Category: Austin (Page 196 of 309)

Pioneering Women Tech Entrepreneurs in Austin

May 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

A panel of women entrepreneurs in Austin managed to find funding for their ventures despite the odds being stacked against them.

“There’s no ratio or statistic that has gotten in their way,” said Jan Ryan, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Women@Austin.

That panel at the Austin Technology Council’s CEO summit included Sara Gates, founder and CEO of Wisegate, Cathy Thompson, CEO of Motion Computing, Karen Bantuveris, CEO of Volunteerspot.com and Crista Bailey, CEO of TextureMedia.

“One of the best kept secrets in Austin right now is the talent around entrepreneurial women,” Ryan said.

She has made it her mission to shine a spotlight on the success of women entrepreneurs in Austin. Last year, Ryan noticed that the ATC CEO Summit had few women presenters and only a handful of female CEOs in attendance. She worked to change that and organized the panel for this year’s summit.

Ryan along with 16 other successful female entrepreneurs created Women@Austin, an organization with the goal of making Austin the most successful and supportive city in the nation for women.

“It’s not just good for women,” Ryan said. “It’s good for economics.”

Women launch 1,288 new businesses daily, double the rate from three years ago, according to the 2014 State of Women-Owned Business Report, commissioned by American Express OPEN. Those are primarily small businesses, Ryan said.

But Harvard recently did a study showing the number of women led big businesses with $10 million or more in annual revenue has grown by 57 percent in the last 12 months, Ryan said.

“There’s a movement afoot we can leverage,” she said.

The impact diversity has on profitability and the effectiveness of a team is huge, Ryan said. The company that has a balanced management team with even a single woman on the team is poised to perform better, she said.

Yet women-run firms received just an estimated 5 percent of the $29.4 billion invested by venture capitalists in 2013.

A big part of the success for female entrepreneurs is having a good mentor, Ryan said. Studies show women with a mentor are seven times as likely to succeed, she said. She asked the panelists who mentored them.

For Gates, her mother, a former opera singer, served as her mentor and told her she could do anything her brothers could do. That foundation helped her found Wisegate, an IT research firm. She also had a strong local mentor, Mark McClain, CEO and Founder of SailPoint Technologies and her former boss.

Bailey with TextureMedia, which runs web sites for women with curly hair, mentioned Jimmy Treybig, founder of Tandem Computers as her mentor. He is also an investor in the company and serves as its chairman of the board.

“He has tremendous empathy for entrepreneurs,” she said. “He also has innate belief in the good in people. He believes in men and women working together to create great companies.”

Bantuveris, founder of Volunteerspot, a leading coordination tool for moms, gave “props to the Austin community in general.” She called herself an accidental entrepreneur.

“I don’t think I could have started up a company anywhere else but Austin,” she said. “Everybody was so welcoming and they wanted to listen to what we were trying to do.”

Thompson, CEO of Motion Computing, a rugged laptop company focused on the enterprise market, said she has had several mentors. In particular, Michael Dell let her move from the finance department to run a division of Dell. She also mentioned Rudy Garza at G-51 Capital and David Altounian, founder of Motion Computing.

Landing venture capital can be a huge challenge for any entrepreneur but female entrepreneurs face some unique challenges when pitching women focused startups to a room full of men.

At first, Bantuveris bootstrapped her venture and then she received seed funding from the Central Texas Angel Network and additional capital from a nationwide network of angels.

“What’s fun for me is to say go home and ask your wife,” Bantuveris said, about the need for an organizational tool like Volunteerspot for moms. There aren’t that many women venture partners, she said. Venture capitalists tend to fund what they know and understand and what they are comfortable with, she said.

TextureMedia, received funding from CTAN in 2007, and additional investment from Golden Seeds in New York.

“You’ve never lived until you’ve tried to raise money for a platform for women with curly hair and you’re standing in front of a room full of men,” Bailey said.

Motion Computing, founded in 2001, is about to start raising outside capital, said Thompson.

“We see a huge market and growth opportunity,” she said.

She said when it comes to raising outside capital, you can’t take it personally.

“There’s times where you’re going to be a good fit and times when you’re not going to be a good fit,” she said.

Dropbox’s Austin Office Serves as Gateway to Latin America

May 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

When San Francisco-based Dropbox announced plans to open an office in Austin, the company had more volunteers than positions here.

“We still have interest,” said Ross Piper, vice president of enterprise strategy at Dropbox.

The startup kicked off its local office with a small founding team from San Francisco to maintain its corporate culture, Piper said. It now has 700 employees worldwide and it has doubled in size for the past couple of years, he said.

Dropbox opened its office at 501 Congress in February. It has 40 employees now with plans to expand to 200 employees by the end of next year, Piper said.

“This is going to be a very big part of our organization,” he said.

Piper gave the afternoon closing keynote talk at the Austin Technology Council’s fourth annual CEO Summit on Thursday at Brazos Hall in downtown Austin. More than 140 registered to attend the daylong event, which featured panel discussions and talks on variety of technology topics from transportation concerns to increasing Austin’s share of the nation’s venture capital.

The Austin office serves as Dropbox’s gateway to Latin America, said Piper. Seventy percent of its customers are outside the U.S., he said. The company also has an office in Dublin, Ireland.

Dropbox, founded in 2007, provides an online storage box that allows people and businesses to exchange files including documents, photos and videos from anywhere. More than one billion files are uploaded daily on its platform. The company has more than 275 million customers including 4 million businesses including National Geographic, Dell, Whole Foods. It’s also a partner with Dell and provides Dropbox for business using Dell’s cloud software and services.

“This is really changing the way people work,” Piper said.

Last February, the City of Austin approved an incentive package worth $244,500 for Dropbox and the company received a $1.5 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant.

Go Big Austin

May 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

In a panel titled “Austin’s Brand: Go Big or Go Home” at the Austin Technology Council’s CEO Summit three seasoned tech leaders gave their perspective on building a billion dollar company.

“Something that Austin is not known for is thinking big,” said Mark McClain, CEO and founder of SailPoint Technologies.

Austin companies often don’t go long and take their ventures to the “Thunder Lizard” stage, a term made famous by Mike Maples Jr. with Floodgate Ventures in Silicon Valley. Maples has challenged Austin entrepreneurs to come up with the next big thing and create a $100 billion tech company in the next 10 years, a venture he calls a Thunder Lizard.

RetailMeNot always had a bigger vision, said Cotter Cunningham, its CEO.

“For us, we felt like there was an opening and we could take advantage of it,” Cunningham said.

RetailMeNot is now the world’s largest online coupon and deals marketplace. Cunningham raised about $300 million from investors, including Austin Ventures, Google ventures and others. His intent was always to build the biggest company in the coupon market largely through acquisitions.

RetailMeNot went public last June. Its stock trades under the symbol “SALE” on the Nasdaq stock market and closed at $25 a share on Thursday. It has a market capitalization of $1.2 billion.

Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast, a developer of enterprise software for social media platforms previously ran a company called Lombardi Software, which he said was in a niche market. IBM acquired Lombardi Software in 2010. He then joined Spredfast.

At the time, Favaron had no idea that Spredfast was chasing a multi-billion market.

“In 2011 we started to sell to people for $100 a month,” he said. “It was completely unclear how big the market would be. It hit us last summer that this was a very big market. We went from very short term planning horizons to long term planning horizons.”

Spredfast raised $60 million and recently acquired another Austin startup in the social media market, Mass Relevance.

“It’s either going to be a giant fireball or really successful,” Favaron said. “We’re shooting the moon on this one.”

At SailPoint there may be a chance to go bigger and go longer, McClain said.

But it’s often difficult to see that massive potential at the startup stage, he said. Some people may think their market is small but it may develop in ways they didn’t think about, he said.

The key to building a massive company that can scale is product and market fit and market size, the panelists said. The market has to be really big and the startup has to be the leader.

Investors can also keep a company from going big if they don’t think big, Favaron said. It’s really important that investors be in synch with the long-term vision of the company, he said.

The founders also have to have the right mentality to go long and take risks. Some first time founders want to maintain control and that means they don’t raise a lot of money and take risks. For example, the founders of Spredfast were willing to sell the company for $6 million, Favaron said. But he saw a much bigger market and potential.

“Our biggest competitor has raised $70 million,” Favaron said. “I’m underfunded, which is weird. It’s a super big market. I think going big is something we don’t do enough in Austin.”

First time entrepreneurs are more risk averse and tend to sell their company so they can put some money in the bank, according to the panelists. Second time founders are more willing to raise more money and risk more.

“If you’re the founder you can do what you want unless you raise money,” Favaron said.

Austin needs to spin out more first time entrepreneurs quickly and cultivate a set of executives “ready to swing big for the next one,” according to the panel.

Austin has a strong brand as a technology center, which South by Southwest Interactive has helped to cultivate globally, said Favaron. He said he doesn’t have any trouble recruiting tech talent to Austin. In fact, Spredfast just recently hired a Chief Financial Officer and had plenty of qualified candidates, he said. Earlier in the day during a different panel discussion, Chuck Gordon, co-founder of SpareFoot, mentioned his company was having trouble recruiting a CFO to relocate to Austin.

How to Craft the Perfect Pitch

May 21, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Crafting the pitch, photo licensed from Getty Image

A good pitch can determine whether a startup lands money from investors to expand.

But few entrepreneurs know how best to pitch.

Texas State University’s Small Business Development Center held a special training session Wednesday afternoon at its Round Rock campus to help entrepreneurs titled “Pitching to Anyone: How to Own the Room.” It’s part of its Spectrum Series of events tailored to assist entrepreneurs.

The session provided tips on everything from how to dress to crafting the right pitch and how to make a video pitch.

The three keys to giving a great presentation are confidence, credibility and passion, said Jim Comer, Comer Communications.

“Fear gets in the way of being unique,” Comer said.

But individuality leads to likeability, he said. So it’s essential to have some techniques to get through a presentation. He said entrepreneurs should smile, maintain eye contact, talk naturally, use natural body language and just use their hands organically.

First off, confidence comes from expertise, he said.

“You’ve got to be the expert,” Comer said. “And credibility comes from anything you can do to build up yourself and your team in front of the audience without bragging.”

Passion is key, Comer said.

“We’ve all got natural resources that make us unique,” Comer said. “The person that your friends like that is the one you want to share with the audience.”

And lastly, don’t forget to smile that starts a presentation off right, he said.

“This is not a torture test,” Comer said. “They want you to succeed. The investors are dying to hear a good idea. Smile, enjoy it. They are on your side.”

The pitch must also make a few points well. Comer suggested entrepreneurs state the problem, provide the solution and show how it works with brevity and clarity and to use an analogy if possible.

“You’ve got to use language the audience understands,” he said. “Don’t use acronyms or technological terms.”

It’s also important to talk about your team and how they have the talent and experience to make the startup succeed, Comer said. And an entrepreneur’s pitch deck must show financials that are easy to read and understand and not pie in the sky, he said.

Eliminate all jargon like paradigm shift, tipping point, and eliminate all technical terms from the presentation, Comer said.

“Think of how the Pentagon would say it and do the opposite,” he said.

He also said to remember “A.T.O – Acknowledge the Obvious.” If something goes wrong during a presentation like the projector catches on fire, acknowledge it and then move on, he said.

“The investors will be as impressed by “grace under pressure” as by your idea,” he said. “However you respond to the unexpected – they are judging you.”

Everyone can be a great presenter if they just fight their fear and focus on their individuality.
To pitch through video, make your point clear, believe in your product, speak passionately and genuinely and stick to the point, said Scott Edwards of Edwards Media.

A crowdfunding video generally costs from $1,500 to $3,000, Edwards said. A video for a company’s website costs from $2,500 to $3,000, he said.

Texas State Small Business Development Center has a studio with cameras and other equipment for entrepreneurs to use once they have gone through training said Dick Johnson, senior technology commercialization advisor. It’s a great way to record a pitch video to see how entrepreneurs appear to potential investors, he said.

Ninety-three percent of any first impression is a visual one, said Jean LeFebvre with Panache Image.
Clothes communicate an image to people, LeFebvre said. Less gimmicks equals better communication, she said.

“You need to put thought into an outfit. It’s not an afterthought,” LeFebvre said. “The most common mistake is not getting dressed for the role you play.”

She advised entrepreneurs to wear classic clothing and use accessories sparingly to be trendy.

“Don’t wear athletic gear when you’re not working out,” she said. “Gym shoes belong in the gym.”
LeFebvre advised people to dress properly even when they run errands.

“At any time be prepared to meet with your potential bosses, your potential investors,” she said. “You want them to see you as a successful person.”

Peg Richmond and Paul Wright, technology commercialization advisors with Texas State Small Business Development Center, gave the top ten investor pet peeves entrepreneurs make when pitching their ventures.
They are:

#10. It’s not fiction writing – tell your story – not a fairy tale
#9. Trying to be someone you’re not.
#8. Reading or talking to your slides
#7. Making the audience connect the dots
#6. Not knowing your ask
#5. Inconsistent messaging
#4. Building suspense and holding nuggets till Q&A
#3. Your business elements don’t match
#2. Burying the headline
#1. Transactional v. Relational

On June 24, the Spectrum Series continues at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce with “The Art of the Deal” information from experts on how to close a deal including what a term sheet looks like.

Dell Selects ihiji and Open Labs of Austin for its Founders Club 50

May 17, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The Dell Center for Entrepreneurs last week announced its first Founders Club 50, an exclusive group of high growth tech startups, including two from Austin.
Dell selected ihiji, which makes remote diagnostic tools for computer networks and Open Labs, a stage lighting and technology company focused on the music industry.
Dell plans to announced its new Founders Club 50 class twice a year and it’s currently accepting application for its fall class.
“The Founders Club 50 is a great opportunity for these start-ups, all of whom are on the verge of reaching the next level of innovation,” Ingrid Vanderveldt, Dell Entrepreneur in Residence, said in a news release. “The program creates a win-win; by serving as a trusted advisor to these companies at this crucial early stage, we hope they will continue to grow with Dell in the future. Dell has always seen the value in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, and the Founders Club 50 is the natural next step in continuing to help high-growth start-ups expand their networks, find valuable resources and use technology to transform their businesses.”
During the two-year term as Founders Club 50 companies, they receive help from Dell in the areas of sales, technology, access to capital, networking and marketing. When they complete the program, they become Club Alumni. Dell has more than 115 alumni companies including Skyera, CloudFlare, Everloop and Mass Relevance.
Members of Dell’s first class are from 17 states and various industries including analytics, healthcare, enterprise solutions, entertainment, IT and mobile computing.

YouEarnedIt Gets $1.5 Million in Seed Stage Funding

May 17, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

YouEarnedIt, a startup focused on helping companies reward employees, has received $1.5 million in seed stage funding, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company received the funding from Capital Factory, an Austin-based incubator and accelerator of tech companies led by Joshua Baer and advertising giant WPP PLC, according to the article.
The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce also recently names YouEarnedIt as one of its A-List Austin startup to watch for 2014. The company’s customers include Gatti’s Pizza, Conde Nast, Y&R, RetailMeNot and Spredfast.
Kenny Tomlin founded the company in 2011. He was replaced as CEO last year by “Steve Semelsberger, a former senior vice president and general manager of California-based Demand Media Inc.’s (NYSE: DMD) social products group,” according to the Austin Business Journal. The Wall Street Journal story listed YouEarnedIt’s CEO as “Autumn Manning, who previously worked as a partner at training and coaching services firm SVI World.”

Compare Metrics Snags $3.8 Million in Follow-On Venture Capital

May 17, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Austin-based Compare Metrics, which makes analytics software aimed at retailers, announced that is has received $3.8 million in follow-on venture capital.
Austin Ventures led the investment with additional funding by existing investors Julie Allegro of Allegro Venture Partners, Bob Greene of Contour Ventures, Capital Factory, Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate, Brett Hurt of Hurt Family Investments and independent investors Dean Drako, Ralph Mack and Adam Ross.
This brings the company’s total amount of funding to $8 million. Compare Metrics received $4.2 million in first-round financing in May of 2013.
Compare Metrics recently made the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce’s A-List of Startups to watch in Austin in the emerging growth category.
The company plans to use the money to support its continued growth. It now has 32 employees and several customers including Fresh Pair, Lenovo, Rebecca Minkoff and The Wasserstrom Co.
Garrett Eastham, Mikael Solomon and Stephen Goodwin co-founded Compare Metrics in 2012 based on Eastham’s cognitive science research at Stanford University.
“It has been exciting to watch the journey of the Compare Metrics team from a three-person start-up to the high-growth and maturing company that it is today. This follow-on investment is indicative of the company’s progress in proving out their market value,” Chris Pacitti, general partner with Austin Ventures, said in a news release. “Retail client results have again validated our original confidence in the company’s potential, and I look forward to watching their continued success going forward.”

StepOne Closes on $ 4 Million in Venture Capital

May 17, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Alex Mitchell, President and co-founder of StepOne, photo courtesy of StepOne

StepOne, an Austin-based startup that makes customer support software, announced that it secured $4 million in venture capital.

LiveOak Venture Partners led the round with participation from Silverton Partners. The company plans to use the money to add employees and to expand sales and marketing efforts.

StepOne has already landed Telstra, Australia’s largest telecomm company, as a customers as well as a major U.S. cable company.

StepOne’s flagship product, Contextual Care, focuses on helping large companies with complex products deliver excellent customer support.

Although lots of products currently exist to help companies deliver self-service customer support, StepOne has a different approach. It “predicts a customer’s question by measuring hundreds of customer attributes like what services they’ve purchased, the state of their billing cycle and the technical performance of the product, and then matches the customer to the optimal content for their predicted question,” according to a news release. “The adaptive software continuously learns which specific pieces of support content best serve various customers, improving its accuracy over time.”

“From product onboarding to in-life support, self-service for customers is broken,” Alex Mitchell, CEO and co-founder of StepOne, said in a news release. “Even though most customers prefer to solve problems themselves, they give in and finally pick up the phone. There is too much content presented to solve the problem and too many irrelevant results in search queries. Our goal is to make self-service become a driver of customer loyalty and cost savings. When you can answer the customer’s question before they’ve even asked it, they’ll stick with you.”

Last year, LiveOak Ventures invested an undisclosed amount of seed stage funding into StepOne.

“Since our seed investment, the StepOne team has achieved significant customer traction, so we are delighted to continue to support the StepOne team as they scale their operations,” Krishna Srinivasan, co-founder and general partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, said in a news release.

Texas Proposes Equity-based Crowdfunding Rules

May 16, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 6 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Crowdfunding Photo licensed from iStockphotos.com

In Austin, one of the big issues facing startups, particularly in the technology industry, is lack of access to capital.

Last year, Austin companies received $626 million in venture capital, or 49 percent of the venture capital dollars for Texas, said Michele Skelding, senior vice president of global technology strategies at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.

“That still represents just 2 percent of the nation’s venture capital,” Skelding said. “So we’re hungry for capital.”

Equity-based crowdfunding may help meet that need.

Skelding hosted about 50 people involved in Austin’s startup industry at a roundtable lunch discussion Wednesday focused on newly proposed Texas crowdfunding rules.

Crowdfunding is one of the hottest trends now for entrepreneurs, said Joy Schoffler, owner of Leverage PR and a board member of the Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates.

Soon entrepreneurs will be able to use equity-based crowdfunding to tap into investments from the general public. The U.S. Jobs Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2012, is making that possible. It will begin once the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issues its final rules governing the practice. So far, the SEC has missed several deadlines to enact the rules.

Meanwhile, Texas and eight other states have proposed regulations that would allow for intrastate crowdfunding.

“The term crowdfunding can really cause some confusion,” Schoffler said.

Several types of crowdfunding exist including reward-based crowdfunding on platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. And individuals can crowdfund for donations on platforms like GoFundMe.com. Some crowdfunding sites like Kiva.org allow people to provide loans to small businesses worldwide. And sites like AngelList.com allow companies to raise funds from accredited investors or individuals who make more than $200,000 annually and have a net worth in excess of $1 million, not including their house.

But the ability to raise money from the general public through equity-based crowdfunding is not yet possible in Texas. But in other states like Georgia it is legal. Georgia already passed its own rules allowing for equity-based crowdfunding.

The SEC has 175 pages of rules being proposed to govern equity-based crowdfunding, said John Morgan with the Texas State Securities Board. Texas’ rules would not supersede the SEC rules, but if Texas passes its own crowdfunding rules, the state would allow equity-based crowdfunding before the federal government.

In April, Texas proposed its own equity-based crowdfunding rules. The Texas State House Committee on Investments and Financial Services will hold a hearing on May 21st to discuss the proposed regulations.

“The great thing about the rulemaking process is it’s flexible,” Morgan said. “There’s time to tweak these rules to get the exact right product we want.’’

The proposed Texas regulations let a company raise a maximum of $1 million every 12 months. An accredited investor can invest any amount. But a non-accredited investor can only invest $5,000. They can only invest through a Texas-owned website, known as a crowdfunding portal, which holds the funds in a bank account until the company meets its funding goals.

And all investors must prove they are Texas residents by providing a valid driver’s license or voter registration card. The regulations also require companies looking to raise money to post a detailed business plan, financial statements and other documents including a list of risk factors.

During the roundtable discussion, Ben Dyer, a serial entrepreneur and entrepreneur in residence at the University of Texas, asked about the ability to raise funds from investors in other states.

With the proposed Texas equity crowdfunding rules, all of the investors in a company must reside in Texas, Morgan said.

Shari Wynne, founder of Incubation Station, a consumer products accelerator, expressed concerns about the filing of a business plan and freezing a business outlook for a certain time since so many startups constantly pivot and change.

“There’s any number of things that are shifting with these companies,” she said

Paul Trowe of Replay Games expressed concern about the $5,000 limit per un-accredited investor. He said his company received $650,000 in 30 days on Kickstarter in 2012 and multiple donors gave more than $10,000 each.

“My questions is why would I want to do equity based crowdfunding with such strict regulations when I can go onto Kickstarter or IndieGoGo or any of the other platforms and not have such restrictions?”

Jason Seats of Techstars said Kickstarter and IndieGoGo work well for certain types of businesses focused on consumer products. It’s more difficult for companies working on enterprise sales tools to raise money from rewards-based crowdfunding, he said.

The legislation isn’t just aimed at tech companies, said Nathan Roach, an attorney with the RAM Law Firm. It’s designed to help all small and medium sized businesses statewide that need access to capital to expand, he said.

The crowdfunding portals help standardize the process of raising money from investors, Roach said.

Investors need to be able to trust the information coming to them, Roach said. The crowdfunding portals provide an entrepreneur with the necessary tools to raise money in compliance with the securities regulations, he said.

The portals also have to vet investors to make sure they are qualified as residents under the Texas rules.

Rick Timmins, chairman of the Central Texas Angel Network, said his members would not invest in equity-based crowdfunding ventures because of the regulations and disclosure requirements.

He said he sees a bifurcation of offerings when equity-based crowdfunding is enacted. Companies will either go down the path of traditional fundraising from accredited investors or they will choose to do equity-based crowdfundng from non-accredited investors, Timmins said.

“I don’t see it being co-mingled at all,” Timmins said.

CTAN is one of the most active angel networks in the country. The organization’s members invested $9.7 million in 33 companies last year.

Crowdfunding is one more tool in the arsenal of tools that are being provided to small and medium sized business throughout Texas, said Amir Mirabi, director of the governor’s office for small business economic development.

Crowdfunding provides more ways for the entrepreneurs who are building things to get close to their customers, said Gordon Walton with Gaming SIG in Austin. Kickstarter has been the most successful platform for game companies. They make up the largest category on Kickstarter, followed by film and TV, Walton said.

But equity based crowdfunding for the gaming industry is going to be a challenge, Walton said. The regulations need to be simple and friction free, he said.

“We would love to have our consumers become investors if they can overcome the challenges,” Walton said. “But the hurdles are high.”

A conference on crowdfunding is being held later this month in Austin. The CFGE Crowdfund Real Estate Summit and Entrepreneur Summit will be held May 29th and 30th at the Hilton Austin.

Datical Tackles Database Issues for Companies

May 15, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By JAIME NETZER
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The world is experiencing a data explosion.

Datical seeks to help companies manage all that data flowing through their organizations.

The Austin-based startup has created software that lets companies update applications on their databases easily and efficiently.

Last week, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce named Datical as one of its A-List Startups to watch for 2014.

So far, Datical has raised $4.7 million, according to its Crunchbase profile. Last December, Datical closed on a $3 million Series A round of funding led by Mercury Fund.

Its flagship product is Datical DB software, based on the open-source project Liquibase, which is used by hundreds of organizations. The software can help companies forecast how a database change will affect production and it makes it easier and faster to update databases.

“Essentially, it allows development operators and database administrators to sort of collaborate on database change management,” explains Pete Pickerill, vice president of products and co-founder of Datical. “We think everybody with a large-scale web-presence would benefit.”

W20 Group, a Datical DB customer, uses it to analyze large volumes of online interactions for information about its customers in health, technology, and consumer products.

“Datical DB gives our teams complete visibility into all of our relational database environments, and integrates seamlessly with our continuous integration process,” says says Steve Blackmon, Director of Data Sciences at W20 Group.

Datical DB eliminates manual change scripting and the errors that can result with automatic script authoring, Pickerill explains. The solution works within existing application release processes, using existing tools. This reduces risk and cost and speeds time to market, he says.

Datical only emerged from stealth mode in October of 2013, but its management team is experienced: Datical is co-founded by Daniel Nelson, Datical CEO; Robert Reeves, Datical CTO; and Pickerill — all founders of Phurnace Software, which was acquired by BMC Software in 2010.

Mercury Fund, a seed-stage venture capital firm, focuses on tech innovation. Datical was an appealing investment for the firm for multiple reasons, explains Aziz Gilani, Director at Mercury Fund and a Datical Board Member.

“Their unique business model makes developing new functionality very fast and provides a loyal, active user base for Datical to tap into,” Gilani says. “We invested for these reasons, but primarily because of Datical’s experience and track record.”

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