Gravitant, which makes software for companies to manage their cloud services, announced Wednesday that it has received $10 million in Series B funding.
Corsa Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investor S3 Ventures.
The Austin-based company plans to use the money to expand its sales and marketing, to fulfill customer orders and to add more features to its cloud management platform.
In addition, Alex Gruzen with Corsa Ventures will join Gravitant’s board of directors.
“Gravitant has the potential to change the way Enterprise IT is done,” Gruzen said in a news statement. “While cloud computing shows much promise in transforming IT, CIOs are struggling with cloud adoption and simply not getting the ROI they expect from their private and public cloud investments. Gravitant’s cloudMatrix brokerage and management platform optimizes agility and cost while maintaining control. The result is a vastly improved cloud ROI.”
“Customer interest in cloud brokerage and management platforms is accelerating, and this funding will help us take advantage of this rapidly growing market space,” Mohammed Farooq, co-founder and CEO of Gravitant said in a news statement. “We believe Gravitant will be the next major software company in Austin, and we are very pleased to see the support from Austin-based venture capitalists to help us realize this goal.”
Category: Austin (Page 227 of 318)
Photo licensed from Getty Images
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday released its long-awaited proposed rules governing the practice of equity-based crowdfunding that allows startups to sell securities directly to the public.
Legislation from the JOBS Act, signed into law by President Obama in January of 2012, directed the SEC to propose the rules by last October. But that date passed without any action. So nearly a year later, the SEC has published its proposed rules, which now await a 90 day comment period from the public before they become adopted.
For years, artists, game developers, filmmakers, authors, entrepreneurs and others have been using Kickstarter, Rockethub, IndieGoGo and other crowdfund raising platforms to support their projects.
The difference is that those platforms allow for perk-based crowdfunding. People give money to the various projects in exchange for a good or service or some other kind of perk. They do not take an ownership stake in the company.
Online sites like Angellist.com already allow companies to raise money from accredited investors or high networth individuals.
But under the JOBS Act, a section called “Title III” allows startups and small businesses to offer and sell securities on equity-based crowdfunding portals to anyone. And the SEC is tasked with regulating the practice.
The SEC has delayed releasing its rules to make sure that they can protect the interest of investors in these news opportunities.
“There is a great deal of excitement in the marketplace about the crowdfunding exemption, and I’m pleased that we’re in a position to seek public comment on a proposal to permit crowdfunding,” SEC Chair Mary Jo White said in a news statement. “We want this market to thrive in a safe manner for investors.”
The legislation has also created a “new entity – a funding portal – to allow Internet-based platforms or intermediaries to facilitate the offer and sale of securities without having to register with the SEC as brokers.”
The proposed rules allow a company to raise a maximum of $1 million through crowdfunding in 12 months from investors who can spend $2,000 or up to 5 percent of their annual income or net worth. “During the 12-month period, these investors would not be able to purchase more than $100,000 of securities through crowdfunding,” according to the SEC.
The following are not allowed to use equity-based crowdfunding: non-U.S. companies, companies that already report to the SEC, “certain investment companies, companies that are disqualified under the proposed disqualification rules, companies that have failed to comply with the annual reporting requirements in the proposed rules, and companies that have no specific business plan or have indicated their business plan is to engage in a merger or acquisition with an unidentified company or companies.”
And any securities bought through a crowdfunding portal cannot be resold for a year.
Businesses looking to crowdfund would be required to file information with the SEC and provide it to potential investors. The companies would be required to disclose information about officers and director and others that own 20 percent or more of a company.
They are also required to provide a description of the company’s business and what they plan to spend the money on. The price for the securities being offered and the deadline to meet its goals and whether it will accept investments in excess of the target offering amount.
The companies also have to provide financial statements and other information on the financial condition of the company along with tax returns and an audit by a public accountant or auditor. Companies would also be required to amend the documents to reflect any changes in its business.
“Companies relying on the crowdfunding exemption to offer and sell securities would be required to file an annual report with the SEC and provide it to investors.”
The proposed rules also cover the crowdfunding platforms, the new entity set up online to sell the securities to the public. These portals would be required to provide investors with educational materials and take measures to reduce fraud.
The portals cannot offer investment advice or make recommendations. They cannot solicit “purchases, sales or offers to buy securities offered or displayed on its website.”
Photo courtesy of TechCrunch’s Fall DEMO
Shelfbucks and Pristine received trophies as “Demo Gods” along with Skully Helmets, Hello Doctor and Sigma Guardian, recognized as outstanding.
Altogether 40 companies pitched at DEMO.
All of the Austin startups reside at Capital Factory.
3 Austin companies launched at @DEMO today! Congrats to @pictrition @PristineIO @Shelfbucks (All @CapitalFactory too)
— Joshua Baer (@JoshuaBaer) October 17, 2013
The four-minute pitches for each of the Austin startups are embedded below:
Pristine:
Shelfbucks:
Pictrition:
Boxer, an inbox management app, has landed $3 million seed stage funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures.
Boxer, formerly known as TaskBox, has integrated its platform with Box, Dropbox, LinkedIn and Facebook.
It expects to announce more strategic partnerships later on this year.
“As mobile devices have become our primary means of receiving and reading email, users have become increasingly frustrated with the primitive experiences provided by stock email apps,” Andrew Eye, CEO and Co-Founder of Boxer, said in a news statement. “Now, with the backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, Boxer can continue to execute on our strategy of extending the mobile mail experience with relevant third party information and interactions.”
Boxer is available for free from the Apple iTunes App store.
Taskbox, founded in 2012, raised $600,000 in seed stage funding from angel investors with the Central Texas Angel Network previously. The company merged with Boxer last May and has rebranded itself Boxer.
Today at noon central time, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is expected to introduce the company’s latest line of iPads.
Last year, Apple announced plans to more than double the size of its Texas workforce and build a $304 million new campus in Austin. That project is expected to create more than 3,600 new jobs.
Today, CNET will be live-blogging the Apple announcement, which you can watch through our syndicated feed via Scribblelive.
Texas had 11 percent of all angel group deals in the second quarter of this year, according to the latest Halo Report.
The deals, with a median investment round of $590,000, had pre-money valuations of $2.5 million. And 74 percent of the deals were syndicated.
“When angels co-invest with other types of investors the media deal size is $1.95 million,” according to the report, compiled by Silicon Valley Bank and its partners the Angel Resource Institute and CB Insights.
The Central Texas Angel Network was the most active angel investment group nationwide. The report doesn’t go into detail about the number of deals or dollars invested by CTAN.
Seventy percent of angel group deals in the second quarter were completed outside California and New England, although 36 percent of dollars are invested in these regions,. California led in number of deals, with 17 percent share of angel group investments.
The bulk of the deals focused on Internet, healthcare and mobile companies receiving 71 percent of the investment deals and 79 percent of the dollars, an increase from the first quarter.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Three Day Startup began in 2008 as a project of some University of Texas graduate students who thought entrepreneurship, like many other areas of study, really ought to have a lab where students could make experiments and—if necessary—blow things up as part of the learning process.
Since then it has evolved to 73 programs at 30 universities in the U.S., Israel, Chile, Thailand, Spain, the Netherlands, Columbia and more.
Seven teams, plus one dummy team, presented Sunday night at the Austin Technology Incubator after working on their projects since Friday night, often staying up until 4 a.m. and being sent out to get at least six hours of market validation. They presented before an audience and a panel comprised of Jason Seats of Techstars, Josh Kerr of Written, Jeff McMahon of Open Labs and Fred Schmidt of Capital Factory and Portalarium.
Biquity
Biquity is investment banking using bitcoin, an unregulated online currency. The practice is illegal in the U.S., but is being used in several Latin American companies where there’s restricted access to equity financing. Biquity would work as a kind of transaction validation escrow service between a company auctioning shares and a company or individual buying shares. Because there are no foreign capital controls on bitcoin, the transaction would not be subject to limits or federal or bank-driven fees
The problem, as Seats pointed out, is that while the lack of oversight means lower transaction costs it also means there’s no oversight to protect parties. The remedy for that is that bitcoin now has futures contracts connected to local currency to ensure that the price agreed upon stays consistent relative to other types of currency. Once the transaction is made it may be easy to convert the bitcoin into local currency that is protected.
Snip Book
Snip Book is an app for hair stylists to capture information about their customers, cataloguing images of haircuts or dye jobs they’ve given, with the specific angle of the cut or the color of dye so that if customers come back asking for the same cut or color they had before, the stylist can easily call up the information. The team’s presenter said 90 percent of the 1.6 million stylists in the U.S. rely on repeat customers for their business’s survival, so being able to recall a cut one gave a client several months ago is important. The original model would be subscription based for about $20 a month with add-on services such as client scheduling. The app could be scaled horizontally to be used at nail salons, tattoo parlors, etc.
The problem, the panel pointed out, was that a lot of this could be done on Evernote. But, Snip Book would also push the hairstyles to social media, such as Facebook, and enhance marketing.
Alza
Alza is an app designed to help users avoid losing time in distractions like getting lost for hours on Facebook or oversleeping. Alza collects data from users’ calendars, social media, and other apps, and sends you notification if it sees users playing candy crush instead of studying for the test or presentation they have to give tomorrow.
With other apps and computer tools, people have to manually track their time, pressing a start and stop button. But with Alza, it’s all done automatically. The team planned to do a monthly subscription and also work with organizations like Groupon. If someone has a productive week, they get extra discounts on restaurants and entertainment.
Fred Schmidt asked if this would help him if he was wasting time at the golf course and one team member said it would use his phone’s GPS system to see whether he was where he should be during that time.
Another problem was that iOS sandboxes apps, preventing the app from seeing whether or not a customer is wasting time on another app. But the worst liability was that audience members said they would turn the app off after one session of nagging. A lot of people don’t want to waste time but they don’t want their phones telling them what to do, either.
Parents might buy it though.
EventApps.com
EventApps.com is an app for small to medium sized conference and event planners. The simple, module-based app lets users plan and promote events without investing a lot of time in creating a short-lived app or a lot of money—though the price point was $100 for an event with fewer than 200 attendees and $1,000 for events with more than 200.
Sally Stone pitching Match Setter
The panelists also questioned the jump from $100 to $1,000.
Match Setter
Match Setter is an app for tennis players to find pickup games in their geographic area with other players who have roughly the same skill level. Presenter Sally Stone said many players can’t find games when they have the time to play them or if they do their opponents aren’t as good a player as they claim. Match Setter not only lets people rate their own playing but allows others who have played them to rate them as well. It creates a community of tennis players and also allows players to plan games around what skill sets they want to improve on.
The team planned to monetize Match Setter with a subscription, but the panel recommended having sponsors, such as tennis ball manufacturers, instead. Having the app free to users would create critical mass necessary to find other funding models.
Looksy TV
Looksy TV uses small cameras to collect analytics on crowds in restaurants, bars and other establishments that enable venues to gather useful data on their traffic and also let prospective users check in on whether a particular restaurant is too crowded, empty or otherwise lacking ambiance the customer is looking for.
Similar to Scene Tap in its function, the application differs in that, instead of identifying approximate ages and genders of patrons it uses a cartoon filter to obscure the faces and identities. It only allows a user to see a 30-second window into a particular establishment, locking the person out for 15-20 minutes after that glimpse to prevent stalking.
Chiron Health
Andrew O’Hara with Chiron Health
The company would charge a fee for the service, taking its cut after the doctor gets paid. More than 20 states require insurance to pay for medical telechats the same way they would pay for in-person visits, O’Hara said, and more states are coming on board.
The panel asked whether the platform was defensible when huge medical conglomerates could take over the market at a moment’s notice. O’Hara said Chiron sees the opportunity to partner with other healthcare technology companies in the next several years to help launch the product.
The final presentation brought three men to the stage…one a typically scruffy startup guy and the other two ridiculously pretty, ripped men in recently ironed clothing proposing a Craigslist-style site for musicians to purchase supplies. Music Matrix was a piece of Moth to Flame Productions’ movie about the startup world Funemployment.
Last month, a new seed-stage venture capital firm, Hurt+Harbach launched.
This month, it shut down.
Brett Hurt, co-founder of Bazaarvoice and formerly with Austin Ventures, and Jeff Harbach, former executive director of the Central Texas Angel Network, formed the firm aimed at launching more tech companies in Austin. Harbach and Hurt made the announcement to end their firm in separate blog posts.
“Today we’re announcing that Hurt+Harbach is no longer,” Harbach wrote on his blog. “It’s a bittersweet ending. A week ago Brett decided that his hopes and dreams ultimately lie elsewhere, and we agreed that ripping the band-aid off in quick order was best.”
“I’m writing to tell you that I’ve decided not to continue to pursue Hurt+Harbach,” Harbach wrote on his blog. He then wrote that the decision had nothing to do with his partner, Jeff, and that they were “very successful on the fundraising trail.”
“We were approaching our first close with prospective investors but we never actually sent out the final legal paperwork or took any investor capital in,” Hurt wrote. “Facing the prospect of a 10-year fund cycle, with investors counting on me for longer than that (a successful VC will set up multiple 10-year lifecycle funds over the years), made me think more deeply than ever if this is what I was really passionate about doing for the next 10-20 years of my life.”
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
JT McCormick with Headspring, Nick Friedrich with Facebook and Michael Osborne with Handshakez
Osborne, co-founder and CRO at Handshakez, was vice president of sales for Bazaarvoice in its early days. He was on the panel along with Nick Friedrich, head of SMB Sales and Service for Facebook and JT McCormick, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Headspring. Karl Scheible, president of Market Sense Inc. moderated.
Failing to plan to build a sales staff creates huge problems, the panelists agreed. At one point, Osborne said, Bazaarvoice had to double its sales staff from 10 to 20 people but didn’t have a mechanism for doing that smoothly.
“Going to 20 people doesn’t sound like that much,” he said, “but it’s really difficult. You have to think through all the impacts and set expectations accordingly. The second time around we were very methodical and it worked.”
Two Strikes, You’re Out
Bazaarvoice, he said, developed a system of twos. If it became clear after two days that a sales person wasn’t going to work out, it was the hiring manager’s fault. If the person didn’t work out after two weeks, it just wasn’t a good fit, they couldn’t grasp it fast enough. If someone didn’t work out after two months, there was “something else missing. They may not be able to adapt to the role.” And if someone missed his or her numbers after two quarters, they were out—even if they’d been performing well up to then.
In one case, a salesman had been a top performer for three years but as the company grew and changed, he started missing his numbers. The issue there, Osborne said, was he failed to adapt to the changes.
“You have to move fast when you see performance issues with competency and commitment,” Friedrich said. “When you hire someone, you coach them as much as you can and then cut them fast if you have to make changes. There’s an opportunity cost to having that person in the seat. You could have a rock star in there.”
Sales Stars Come From Unlikely Places
All the panelists agreed that their top sales people might not come from a sales background. They’d hired students, soccer coaches, lawn care professionals. Passion and drive as well as intelligence and a stellar ability to communicate were more important than sales experience.
“We look for proactive folks with an appetite who were driving change in their previous roles,” said Friedrich.
At Bazaarvoice, Osborne said, they required sales candidates to pitch the company to them. They weren’t given any materials, but they were free to call the sales staff to ask questions.
“We got some of the most amazing insights on how to pitch us,” Osborne said. “We know right away from the pitch if they can do the job. We had people who we thought ‘This guy is a shoe-in’ but then they wouldn’t do well on that test. If they could crush the test, 90 percent of the time they’d do well.”
McCormick said he asks candidates “How are you going to get into this company? Sell me on how you’re going to get into this company. It’s amazing how many people dance around that….”
The Money and The Fame
Top sales people, the panelists agreed, often aren’t the same as top sales managers. Top sales people want the money and they want the recognition. Top sales people want the numbers to come from their success. Friedrich said it was important to keep the compensation predictable, or it can hurt the culture of the organization. But most executives and account managers know their best sales people are going to make more money than they do, and that’s alright.
“Sales people prefer recognition over compensation,” Osborne said. “They won’t work for free but they want to crush everyone else. They want to embarrass people.”
McCormick said if someone’s more interested in the base than the commission, it’s “game over.” “I’m a money motivated bastard,” McCormick said. “A true salesperson wants to dominate everybody.”
For that reason, companies often don’t promote their top sales people to sales manager. Many people don’t transition well from the role of a rockstar sales person with the spotlight on them and the money they can make as an individual to a team leader.
By the same token, a company has to have a clear agreement with respect to the compensation of the sales people—the hunters—and the account managers—the farmers. Farmers don’t get paid the same as hunters because the hunters brought them in the door. Osborne pointed out that the ones handling the money shouldn’t be the same as the ones “trying to keep you happy all the time.” But McCormick believes it’s important for the client relationship to let the hunters continue to have communication with the client, for the client’s sense of continuity.
By the same token, if someone wants to move to the sales side and can make a case, most of them said they’d give that employee a shot. Sometimes it works out great. But more often than not, other employees run from sales.
After all, as Osborne said, with sales there’s a huge risk. You miss two quarters…you’re out.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Bryan Menell has hosted the InnoTech Austin Beta Summit since 2008
According to CEO Peter Li, the team is still working on the software to include recognizing the amount of weight you’re lifting. Li said that, since form is important, the band can track your wrist motion in three dimensions and make calculations on improving form. Wearers will also be able to go on the site and see what other people with similar body types have done to improve their health or physique.
The Atlas team had several audience members who volunteered “I want one!” immediately after their presentation.
Toopher, a two-step identity authentication security system that ties the GPS on the customer’s smart phone with financial transactions, can be automated so that once you log in, it will automatically verify transactions. If, for example, money is being withdrawn from your bank and your phone GPS doesn’t register you at the bank, it will notify you on your phone and verify that the transaction is legitimate. The app can also lock down your accounts when you’re at home or sleeping so that no transactions can be made at those times. Toopher CEO Josh Alexander announced Wednesday that the company has also added purchases to the phone so that you can approve a certain amount of purchases to be made at particular vendors—such as your favorite pizza place—so the purchases automatically go through up to that limit.
The Toopher app is free for consumers but monetized through enterprise businesses that use it. So far, Alexander said, eight million consumers use the app.
myCampusTutors also demoed its service that lets parents hire online tutors from colleges in the U.S. to help students with one-on-one tutoring sessions. The sessions are videotaped so that parents and teachers can review them later, if desired. Every tutor goes through a vetting process including a discipline test and a pedagogical piece wherein the tutor does a session with another tutor who has been vetted.
So far, said Erin Ostboe, vice president of operations, they’ve done more than 2,000 tutoring sessions. Sessions cost $22 for a half hour, $40 for an hour. Parents can buy a block of sessions which lowers the price. The company, which is in the Capital Factory incubator, has raised $775,000 and is looking to close out its initial round of funding.
ServaBid is a company that lets consumers and service providers create bids for tasks using video. If a homeowner has a home repair project, said founder and CEO Will Scott, he or she can take up to two minutes of video describing the task and post it on ServaBid for free. Providers in the area can see the video and make a bid on the project, including their own videos of completed projects. Customers accept bids and pay through ServaBid’s Stripe which takes a percentage of the transaction but doesn’t store the customer’s credit card information. For smaller businesses, Scott said, this is a much less expensive way to get the word out about their businesses than many expensive marketing and PPC campaigns.
If customers prefer, they can use the “incognito” feature and only send out a request for bids to certain providers without going on the Servabid public site.
Currently the app is only available on iPhone and iPad but Scott plans to have it available on other systems soon.
Bryan Menell, who has hosted the event since 2008, said he receives dozens of applications and solicits input from the incubators, investors and asking “what’s out there that’s cool?”
“I’m looking for new technology that’s fresh, so I want this to be the first look at these companies or even an established company with a new technology…. They have to be in that right window of time to wear mature enough to demo but everybody hasn’t seen it,” Menell said.
In the last three years there’s been a huge shift toward mobile as well as wearable tech and security products.