Category: Austin (Page 42 of 318)

Procore Technologies increased its footprint in Austin last week with its acquisition of Esticom, an Austin-based estimating software company.

Procore, which has more than 500 employees in Austin, makes construction management software. Its acquisition of Esticom will allow the company to add estimating to its Procore platform, which general contractors and specialty contractors use to oversee projects.

Procore did not disclose the financial terms of the transaction.

“We welcome the Esticom team to Procore,” Tooey Courtemanche, Procore Founder and CEO, said in a news release. “Procore is investing in the future of preconstruction, an increasingly important and impactful part of the construction process. Together, Procore and Esticom will deliver a single, comprehensive preconstruction solution on the Procore platform, with data connectivity that helps customers track costs and accurately predict estimates.”

With the acquisition of Esticom, Procore’s software platform can now be used during the early stages of a project.

“Contractors who use Esticom typically see a three-fold increase in the number of construction projects they can estimate and a five-fold increase in takeoff speed. Esticom is modernizing preconstruction by replacing paper plans and spreadsheets, and delivering more accurate estimates. We look forward to further advancing preconstruction as part of the Procore platform,” Chris Lee, cofounder of Esticom, said in a news release.

Esticom will become part of the Procore platform next year and until then is a partner on the Procore App Marketplace.

Procore, based in Carpinteria, California, has raised more than $648 million in venture capital financing since its founding in 2003, according to Crunchbase data.

During the pandemic, the latest perk for local and national tech companies is a paid holiday on election day.

OJO Labs, Sana Benefits and Dell Technologies are among the Austin-based tech companies allowing employees time off to vote. They have joined more than 1,850 businesses nationwide that have partnered with Time to Vote to encourage businesses to give their employees time off to vote.

OJO Labs declared election day as a company-wide holiday and is encouraging its employees to treat it as a day of service, said John Berkowitz, the company’s CEO and Co-Founder.

Last August, Berkowitz wrote a post on LinkedIn encouraging other business leaders to declare election day as a holiday.

“Election Day should be a national holiday, and until it’s recognized as one, the responsibility falls on business leaders to help secure that right for their employees,” Berkowitz wrote.

OJO Labs also joined Civic Alliance to stand up for democracy by making a non-partisan pledge in support of the democratic process.

The U.S. has historically low voter turnout and people often cite a lack of time from the demands of life and work as the reason for not voting. Time to Vote, a nonpartisan business-led coalition, is working to address the problem by partnering with businesses and giving workers the time and tools they need to cast their ballot in the November 3, 2020 election.

This year, it’s needed more than ever because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, said William Young, CEO and Co-Founder of Sana Benefits. Sana declared Nov. 3 as a company holiday to allow its 85 employees time off to vote.

“It is an expression of our values as a company to give that day off and empower people to participate in our Democracy,” Young said. “Whatever their political persuasion, we want them to get out there and participate.”

This is the first year Sana declared election day as a company holiday.

“The pandemic created the opportunity for us to be more thoughtful about how we support employees in the office and outside of the office,” Young said. “When this idea came up, it made total sense for us to do it.”

And after the pandemic ends, Sana still plans to keep the election holiday on the books, Young said.

“A good idea is a good idea,” he said.

Voters face many challenges this election because of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Time to Vote. Other problems include a lack of poll workers, malfunction voting machines, and long wait times.

In addition, Time to Vote is calling attention to issues of racial equality and how communities of color are disproportionately affected by systemic voter suppression.

“The need has never been greater for businesses to provide their employees dedicated time off to vote,” Dan Schulman, president and CEO of PayPal, one of the three companies that founded Time to Vote in 2018, said in a news release. “No American should have to choose between earning a paycheck and voting. Business leaders around the country must step up and do what’s needed to ensure all of their employees will have the opportunity to have their voices heard this November.”

Time to Vote represents workers in all 50 states and spanning a variety of businesses. They include Bank of America, Ben and Jerry’s, Cox Enterprises, Expedia Group, Nike, SAP, Tripadivsor, Twitter, Tyson Foods, Unilever, Visa and more.

The companies joining Time to Vote are supporting employees in a variety of ways including making Election Day a paid company holiday, offering paid time off on Election Day and actively promoting early voting and vote by mail.

“What I hope to see from this movement is a shift in mindset toward Election Day—one that increases voter turnout and enables every eligible voter to participate in decisions that impact each and every one of us,” Berkowitz wrote. “Amid a global crisis and widespread social activism, this is more important today than ever before. Voting is not a privilege; it’s a constitutional right. Let’s start treating it as one.”

The demand for video has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic and it’s not just from people hunkered down over their laptops on Zoom calls.

All kinds of businesses from retail stores to gyms and restaurants are embracing video as a way to monitor their environments and maintain security.

And that’s been a boon to Eagle Eye Networks, a cloud-based video security company, founded in 2012 by Dean Drako, a well-known serial entrepreneur in Austin who also founded Barracuda Networks, Drako Motors, LivingTree, and Swift Sensors.

Eagle Eye Networks on Tuesday announced it has raised $40 million in Series E venture capital funding from Accel, which has backed Facebook, Spotify and DocuSign to name a few. Eagle Eye Networks has raised $95 million to date, according to Crunchbase. Its high-profile investors include Michael Dell.

“They see the opportunity to leverage AI in the cloud for video surveillance,” said Drako, founder and CEO of Eagle Eye Networks.

Eagle Eye plans to use the money to hire additional engineers, and sales and marketing staff and plans to add as many as 200 more employees, Drako said. The company has 200 employees globally and operates offices in Amsterdam, Tokyo and has 11 data centers worldwide in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and Hong Kong. It currently has 31 jobs open in the U.S. and 11 job openings in the Netherlands.

The global market for video surveillance software as a service is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 20 percent from 2017 to 2022, according to Eagle Eye Networks. It is expected to be a $1.5 billion market this year and a nearly $2.3 billion market by 2022.

“We were the first real developer of video surveillance that is cloud-based,” Drako said. “We were the first company that devoted ourselves to it and to do it right and do it big. We’ve raised this money so we can basically do that same thing with AI and video surveillance. The market is nascent, and the technology is early but it’s going to be big and it’s going to have a huge impact. If you want to do AI, you have to have the video in the cloud.”

Cloud-based video surveillance can help businesses and communities detect dangers such as weapons, erratic driving, robberies, accidents and more, Drako said. It also gives businesses tools to analyze their operations to provide better service, he said. Tens of thousands of companies in more than 90 countries use the Eagle Eye Cloud Video Management System.

 “Eagle Eye Networks pioneered the video surveillance industry’s move to the cloud, and AI applications will drive the industry’s next transformation,” Sameer Gandhi, Partner at Accel, said in a news release. “Eagle Eye is in the pole position to make this happen. Its true cloud technology puts Eagle Eye in a unique position to instantly deploy new analytics breakthroughs.”

Video needs to be in the cloud for the artificial intelligence and data analysis to work, Drako said. It’s not practical to do if a company’s video surveillance footage is stuffed in a desk, he said.

“Just to be very honest, the AI components of what we’re all doing is still kind of on the cutting edge,” Drako said. “It’s changing every week with what they can do and how they can do it and what’s possible.”

Some applications are as simple as sending a notification when someone parks in the handicap parking spot, Drako said. Other businesses use video for license plate recognition to track cars. With Eagle Eye’s technology, they can search for blue cars or red cars or a certain make or model.

Others are using video technology to make sure their stores are neat or the tables are bussed properly at a restaurant.

In addition to businesses, Eagle Eye Networks has customers in law enforcement, schools, and city governments that use its software. One of its competitive advantages is that the Eagle Eye Networks platform works with any type of camera, Drako said. It does not require businesses or government agencies to buy specialized hardware, he said. It adapts to fit with hundreds of different types of surveillance cameras, he said.

Eagle Eye Networks has a very large deployment with a city in Mexico which is using its network on a 4G wireless network to monitor public spaces, Drako said.

Initially, Eagle Eye Networks saw a slowdown in business in March and April related to the Covid-19 pandemic, Drako said. But business has continued to rise through the summer and into the fall, he said. All of Eagle Eye Networks employees are working virtually and Drako expects that continue.

“One of the pandemic’s impacts for us is we’re more open to remote workers than we might have been in past,” Drako said.

By LAURA LOREK, publisher of Silicon Hills News

NSS Labs, an information security testing company, has shut down operations resulting in more than 40 employees losing their jobs.

The Austin-based company posted on its website “Due to Covid-related impacts, NSS Labs ceased operations on October 15^th.”

“It was unexpected, and it took a lot of people by surprise,” said a former employee who requested anonymity.

Employees were not offered severance pay or extended benefits, according to the employee.

NSS Labs received a Paycheck Protection Loan of between $1 million and $2 million in April through Silicon Valley Bank to keep its 47 employees on staff.

NSS Labs moved into new headquarters with 23,000 square feet of space at 3711 S. Mopac a few years ago, according to Austin Inno. The company had ping pong tables, sit and standing desks, and provided catered lunches daily to its employees, landing it on Austin Inno’s 50 on Fire list for 2017.

Attempts to contact the company for comment via email and phone were unsuccessful.

DARKReading first reported the news of the shutdown last week. TechCrunch and TechTarget also reported the news.

Jason Brevnik, CEO of NSS Labs, posted to LinkedIn about the shutdown and wrote “If you are in need of excellent people that exceed my high standards, please get in touch.”

On Nov. 1, 2019, Consecutive Inc., a private equity company based in San Francisco, acquired NSS Labs, according to mergr. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Attempts to get a comment from Consecutive via email were also not successful.

Bob Walder, now a real estate investor in Austin, founded NSS Labs in his garage in 1991. NSS Labs had raised $27 million in venture capital and was backed by LiveOak Venture Partners. The company created the “Cyber Advanced Warning System,” cloud-based software that monitors networks for attacks and tests security products against those attacks.

Other high-profile Austin tech companies that have shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic include ScaleFactor, a Techstars company that had raised $103 million, announced its plans to close shop in June. And GoDaddy, which bought Main Street Hub for $125 million in 2018, shut down its Austin office in June and laid off 331 local employees.

 

MassChallenge handed out more than $400,000 in equity-free prizes last week to the top startups in its 2020 program.

MassChallenge held its event online with a virtual awards ceremony. In fact, the entire four-month accelerator for 58 startups took place online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“All of the startups from this year’s program exemplify the grit and tenacity needed to build sustainable solutions,” Mike Millard, Managing Director of MassChallenge Texas in Austin said in a news release. “At the end of the accelerator, these startups have raised $40 million in funding, generated $17 million in revenue, and created 328 jobs. They are on a great path to impact our future – the way we live, work, and play.”

$100,000 Diamond Award Winners

 ● DanceFight of Austin: DanceFight is a mobile dance competition platform.

 ● RealKey of San Francisco: a mortgage processing platform.

$50,000 Gold Award Winners:

 ● At Ease Rentals Corp. of Round Rock: temporary housing for military and federal employees.

 ● Civic Champs of Bloomington, Indiana: creates a mobile platform for nonprofit organizations to organize and engage with volunteers.

 ● Code 1 Medical Devices of St. Petersburg, Florida: a medical device that prevents aspiration of stomach contents into the lungs.

 ● CUE Audio of Franklin, Tennessee: CUE transmits data between any microphone and speaker using sound waves.

 ● Locker Lifestyle of Orland Park, Illinois: created a wearable wrist wallet to stash cash, keys, phone, ID, and other objects.

 ● Muxy of Austin: created software that allows broadcasters to interact with viewers.

 $15,000 FM Global Resilience Prize

 ● Power Polymer, based in Wimberley, the company’s patented solution shows significant promise in reinforcing existing structures, with the goal to enhance a property’s resilience.

The Justice Department sued Google last week for alleged monopolistic practices and violating antitrust laws.

The Justice Department along with eleven state Attorneys General, including Texas, filed the civil antitrust lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit seeks to restrain “Google from unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices, and to remedy the effects of this conduct,” according to the lawsuit.

The other states suing are Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina.

 “As with its historic antitrust actions against AT&T in 1974 and Microsoft in 1998, the Department is again enforcing the Sherman Act to restore the role of competition and open the door to the next wave of innovation—this time in vital digital markets,” Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen said in a news release.

Google has a big and growing presence in Austin. It has had in office in Austin since 2007. It opened its downtown headquarters in a skyrise in the Second Street District a couple of years ago. Google has more than 1,100 employees working across Android, G Suite, Google Play, Cloud, staffing and recruiting, people operations, finance, and marketing in Austin. It also has a data center near Dallas.

In a blog post, Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs at Google, called the Department of Justice’s lawsuit “deeply flawed.”

“People use Google because they choose to, not because they’re forced to, or because they can’t find alternatives,” according to Walker. “This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers. To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use”

The lawsuit alleges Google entered into exclusionary agreements with other tech companies to make it the dominant search engine with the intent to block its rivals. Google also receives about $40 billion annually from advertisers placing ads on its search engine. Google’s scale and its exclusive relationships make it difficult for others to compete against it, according to the lawsuit.

“Google’s practices are anticompetitive under long-established antitrust law,” according to the lawsuit.

“Our agreements with Apple and other device makers and carriers are no different from the agreements that many other companies have traditionally used to distribute software,” Walker wrote. “Other search engines, including Microsoft’s Bing, compete with us for these agreements. And our agreements have passed repeated antitrust reviews.”

The Department of Justice lawsuit also references a similar monopoly busting lawsuit brought against Microsoft nearly 20 years ago in the case of the U.S. vs. Microsoft.

“Back then, Google claimed Microsoft’s practices were anticompetitive, and yet, now, Google deploys the same playbook to sustain its own monopolies,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also alleges Google learned lessons from the Microsoft lawsuit on what words to avoid when discussing its business. Its executives told employees “what language to use (and not use) in emails because “Words matter. Especially in antitrust law.” In particular, Google employees were instructed to avoid using terms such as “bundle,” “tie,” “crush,” “kill,” “hurt,” or “block” competition, and to avoid observing that Google has “market power” in any market,” according to the lawsuit.

“For the sake of American consumers, advertisers, and all companies now reliant on the internet economy, the time has come to stop Google’s anticompetitive conduct and restore competition,” according to the lawsuit.

“We understand that with our success comes scrutiny, but we stand by our position. American antitrust law is designed to promote innovation and help consumers, not tilt the playing field in favor of particular competitors or make it harder for people to get the services they want,” Walker wrote. “We’re confident that a court will conclude that this suit doesn’t square with either the facts or the law.”

Want to take to the open road in an RV, but don’t want to plunk down all the money to buy one?

That’s the problem RVshare solves. The Austin-based company hooks RV owners up with people who want to rent them.

And while the pandemic has punished a lot of businesses, it has been a boon to RVshare, which has more than 100,000 RVs listed on its platform. And it has managed more than two million days booked so far.

That landed RVshare $100 million in venture capital funding led by KKR with participation from existing investors Tritium Partners. The company plans to use the funds raised to expand its business. To date, the company, founded in 2013, has raised $150 million.

RVshare competes with  Outdoorsy, another Austin-based company that created a peer to peer RV rental marketplace. It has raised $75.1 million to date.

“At RVshare, our mission is to expand the definition of travel, providing a unique, seamless experience that will allow travelers to build lifelong memories with loved ones,” RVshare’s CEO Jon Gray said in a news release. “I am very proud of our employees and thankful to our customers for helping build RVshare into the market leader it is today – and we are only at the beginning of where our business can go. This financing and the support of KKR’s global platform positions us well to invest in future growth and provide the best experience for our owners and renters.”

“We are thrilled to work together with RVshare to build on the success they have achieved to date as a market leader in an important yet underserved category of travel,” Jake Heller, Co-head of KKR’s Technology Growth team in the Americas, said in a news release. “Jon and team have proven they can deliver explosive growth with impressive capital efficiency and we look forward to leveraging KKR’s global experience and network in mobility, travel and technology to help unlock new opportunities for RVshare.”

 RVshare has seen a surge in RV rentals this spring and summer as families take to the road for a getaway. The company has seen the momentum continue going into the fall with bookings up 123 percent over the same time last year.

Kerry Rupp, a general partner of True Wealth Ventures in Austin, is one of the featured speakers at the 2020 Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit, which kicks off on Sunday.

The event is being held online from October 18^th through October 21^st. (Full disclosure – the Greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce, that puts on the event is an advertising partner with Silicon Hills News).

In addition, the speaker lineup also includes LeMia Jenkins, Pinterest’s global head of communications.  Jenkins will be joined in conversation by Yasmin El Baily – Pinterest’s Merchant Growth Lead – in the company’s fireside chat.

“This conversation with Pinterest alludes to the accelerating importance of social media in connecting consumers to products and recognizes NWA as the hub for retail tech and e-commerce,” says Graham Cobb, President & CEO of the Greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce.

Other featured speakers include YouTube creator James Hobson, better known as the Hacksmith.

The former mechanical engineer is well known for taking fictional concepts and objects from movies, video games & comics, and making functional prototypes. Every week, he inspires nearly 10 Million followers to pursue careers and passions in STEAM fields by documenting his creations and builds on his YouTube channel. Since 2015, Hobson has accumulated nearly a billion views on his channel.

Hobson left his former engineering career to pursue his passion as an inventor in 2015. He is a graduate of Conestoga College in Ontario – where he received his Bachelor of Engineering. He is also a former student of the Technical University of Brunswick, Germany.

The Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, Northwest Arkansas Council, and Walmart.

In 2017, Alex Levine found himself working on a 12-inch laptop at a client’s office in New Jersey and he wanted a better setup like the big monitors at his home office.

“For me, one thing that I found that was a big hole in my travel lifestyle was I couldn’t bring my beautiful home office setup with me while on the road,” said Levine, a technology consultant with Accenture at that time.

On the plane flight home, he dreamed up the idea for Xebec Tri-Screen, a device that attaches two more screens to almost any laptop without requiring software or adhesives. Levine, a University of Texas at Austin engineering graduate, put together the original version in AutoCAD and printed a prototype using his 3-D printer at home. He tried it out on some old laptops, and it worked.

Levine brought the device to work the next week and all of his co-workers liked it. That’s when he shared it with his longtime friend and UT alumn, Trevor Russo who was a New York-based consultant. They studied the shift to remote work and decided to form Xebec to launch the product into the marketplace.

“Over the last five years, there had been a 40 percent increase in remote workers, and that stat was only expected to continue to climb as time went on,” Levine said. “We saw this great opportunity in a quickly growing market.”

Xebec’s first product is its $399 Xebec Tri-Screen triple-screen device, but it plans a whole range of products designed to bring the comforts of an ergonomic office to digital nomads.

In 2019, Levine left his full-time job to focus solely on the company which they named Xebec, a three-masted Mediterranean sailing ship. It fit the company because, with its product, digital nomads can go exploring and work from anywhere, Levine said. But the name actually came about because Russo remembered it from a childhood spelling bee growing up in Lakeway, Levine said. Both of them grew up in the Austin area. Levine is from Bee Cave.

Today, the company, Xebec, which is a member of Capital Factory’s accelerator program, has reached a milestone of $2.3 million in sales in six months, selling out of 5,500 units of its flagship product, the Xebec Tri-Screen.

“With this pandemic, it has been just an incredible spike, a vertical shift, which I can’t even quantify in the number of remote workers we’ve seen not only in the U.S. but across the world,” Levine said.

Levine’s product born out of necessity has met the needs of a lot of other nomadic workers. But Xebec still had to overcome a lot of challenges to get its product to market during a pandemic.

In late January, Levine feared the worst because its engineers are based in Hong Kong and its factory is in Shenzhen in Southeastern China. The COVID-19 pandemic shut the plant down. And Xebec planned to launch at South by Southwest and that was canceled.

“We had to get ready for the pandemic before everyone else because it hit us so soon,” Levine said. “After the Chinese New Year, we had no idea if our factory was ever going to open up again. We were really in the dark.”

Xebec was in a holding pattern from January until April and luckily its plant opened up and it received its products from China. During that time, Xebec also pivoted to launch an e-commerce site online. The company has even expanded during these difficult times. Xebec has hired five additional employees in the last five months. It now has seven full-time workers and it opened a new warehouse in Austin.

Now, Xebec has the right product at the right time, Levine said. The company also has three patents pending on its product, he said. It has raised less than $50,000 from friends and family and is bootstrapping its operations, Levine said.

Xebec expects demand to continue to grow as International Data Corporation reports remote workers will make up 60 percent of the workforce by 2024.

“We launched this product, and this company as a whole, during a really tough year for everybody after years and years of preparation from a very organic point of solving a problem that we had,” Levine said.

And while it was initially pretty daunting, Levine is excited about how everything has turned out.

“We allow our Xebec users to free themselves from this traditional workspace and to allow them to live the best version of themselves,” he said. “I’m really hoping the work-life balance that comes from all of this can be the silver lining of what’s happened.”

DISCO, which makes software for the legal industry, announced this week that it has raised $60 million in additional funding.

The startup, which moved to Austin in 2018 from Houston, has raised $195 million to date.

Georgian Partners led the latest round of funding. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, LiveOak Venture Partners, and The Stephens Group all participated, and new investor Breyer Capital also invested.

DISCO makes products and provides services for the cloud-based investigation and litigation marketplace, which is projected to exceed $20 billion by 2024, according to a news release. DISCO has created a platform for lawyers to use artificial intelligence, cloud computing for compliance, disputes, and investigations.

“We are building the enterprise software system of record for the legal function. Every major company has a legal department and spends money on legal services, but there is very little software built to help legal professionals do their work,” DISCO Founder and Chief Executive Officer Kiwi Camara said in a news release. “We want to change that. Legal is a critical business function just like sales or marketing or finance. We believe that software can transform the legal function just as it has transformed every other business function. DISCO is positioned to build for legal the kind of horizontal platform that Salesforce built for sales.”

DISCO plans to use the funding to hire more employees for sales and marketing and to expand its presence in internationally with a focus on Europe and Asia. It also plans to expand its strategic channel program.

And DISCO will continue to invest in its cloud technology platform, software products like DISCO Ediscovery and DISCO Case Builder, and legal services like its AI-powered DISCO Managed Review offering.

The pandemic has accelerated the move to cloud computing for legal departments and law firms, according to DISCO.

“In an emerging space like legal technology, real-world solutions require both world-class technology and first-rate professional services. DISCO delivers both,” said Tyson Baber, Lead Investor at Georgian. “DISCO’s investment in engineering and development of their proprietary platform, coupled with their incredible team, makes them well-positioned to help legal teams embrace the future.”

‍DISCO currently has more than 300 employees with offices in Austin and London.