 airports. Wingz doesn’t consider itself an on-demand service, but reports its more like a town car service.

“We received a Texas-sized welcome when we launched our airport ride service in Austin last week and immediately felt a part of the community,” Chris Brandon, CEO, Wingz, said in a news release “When we saw what was happening with Uber and Lyft and how it was affecting not only riders, but also the livelihood of drivers, we decided to expedite our Beta launch of WingzAround to help fill that void. We are excited to offer WingzAround to the Austin community and help Austinites safely navigate the city—whether it’s for attending a business meeting or conference, dining in SoCo, catching a concert or sporting event, or getting to a doctor’s appointment.”

Wingz also plans to fingerprint all of its drivers to comply with Austin’s regulations. It is planning to have all of its drivers fingerprinted by August 1st.

EyeQ, a shopper intelligence platform, announced it has received $3.5 million in Series A funding.

Align Capital, a new investor, led the round with participation from existing existing investors. As part of the deal, Lisa Harris, managing partner of Align Capital, joins eyeQ’s board of directors.

The Austin-based startup plans to use the funds for technology development, product enhancement and for sales and marketing. eyeQ has created a combination of hardware and analytical software which it installs in stores. The system provides retail information to consumers with the ultimate goal of driving more sales for the retailer.

“We recognize the potential and value of eyeQ,” Harris said in a news release. “What eyeQ is doing for the in-store shopper experience is giving brick and mortar retailers a way to stay ahead of the game against online competitors.”

eyeQ’s customers include Ford, HP, IBM, Intel, Samsung and OtterBox.

“We are thrilled with an additional financial infusion to help accelerate our business,” eyeQ Founder and CEO Michael Garel, said in a news release.

Founded in 2012, eyeQ previously raised $1.2 million in seed stage funding.

Austin tech leaders Monday announced a new ride-hailing service based on a nonprofit model.

The service is called RideAustin and plans to rollout starting in June. It plans to expand its service to the entire city of Austin by the end of the year, according to information on its website.

Joe Liemandt, founder and CEO of Trilogy, is leading the RideAustin launch team. It is being supported by donations.

“We will have a phased rollout of the service – starting with downtown and the airport,” according to RideAustin. “We are committed to delivering a great experience to customers – and to do so – we will need to carefully expand our coverage as we grow our passenger and driver base.”

RideAustin has already started hiring drivers. It also pledges to pay for the drivers to get fingerprint-based background checks.

The new service is the latest development in Austin’s Transportation Network Company industry. Recently Austin voters shot down Prop 1, an ordinance that would have repealed the fingerprint background check requirement and other regulations of ride hailing companies. As a result, Uber and Lyft quit operating in the city. While some other ride hailing apps like Get Me continue to provide service, they have not been able to fill the void left by Uber and Lyft.

RideAustin will initially be available as an iOS app for both the rider and driver with plans to release an Android version by July, according to RideAustin.

Joshua Baer, founder of Capital Factory, also wrote a post in Austin Startups on Medium, signed by Austin tech leaders who back the RideAustin service.

In the startup community, it’s very well understood that bigger does not always mean better. In fact, bigger can often mean slower, more bureaucratic, and in many cases overly complex and expensive. Yet for all their focus on new business models and disruption, Silicon Valley startups are extremely conservative in their choices of law firms. Pick a random VC-funded startup in Silicon Valley, and there’s a 95 percent chance it uses one of a very short list of law firms. And more peculiarly, every firm on that list is large, very expensive, and decades old.

There are a lot of reasons for this strange phenomenon, and they go deep into valley economics, culture, and history. Occasionally a few lawyers will break away and build a respectable boutique practice there, but the general presence of newer, more nimble firms is barely a blip relative to the overall economy in Silicon Valley. The same can be said for other tech ecosystems like NYC and Seattle.

New Technology, New Firms

Not so in Austin. Here, pick a random VC-backed startup, and more likely than not it doesn’t use large law firms, and isn’t planning to for the foreseeable future. Of course ‘BigLaw’ still dominates IPOs and very very large deals, as it should (big firms are good for big deals), but the opposite is true for Austin’s tech companies that can truly be called startups. To people not very familiar with the history of technology law, this shift to boutique firm dominance may not seem like a big deal. But to those who work in the tech legal market, it’s monumental.

Ask Jose Ancer, a senior VC lawyer at Miller Egan Molter & Nelson (MEMN) and blogger at Silicon Hills Lawyer, and he’ll tell you that three factors explain why Austin is breaking down BigLaw’s dominance in technology law: (1) New technology, (2) Entrepreneurial lawyers, and (3) a focus on capital efficiency.

“Everyone knows that SaaS and the Cloud have dropped the cost of starting a startup by 90 percent. Many don’t know that they’ve done the same for law firms. If I’m a great lawyer in a large firm that is eating as much as 80 percent of what I bill to support its institutional structure, I’m absolutely running numbers on whether I can and should break free,” says Ancer. Over the past 5 years there’s been an explosion in cloud-based services and outsourced service providers that dramatically simplify the infrastructure needed to start and scale a law firm.

Trimming the Fat

Many clients of large, traditional firms don’t realize that the senior associate charging them $625 an hour is probably getting paid 20-25 percent of that rate; leaving a good deal of fat for more nimble firms to trim. Put the right resources in place to completely redesign the firm delivering that lawyer, and her rate can drop hundreds of dollars an hour without her taking much of a pay cut. That’s effectively what is happening in Austin.

But those economics apply across the country. Why is Austin driving this change? Ancer says the city’s legal culture and its focus on capital efficiency are key. Much like the rest of Austin’s professional culture, top lawyers in Austin have historically pushed against the “bill, bill, sleep, bill, and bill some more” culture of traditional large firms. They want to build great careers and get paid well, but they’re more willing to fight for balance than their counterparts in other cities. That has historically meant that (i) the Austin offices of large firms often have better work-life balance, but more importantly, (ii) Austin lawyers are more likely to build their own firms to work on their own terms.

A Growing Ecosystem

To Ancer, “If a top corporate, patent, trademark, whatever lawyer in Austin has found a viable path (thanks to new technology) to drop his rate from $650 per hour to $400, while actually having a personal life and without taking a pay cut, good luck stopping him.” The end-result is a growing ‘ecosystem’ of top lawyers in all kinds of specialties that is collaborating to rival the ‘one stop shop’ model of large firms.

And in a capital-strapped town like Austin, where financings generally have 1 or 2 fewer zeros than their Silicon Valley counterparts, paying $250 less per hour for great counsel is impossible to ignore. “If my Series A is $1 million (in Austin) instead of $10 million (on the West Coast), you better believe I’m going to care if I’m overpaying by hundreds of dollars an hour on legal,” says Ancer. The legal ecosystem here has evolved and thrived out of economic necessity.

With a growing client base that stretches across Texas and the South, and reaches the coasts, Ancer sees a significant market opportunity for the emergence of new top-tier technology law brands that challenge the old players in the early-stage and middle markets. Like MEMN, they’re leveraging technology to be leaner, more focused, and because they aren’t going after billion-dollar deals that BigLaw is designed for, more responsive to startups.

If you’re going IPO or selling your unicorn for $750 million, you may look to a Silicon Valley law firm. But for the rest of the VC-backed market that needs great technology lawyers whose rates are closer to earth, Austin is increasingly the place to look.

This is a sponsored post.