Category: Austin (Page 181 of 318)

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Talk to the founders of EvoSure for 30 minutes and even if you thought insurance was the province of wary gray men in gray suits, you’ll come away convinced that it’s an exciting, complex maze of chance and judgment, fraught with risk in every direction, from human frailty to Acts of God. It’s breathtaking.

But, because of all of this complexity and danger, it can be a huge challenge, especially in the commercial lines, to find an insurance underwriter willing to cover specific clients. Some insurance situations are boilerplate, but others have variances that make them unsavory to particular insurance underwriters. And since, according to EvoSure advisor Michael Boyle, CEO of Perseus Technical Strategies LLC, processing a request for a quote costs around $200 each, 80 percent of brokers’ requests for underwriting are declined without even being quoted.

Finding an underwriter who will cover your particular client’s risk, Boyle said, is like being put in a room with a handful of darts and a dartboard that’s allegedly on the other side of a sheet. There’s a guy standing in the middle, repeating: “Darn, you missed.”

Carriers might tell brokers that they will underwrite manufacturing, but when the broker comes back with a manufacturing firm client in Michigan, the underwriter says they don’t handle manufacturing in Michigan. When the broker returns with an Ohio manufacturer it appears a go, until it turns out the company manufactures yogurt and this underwriter doesn’t handle food manufacturing. Then if the broker shows up with a sheet metal manufacturing client in Illinois, it looks hopeful until the broker tells the underwriter it’s a $110 million plant and the broker doesn’t handle sheet metal companies over $100 million.

EvoSure, Boyle said “Seemed like the single most revolutionary approach to this problem anyone had ever taken.”

Calling itself the Match.com of the insurance industry, the EvoSure platform lets subscribing insurance brokers get online, type in what they’re looking for and instantly access a list of underwriters who are interested in covering that kind of business. From there, the brokers just have to connect with the list of underwriters to drill down which one is the best match for the company.

According to J. Brandon Foster of Walker Myers Insurance and Risk Management, it takes “Massively less time,” than the old system, and creates much better relationships between brokers and underwriters.

Birth of a Solution

EvoSure co-founders Matt Foran, CEO and Brian Wood, COO, met in 2008 when both were working for Marsh & McLennan and both were contacted in their respective home towns and asked to move to New York immediately to head up the project restructuring Marsh USA. Foran had always loved business. As a kindergartener he wanted to be a stockbroker. He started investing at the age of 14 and was a broker who “could sit with CEOs of investment firms at 22 and I thought that was very cool.” Wood studied psychology but while working on his master’s degree worked at a bank call center and wound up getting promoted so rapidly he ended up managing a call center at Bank One and later being recruited by Trilogy to work on a startup, InsuranceOrder.com

When they were put in charge of restructuring Marsh USA, they had to eliminate $260 million in costs in three months.

“You learn a lot, very quickly, about the right sizing of business models,” Wood said. “We both believed the company should not have to do this again, if we do it right.”

That meant focusing on the core business and making careful decisions as they went through to keep what was central and eliminate what was peripheral.

After that project, Wood went on with Marsh & McLennan and Foran went on to become director of strategy and operational planning and execution for Zurich Financial Services, which owns Farmer’s Insurance.

“I was head of strategy for specialty products and I got to see the brokerage side, all the challenges they face, and the underwriting side, and to understand the pain and the root cause,” Foran said.

Both Foran and Wood are big into understanding the root cause.

“If you look at the challenges between the brokerages and carriers by themselves you can’t solve a lot of them. But if you take three steps back you can solve the initial, big problem.”

Foran had kept in touch with Wood over the years and when he came up with the idea for EvoSure, he called him and told him he wanted to fly from Chicago to Austin to talk to him about it. Wood agreed, hung up the phone and said: “What did I just do?”

A self-described “person of faith,” Wood had already co-founded a startup and was racked with guilt over agreeing to meet with Foran. One day, before the meeting, his co-founder said “You seem like something’s weighing on you, what’s up?”

When Wood told him about the impending meeting, his co-founder reminded him “Remember I told you about three weeks ago that I had a strong feeling you were going to wind up doing something else?” Wood recalled the comment, but at the time he had dismissed it, it came so out of the blue. Now it looked like a sign.

Austin, Cheap and Friendly

Their first order of business was to hammer out the company culture.

“The bigger thing for me was what kind of company do you want to build?” Wood said. “How do you want to support your clients? How do you want them to think about you? How do you want employees to think about their days? We were focused on the cultural things—what it was going to be like.”

“Austin is really competitive from a personnel standpoint,” Foran said. “It’s all about relationships. People have to trust you. People have to know that you know what doing…and they have to know how they fit in and where you want to take the company. Brian built an incredible team. He added one person and they’ve added another person…. Every single personality drives your culture so it’s critical that your very diverse personalities are driven toward a singular vision of serving clients and serving each other.” Team members include Josh Peterson, vice president of product who worked at Marsh & McLennan, Google and Bazaarvoice, who they credit with developing a lean approach to creating the business.

Some of their advisors had said it would take $10 million to $15 million to get the company off the ground. They were thinking in terms of onsite servers and custom security. Instead, they went with cloud solutions that had top level security at a fraction of the cost. They bought used office furniture and only spent money on people and travel. Many people in the Austin tech community advised and coached them, helping them build a company frugally. That was one of the extraordinary things about building the company in Austin, the community really wanted to help them succeed.

The company operates on an access model, Foran said. Underwriters pay $75 per underwriter per month. Brokers’ fees are based on the size and complexity of the brokerage. Founders didn’t say exactly how many companies had signed on but that they were confident of reaching critical mass. If the top 10 carriers join, Boyle said, the other 30-50 have to follow. And EvoSure benefits them as well as brokers. Currently they’re missing out on a lot of opportunities because of how much it costs them to analyze them.

Finally, a Solution

Since this problem has been around so long, it seems odd that no one has solved it before. Boyle said others have tried. One, created by LexisNexis was trying to create a system for electronic submissions to be possible between every carrier and every broker but it required the companies to put “all this plumbing in place” and many carriers wouldn’t support it. EvoSure’s user experience is simple.

“It really delivers value from day one to the brokers using it. It doesn’t require them to rebuild the entire ecosystem of technology.”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

CoinTerra, once recognized as one of Austin’s fastest growing startups, has filed for Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy.

The Austin-based bitcoin machine manufacturer filed for bankruptcy in Austin on Jan. 24, listing between $10 million and $50 million in assets and liabilities.

“The move comes soon after CoinTerra became the target of a lawsuit launched by C7 Data Centers, a data center colocation services provider based in Utah,” according to an article in CoinDesk. “C7 is seeking repayment on roughly $1.4m in unpaid service fees, as well as nearly $4m in damages.”

Ravi Iyengar, a former lead CPU architect at Samsung, founded CoinTerra in May of 2013 and served as its Chief Executive Officer. The company made the TerraMiner IV, a high performance computer which mined Bitcoins and sold for around $6000. The company raised about $2.2 million in funding, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Silicon Hills News did this profile of CoinTerra last year. In the comments, some customers complained they never received the computers they ordered.

Bitcoin is a global digital currency created in 2009. High powered computers are used to “mine” or create new bitcoins.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A crowd turned out last Saturday to cheer on food industry innovators at the Norman Hackerman Building at the University of Texas.

The top 20 finalists in the first Food Challenge Prize, put on by the Food Lab at UT, displayed their wares throughout the room. It kind of resembled a science fair with posters and flyers on the various startups. They also provided samples of such delicacies as cricket granola.

A band played in the hallway where visitors mingled and munched on sandwiches and sipped on drinks from BeatBox, an Austin startup that received a $1 million investment from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank.

At the afternoon pitch session, the finalists gave three-minute slide presentations and provided information on their startups. Then the judges deliberated and around 3:30 p.m. Robyn Metcalfe, founder and director of the Food Lab at UT, announced the winners.

Sproot, a three-year-old startup from Somerville, Mass, that delivers healthy snacks and meals to kids in pre-schools and runs children’s cooking classes, won the People’s Choice Award.

Ten Acre Organics, a startup which is building a 10-acre farm based on aquaponics, in which fish and vegetables are grown together to create zero waste took the grand prize and won $10,000.

Ten Acre Organics participated in the Texas Venture Lab last year and has previously participated in the Unlimited USA incubator.

In addition to the grand prizewinner, $20,000 in prizes went to four food startups that won their category. The category winners each received $5,000.

Aspire Food Group, an Austin startup that processes and sells farm-raised edible insects, won in the category of Healthy Eating and Education.

Revive Foods from San Francisco won in the category of Inputs and Production. It makes jams, jellies and other foods from surplus fruits and vegetables that would otherwise go into the trash.

Sereneti Kitchen from Atlanta won in the category of Processing, Packaging and Safety. It makes a robotic appliance to automate household food preparation.

CitySprout, an Austin-based startup which serves as a virtual farmers market connecting buyers with local farmers online, won for Storage and Distribution.

More than 120 early stage startups registered for the competition.

“This first-time event generated tremendous goodwill and enthusiasm throughout the university, the city and across the country,” Metcalfe said in a news release. “And the Challenge is intended to have an impact well beyond today’s awards – we are connecting teams to a powerful network geared towards continued growth. We look forward to seeing where all of the teams will be a year from now.”

Ben Dyer, a serial technology entrepreneur and entrepreneur in residence at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, has joined the advisory board of Enola Labs.

The Austin-based mobile and web development company is run by Marcus Turner, its president and chief technology officer. It is also in the process of acquiring MeetMePay, a payment platform and its developing another payment platform for the hospitality industry.

Dyer is an instructor in the Longhorn Startup program. He previously founded, ran and sold Peachtree Software and later founded Comsell, an early interactive media company that he sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, followed by Intellimedia, which created ESPN branded CD-ROMs for sports education and later morphed into web development.

The company, which has 20 employees, is also moving part of its team into the We Work Austin coworking space on Congress Ave. It will also keep its North Austin development office.

In addition to Dyer, Keith Krammes has also joined the Enola Labs advisory board. Krammes previously served as a Senior Vice President and Deputy Sector Manager with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

“We have assembled a very strong core team and have recently restructured our company for rapid expansion in 2015 via organic growth and acquisitions,” Enola Labs President Marcus Turner said in a news release. “Our goal is to be a leading mobile and web developer in Austin, Atlanta, and the DC area, and we are working with clients across the US.”

“Having known Marcus Turner for several years, I have come to respect his skills in leading all levels of software development,” Dyer said. “Marcus has deep experience as the manufacturing innovation lead within HP labs and as a consultant there and has created considerable technology that is today widely used both within HP itself and several Fortune 200 companies. He has assembled a solid base here in Austin, and I’m pleased to assist in leveraging this into a significant company this year and beyond.”

Dan Graham, the co-founder of BuildASign.com, has launched a new venture to nurture Austin’s startup community.

Graham has officially opened Owen’s Garage, a coworking and incubator in housed in a former auto shop in East Austin.

The space contains Austin startups which Graham has invested in. Owen’s Garage provides a place for “startups to work and collaborate while they scale their business.”

“As a founder of a startup myself, I understand the struggle to grow your business when you’re working from a kitchen table or a coffee shop,” Graham said in a news release. “I saw Owen’s Garage as an opportunity to create a functional coworking space that gives the companies I’m invested in the flexibility both in cost and structure that fits their startup nature.”

Owen’s Garage includes ten businesses:

Kickstand Communications, a public relations firm

ScaleFactor, a financial services firm

Sku, a CPG incubator

Idea Labs Consulting, a business consulting company

Wearables.com, the authoritative site for all things wearable tech

Massage.com, an online booking site for massage services

Clear Launch, a web development firm

GreenStraw Creative, a UI, web design, and branding company

Broomly, an online booking site for house cleaning services

Glasshouse Policy, a nonprofit focused on Texas public policy

Owen’s Garage at 1408 East 13th Street is hosting an open house on Thursday from 6 p.m. until 9 p.m.

It’s a real drag when the giant bag of dog food in the pantry is empty and the dogs are hungry and there’s no time to run to the store.

Never fear, there’s a solution to this nagging problem.

The dogs have got to eat. And Instacart and Tomlinson’s Pets in Austin will make sure of that. They’ve teamed up to provide same-day delivery directly from the pet store. (Anyone remember Pets.com? They used to deliver giant 20 pound bags of dog food for free, but they’re out of business. The economics just didn’t make sense. But it sure was convenient for pet owners.)

Now the solution for the millenium age is Instacart, a same day grocery delivery service, combined with Tomlinson’s Pets, which has nine locations throughout Austin and surrounding areas. Customers can now get a “curated selection of food, treats, toys and essentials for customers’ favorite furry friends, making pampering their pets as simple as having groceries delivered right to their door.”

And here’s a way to do good by just ordering pet supplies through this new partnership. They plan to donate $1 to Austin Pets Alive for each order placed this month.

“We want to make it as easy as possible to find and feed your pet the healthiest food available,” Scott Click, Owner of Tomlinson’s Pets, said in a news release. “Many of the healthy foods we carry aren’t found in big box stores or online, so Instacart is providing our customers with a great way to get local, natural pet products without sacrificing convenience.”

The deliveries will take place Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. and Sunday from noon until 6:00 p.m.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Pipeline Fellowship Founder and CEO Natalia Oberti Noguera spoke recently at a Women 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

She talked about her experience as a LGBT Latina entrepreneur and afterwards a black woman approached her tearfully and thanked her for sharing her experience.

It turns out the woman got invited to pitch at a tech event in Los Angeles in 2014 and when she got there a prominent investor handed her his trash to throw out. She explained who she was and that she was pitching and he still told her to throw out the trash.

The woman said, “This is why I want to be a successful entrepreneur so I can become an angel investor and, in turn, fund people of color entrepreneurs so they don’t have to go through what I went through.”

“You can and you will change the face of angel investing,” Oberti Noguera told her.

And that’s Oberti Noguera’s mission.

“If we have more women, as well as men of color – diversity on the angel investing side, the concept of ‘the other’ that is so prominent changes,” Oberti Noguera said. “It’s going to become less “the other’ and more us. That’s what I find really powerful and that will help to improve the situation.”

Oberti Noguera, who was named one of Business Insider’s “30 Most Important Women in Tech Under 30,” is launching the first Pipeline Fellowship cohort in Austin. Pipeline Fellowship is an angel investing bootcamp aimed at training high net worth women how to become angel investors.

Pipeline Fellowship runs programs in Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, D.C., Memphis, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. And it is expanding this Spring to Detroit and Austin.

The goal is to create more capital for women entrepreneurs, Oberti Noguera said.

The deadline to apply to belong to Pipeline Fellowship’s first Austin cohort is Friday, Feb. 13th. To qualify, accredited female investors must have an annual income of $200,000 or $300,000 joint income with spouse for the past two years or $1 million net worth excluding residence. Candidates also must be interested in a group learning model and they must have a passion for philanthropy or social change. Pipeline Fellows range in age from late 20s to 60 plus.

Oberti Noguera dubs the Pipeline Fellows “angels in training” or “sharks in training.”

“Entrepreneurs are everywhere,” Oberti Noguera said. “Capital isn’t.”

“There’s this assumption that if you want funding you should go to Silicon Valley,” Oberti Noguera said. But many people are not wanting, willing or able to do that. So Pipeline Fellowship seeks to bring the capital to female entrepreneurs wherever they live, she said.

“We’re activating local capital for entrepreneurs,” she said.

The Pipeline Fellowship involves three stages. The first is the educational component which provides information ranging from how to do due diligence to portfolio strategies. The next phase involves mentoring in which the women are paired with experienced angel investors for “street smarts,” Oberti Noguera said.

“They learn from real people on the ground sharing experiences,” she said.

Lastly, they participate in a pitch summit. Women entrepreneurs looking for funding submit applications. The group invites eight to ten women to pitch their ideas, and then the Pipeline Fellowship cohort selects one company to invest in as a group. The company gets from $15,000 to $50,000 in seed stage investment.

“Early capital is critical to get the company to the next level,” Oberti Noguera said.

Since Pipeline Fellowship launched in April of 2011, the program has trained 100 women as angel investors.

“We’re creating capital for women looking to do good and women looking to do well,” Oberti Noguera said. “To put it candidly, currently traditional VCs and angels aren’t filling the role.”

Pipeline Fellowship connects female investors and entrepreneurs with opportunities beyond their network and reach, Oberti Noguera said.

“We’re deconstructing the system and creating a new one,” she said. “If we have more diversity on the angel and VC side, then we are going to be more open to diversity on the entrepreneur side.”

Candidates are encouraged to apply by Friday.

BuildASign.com, a bootstrapped online sign printer which also sells home decor items, Tuesday announced it has received an investment from PWP Growth Equity.

The Austin-based private company did not disclose financial details of the investment.

Founded in 2005, BuildASign.com has been on a steady growth track. (Silicon Hills News did this story in 2012 on its success.)

BuildASign plans to hire more employees, invest in sales, test new products and grow its existing business with the investment, according to a news release.

“This year BuildASign.com turns ten years old and we are extremely excited about this new chapter,” Dan Graham, CEO and co-founder said in a news statement. “This investment will allow us to be more growth focused than ever before and will give us an edge in the competitive landscape as we move forward.”

Graham will continue to run the company as CEO. Co-founder J.R. Kraft will no longer be president. David Ferguson and Chip Baird, both partners at Perella Weinberg Partners and co-heads of PWP Growth Equity, will join Graham and Kraft on the Board of Directors.

BuildASign.com also runs EasyCanvasPrints.com and AlliedShirts.com. It has more than 270 employees.

Four Austin startups will go on to compete in the 1776 Challenge Cup Competition.

The winners include PenPal Schools in the education category, Lucelo Technology in the energy & sustainability category, Keet Software in health category and StormPins in the transportation and cities category.

Several Austin startups competed at the Capital Factory Thursday night in the Austin regional Challenge Cup. The winners advance to the global Challenge Cup competition to be held in Washington, D.C. in May. That event will feature 64 startups from 16 regions. They will compete for $650,000 in prizes.

“Last year, seven startups from Austin advanced to the Challenge Cup global finals and Houston-based Water Lens, which competed at the Austin Challenge Cup, was named the American winner of the Energy competition,” according to new release.

“Austin has become a leading hub for innovators who are leveraging their creativity to drive positive change in complex, entrenched industries,” Evan Burfield, co-founder of 1776, the global incubator and seed fund, said in a news release. “We’re proud of the extraordinary talent and innovation displayed tonight, demonstrating once again that great ideas with the potential to reshape our world are emerging outside Silicon Valley—and that Austin is a place where groundbreaking ideas are growing and flourishing.”