Category: Austin (Page 45 of 318)

By OMAR L. GALLAGA, Freelance Contributor to Silicon Hills News

A few weeks ago, Michelle McKown celebrated her return to a workspace at Central Austin’s Vessel Coworking with a cheerful Instagram story post. “Back at @Vesselcoworking and it feels so good!” she posted, “Don’t @ me! It’s lunchtime & I can’t eat through a mask!”

McKown, like perhaps thousands of others in Austin who were regulars at more than 60 coworking spaces before the COVID-19 pandemic, vacated the premises in March. She’d been a loyal customer since last August, using the space to study and write papers as a returning student studying to be a therapist.

Returning after five months without ever having canceled her membership, McKown says she decided to come back because she felt Vessel’s owners were approaching the issue of customer safety thoughtfully, and because she sorely missed the social interaction. She also needed separation between her home and work life.

“School started back up and I’m going insane at home,” McKown said over a video call from her tabletop at Vessel. “I can’t work at home. Some people thrive doing it, but I can’t.”

So she returned, joining about 10 others who are spaced apart physically and temporally at the coworking space throughout the week. “They made changes to the A/C system to make it safer. They have sanitizers all over the building,” McKown said. The business also had facemasks printed with the Vessel Coworking logo on them. “They made me feel like, OK, this is being done well and I feel safe coming back to this.”

Closings

Six months into the pandemic, some Austin coworking spaces are finding that freelancers and entrepreneurs as well as large businesses with nomad employees are slowly dipping their toes back into coworking. A comeback of sorts for coworking may be on the horizon, despite ongoing COVID-19 infections in Texas.

But the coworking businesses that survive, and perhaps thrive, after this pandemic period, will be rising amid the ashes of some others that didn’t make it through.  Austin has seen months of empty downtown offices and closings of several coworking spaces such as Orange Coworking and The Riveter, which is shifting its business away from coworking and which closed work locations in several cities including Austin.

In the case of Orange, which had initially planned to return after a temporary shutdown, the economics of the situation turned the closing permanent. Founder Dean Siracusa said longtime members canceled memberships and some members were forced to work from home by companies who had been paying some or all of their Orange membership fees.

A Hail Mary Facebook and LinkedIn ad campaign to attract new members in May was unsuccessful. “We stopped the campaign when it both, 1, was not working and, 2, was attracting some backlash from the general public about safety,” Siracusa said in an email. An attempt to negotiate a reduced-rent lease with building owner H-E-B also didn’t work out, he said. “We liquidated all of the supplies and furniture and closed up. And that’s basically the whole thing.”

One of Austin’s most high-profile coworking spaces and startup incubators, Capital Factory, has all but given up on the idea of a shared collaborative space for entrepreneurs, at least in-person ones, for the foreseeable future.

“Coworking is dead until COVID passes,” Capital Factory founder and CEO Joshua Baer declared in an August 16 blog post at Austin Startups.  The founder says Capital Factory is pushing virtual-first events and meetings, particularly for anything involving larger groups. Not everyone will adapt to working from home, or being away from a home office, he said in the post, but added, “I believe that a double-digit percentage of people will never go back to working in the office.”

Signs of life

Some people never left and, surprisingly, some Austin coworking spaces never actually shut down amid the pandemic.

David Perez, the founder and president of Lumen Insurance Technologies, is one of the die-hard coworking devotees who continued to work outside the home even in March and April.

He works out of Galvanize in downtown Austin and goes there every day, 9 to 5, for three really great reasons. They are ages six, three, and 18 months.

“It’s bad,” Perez jokes, “it’s really hard to get anything done in the house.” The Galvanize space is attractive as a place to work “because of the stillness and the quiet amid the chaos from home and kids being there. Now, I had a place I could go and actually work in peace and quiet.”

It’s been even quieter since March, “A ghost town,” Perez says, but he’s continued to get work done at Galvanize, checking his mail and engaging in some socially distanced networking and conversation when others are in the space. “Sometimes it’s just friends, sometimes it’s potential business or investment opportunities,” he said.

Perez is the kind of customer that has kept some coworking businesses going, along with small-business loans and the generosity of businesses and membership holders who’ve kept paying fees even when they aren’t using a space.

That’s been the case at Vessel, where owners Steven and Beth Knapp have been taken aback by the support they’ve received through the pandemic to keep the doors open at the business, which opened in 2015.

“I can’t describe the generosity we felt from that,” Beth Knapp said. “We weren’t holding anyone to a contract or any membership commitment over their head. If someone said, ‘I need out,’ we let them out.”

A small handful of regulars continued to work out of Vessel in the spring and Steven continued to go to the space every day, scaling down big breakfasts to a few Nervous Charlie’s bagels. They continued in their role of dinner party or backyard barbecue hosts making the space comfortable and friendly for their clients and helping them make connections with others.

The numbers of those using Vessel have slowly crept up; Beth and Steven say their clients have been respectful of spacing, wear masks in common areas and throughout the For the City center where Vessel is housed, and that there’ve been no incidents of COVID infections among those who patronize Vessel.

“Nothing has changed other than that I just think overall everyone’s awareness of how they should be as a community,” Steven Knapp said.

That doesn’t mean the couple hasn’t agonized over how best to protect their customers and to make a safe space for working. They’ve tried to make thoughtful decisions and to solicit feedback from customers as the pandemic’s parameters have continued to change, Beth Knapp said. “I feel like definitely people would judge us and have something to say on how we’ve handled this along the way. We haven’t been sure how to navigate it.”

A future coworking boom

One thing that businesspeople like Joshua Baer, coworking owners like the Knapps and coworking experts agree on is that post-COVID, whatever work looks like, it will be boom times for coworking spaces providing safe, productive places to work.

Already Vessel is seeing an uptick in requests for accommodations for small teams and for usage of a second off-site space they own that’s set up for all-day conferences. Coworking spaces with private offices and plenty of room to spread out will be in high demand as working from home becomes unsustainable long-term and businesses hedge on bringing workers back to home offices, says one long-time coworking entrepreneur.

Liz Elam, the former owner of Austin’s Link Coworking and creator of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC), says COVID-19 is weeding out businesses that were already in danger before the pandemic and paving the way for a big step forward in the industry.

“Those that do survive have a fantastic opportunity on the other side of COVID,” Elam said. Working from home, she says, sounds great at first, but is a haven for distractions, can exacerbate depression among singles and is typically not subsidized by businesses.

“If you are taking space in somebody’s private home, you should have to pay for their internet. You should give them an ergonomic desk. You should give them a chair and you should pay them for a portion of your house that they’re utilizing,” Elam said.

Short of that, she said, businesses will likely ask employees to utilize a mix of work-from-home and safe coworking spaces, especially ones that cut down on commuting distances. “It’s really good for suburban and rural coworking,” she said. “So like Cedar Park, Pflugerville, Georgetown, San Marcos are great places to have coworking spaces right now because that’s where people live.”

A few new coworking spaces are trying to anticipate these shifts, including Firmspace, which has opened a flagship space in Google’s downtown Austin office building, and Common Desk, which continues to expand its locations throughout Texas and in other parts of the country.

Elam says that these businesses have a mission to put people at ease about their safety concerns if they want to stay in business. That could mean upgrading air systems, changing floor plans and adding private offices, investing in lots of wipes and hand sanitizer, and most importantly, making sure their marketing is up to date.

“They need to put it on their website, they need to make it front and center,” she said, “they need to change their photos to show social distancing.”

The Knapps say they are optimistic that Vessel Coworking, which they took over three years ago, will thrive in the new normal. They think coworking spaces still fit a huge need in Austin.

“People still want to be part of the community,” Steven Knapp said, “they still want to work amongst people.

“Certainly I think people are just tired of being at home,” he said.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct Michelle McKown’s name.

The National Science Foundation on Wednesday announced the selection of the University of Texas at Austin to lead the NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning.

UT is spearheading one of five NSF AI Institutes nationwide and each one will receive $20 million in funding.

The UT NSF AI Institute for Foundations and Machine Learning will focus on major theoretical challenges in artificial intelligence including creating new algorithms, neural networks, and robotics.

“Many of the world’s greatest problems and challenges can be solved with the assistance of artificial intelligence, and it’s only fitting, given UT’s history of accomplishment in this area along with the booming tech sector in Austin, that this new NSF Institute be housed right here on the Forty Acres,” UT Austin interim President Jay Hartzell said in a news release.

Partners for the UT institute include the City of Austin, Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, and Dell Technologies. And UT will collaborate with researchers at the University of Washington, Wichita State University, and Microsoft Research.

Overall, the AI industry is booming with more than $191 billion in revenue by 2024, growing at a rate of 37 percent annually, according to Market Research Engine. Austin has a strong foothold in the industry with companies like SparkCognition, CognitiveScale Hypergiant Industries, Cerebri AI, OJO Labs, REX, and others.

UT Austin has also created the new Machine Learning Laboratory, which will house the AI Institute and serve as a place for data scientists, mathematicians, roboticists, engineers, and ethicists to collaborate. Tech entrepreneurs and UT Alumni Zaib and Amir Husain donated to the Machine Learning Lab.

The UT NSF AI Institute will be led by Adam Klivans, a UT computer science professor. He will also direct the Machine Learning Laboratory along with Alex Dimakis, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer engineering.

“Machine learning can be used to predict which of thousands of recently formulated drugs might be most effective as a COVID-19 therapeutic, bypassing exhaustive laboratory trial and error,” Klivans said in a news release. “Modern datasets, however, are often diffuse or noisy and tend to confound current techniques. Our AI institute will dig deep into the foundations of machine learning so that new AI systems will be robust to these challenges.”

UT is also creating a new Masters Degree program in AI and plans to create additional AI programming geared to high school students and working professionals.

In addition to UT, the NSF’s other AI Institutes include:

1.  NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, led by a team at the University of Oklahoma, Norman
2. NSF AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming, led by a team at the University of Colorado, Boulder
3. NSF AI Institute for Molecular Discovery, Synthetic Strategy, and Manufacturing (or the NSF Molecule Maker Lab), led by a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
4. NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, led by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The United States Department of Agriculture also announced two AI-focused institutes that will receive $40 million in funding over the next five years. They are the USDA-NIFA AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems, led by a team at the University of California, Davis, and the USDA-NIFA AI Institute for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability, led by a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

At a Youth Peace Summit held at the John Knox Ranch in Wimberley, Ryan Jordan saw how young men and women from 20 countries bonded.

One of the ways was through dance.

Even though the teenagers spoke different languages and came from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, they all liked music and dance, said Jordan, who served as executive director of the Austin-based Amala Foundation, which hosted the summit.

That summit is where the idea for DanceFight, a mobile dance competition platform, began. To bring the project to life, Jordan teamed up with Rich Sloan to co-found Virtual Arts, maker of the DanceFight app. Jordan and Sloan have experience in consumer mobile apps and music-tech ventures.

Last week, Virtual Arts closed on $2 million in seed-stage funding to further develop the app, which is available for Apple devices right now. With the funding, Jordan plans to create an Android app for the Google Play Store that will be available in October. The startup also plans to expand internationally later this year. Investors include Quake Capital Partners, Sound Media Ventures, VSCO’s CEO and Co-Founder Joel Flory, and Thunderstruck Dance Competitions.

Also, Virtual Arts plans to expand and re-brand the app beyond dance competitions to include singing, comedy, rap, cheerleading, basketball trick shots, skateboarding, and other action sports, Jordan said.

“Any way kids want to compete,” he said.

 The skills-based platform is aimed at Generation Z, primarily 13 to 24-year-old youths who grew up with mobile devices, he said.

Other apps like TikTok and Instagram’s new “Reels” let people watch dance videos. But DanceFight is different because it encourages interactivity and pairs up dancers in side by side competitions and lets viewers decide the winner. The dance moves are whatever the dancer decides. They are only limited by their imagination and creativity.

“In the app, people are dancing in many different ways from break dancing to hip hop,” Jordan said.

Work on the app started a year and a half ago, Jordan said. It was released in the Apple App Store about eight weeks ago and it received the designation in the as “Apps We Love.” DanceFight is free to use. Virtual Arts makes money from in-app purchases and through ads and sponsorships, Jordan said.

DanceFight is also working with major record labels including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group for dance challenges. It gives dancers access to millions of songs to create or join a challenge. DanceFight is also working with musicians like Pitbull to use the app to introduce new music and dance challenges, Jordan said.

DanceFight has also partnered with artificial intelligence company Hive AI to block any inappropriate content, Jordan said. And the app excludes commenting and direct messaging to prevent bullying and harassment, he said.

“We created a safe space for kids to express themselves fully,” Jordan said.

DanceFight also never shows vote totals, just a winner, Jordan said. DanceFight has leaderboards and players earn points for participating in dance competitions as well as for winning them, he said. The focus is on inclusivity and creating an environment where everyone feels welcome, he said.

“Competition is a way to have fun,” Jordan said.

DanceFight also plans to create an equity pool for participants and to reward them for contributing to the platform, Jordan said.

Virtual Arts has 11 full-time employees and six part-time employees. It recently hired Blake Gardner, former Perk Chief Technology Officer, Ben Rose, former head of growth for Pandora, and Norma Ventura, a former Creative Strategist at Khoros. In the next year, DanceFight plans to add 20 more employees. Right now everyone is working virtually during the pandemic, but eventually, they plan to rent office space at Vuka in Austin, Jordan said.

Since the COVID-10 pandemic, Austin-based Fetch has seen a 59 percent increase in volume for its package delivery service to apartments.

As e-commerce explodes in popularity, apartment complexes have turned to Fetch to handle the crush of package deliveries.

The company has almost doubled the number of communities they serve this year with more than 120,000 apartment homes under contract.

And this week, Fetch, a last-mile package delivery service aimed at apartment dwellers, announced it has closed on $18 million in funding.

Iron Gate Capital and Pando Ventures led the round and were joined by existing investors Signal Peak Ventures, Silverton Partners, Seamless, and Venn Ventures. Fetch plans to use the funding to enter new markets, and in sales and marketing and to invest in its warehouse strategy and delivery technology.

Previously, Fetch raised $10.5 million in Series A funding last year. To date, the company, founded in 2016, has raised more than $32 million.

According to Scott Carman, Managing Partner of Pando Ventures, package volume will continue to remain high as ecommerce shopping becomes more commonplace.

“The increased number of deliveries that apartment communities have been forced to deal with in recent months is something that is here to stay,” Carman said in a news release. “The Fetch model takes that burden off the shoulders of on-site teams, which is why we’re seeing so many property management companies make the switch. Moving forward, Fetch’s expansion is crucial to the multifamily industry’s collective effort to provide prompt, reliable, and customized package delivery for renters. That’s why we’re proud to be part of their Series B funding effort, and their push to serve new markets and new clients.”

“This fundraise and our fast growth in the middle of a pandemic is a testament to our team’s dedication and hard work,” Fetch Founder and CEO Michael Patton said in a news release.

ICON, the Austin-based startup that builds homes with its giant 3-D printer using concrete as substrate, on Wednesday announced it has closed on $35 million in funding.

Previously, the company raised $9 million in seed-stage funding.

ICON is arguably one of Austin’s most innovative startups tackling big problems like building homes for the city’s homeless population. It teamed up with Mobile Loaves and Fishes last year to build six 3-D printed homes for Community First! Village, a 51-acre master-planned development in Austin.

The company has received other accolades landing on the Austin Chamber of Commerce’s A-List of hottest startups last year. Time Magazine also named the company one of the best inventions of 2018. Popular Science named ICON one of the best 100 Greatest Innovations of 2018.

Moderne Ventures led the Series A round of investment. Other investors include international architecture firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, CAZ Investments, Citi, Crosstimbers Ventures, Ironspring Ventures, Next Coast Ventures, Oakhouse Partners, Trust Ventures, Vulcan Capital, and Wavemaker Partners.

“Traditional building and construction techniques have not improved since B.C., they have only become more expensive,” Constance Freedman, the Founder, and Managing Partner at Moderne Ventures said in a news statement. “The results are vast deltas in affordability, limitations on design, and both time and efficiency challenges. I believe we will see an evolution of the entire home-buying value chain, especially when integrated with other technologies like digital transactions and augmented reality. Consumers will be able to order, build, design, and purchase a brand-new home in a matter of days–something that’s truly innovative and truly disruptive. We are excited to support ICON as it continues to change the world.”

“In early 2018, there were no 3D-printed homes in North America, and today, there are almost twenty and we’re gearing up for hundreds more,” Jason Ballard, Co-Founder and CEO of ICON, said in a news release. “We anticipate more high-velocity progress in the years ahead to help bring housing and construction into the modern world and in-line with humanity’s highest hopes. The present challenges the world is facing due to new coronavirus have only emphasized the tremendous gap between the housing that we have and the housing that we need. We are grateful to those who have believed in our mission from the beginning and are excited to have a larger team of global investors joining us in our belief that the housing of our future must be different than the housing we have known.”

ICON’s new round of funding will accelerate the development of its printers, create a variety of home types and designs, and enhance its core technology.

ICON unveiled its first 3D printer and successfully secured a building permit and printed a home in Austin in March 2018. And a year later at SXSW, ICON unveiled its next-generation Vulcan 3-D printer and announced strategic projects in the U.S. and Mexico.

 In addition to the Mobile Loaves & Fishes project, in 2020, ICON built 3D-printed homes in Mexico alongside nonprofit partner, New Story. ICON also partnered with the Defense Innovation Unit and the United States Marine Corps to train Marines to operate its technology and complete a field demonstration print at Camp Pendleton.

ICON is also hiring with “numerous roles across robotics, off-planet construction, materials science, software engineering, architecture, building science and operations.”

Despite the novel coronavirus pandemic, deals are still getting done in Austin’s startup community.

Austin-based SpyCloud announced on Tuesday that it has closed on $30 million in additional venture capital funding.

To date, the cybersecurity company, founded in 2016, has raised $58.5 million, according to Crunchbase.

SpyCloud plans to use the funds raised to expand its product and engineering teams and build new ways to detect and prevent fraud.

The company has created an anti-fraud platform that specializes in preventing account takeover by criminals. SpyCloud’s software can find vulnerabilities in a company’s computer system before cybercriminals can strike. SpyCloud’s software flags employees and customer accounts that have security issues early on. And the company checks to make sure the accounts have not been exposed and passwords are secure.

Centana Growth Partners led SpyCloud’s Series C investment, with participation from all existing investors: M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Altos Ventures, Silverton Partners, and March Capital Partners.

“Criminals work together to steal information and find creative ways to monetize it. As a result, even the most careful and sophisticated organizations are vulnerable,” Ted Ross, SpyCloud CEO and co-founder said in a news release. “SpyCloud will continue to pursue new and innovative ways to stay ahead of criminals and provide solutions that make the internet a safer place for individuals and businesses.”

The pandemic has affected SpyCloud’s business. Its services are in big demand because scams have proliferated online since the lockdowns began in March. SpyCloud researchers found 139,000 new web domains related to the virus with multiple scams designed to steal people’s personal information.

“SpyCloud’s approach to fraud prevention is helping businesses protect themselves and their customers at a time when threats are more pervasive than we’ve ever seen. We heard from major financial institutions and a wide range of enterprises that SpyCloud’s solutions are critically important to their anti-fraud efforts,” Eric Byunn, partner at Centana Growth Partners who joins SpyCloud’s board., said in a news release. “We’re proud to help them continue the fight and discover new ways to protect both companies and consumers from these evolving threats.”

“With so many people now working from home and multiple family members sharing devices with a mix of personal and professional applications, attack surfaces have increased significantly. Criminals are certainly taking full advantage of these new opportunities to exploit your employees and their family members,” Ross said.

Cybercriminals are able to break into a company’s computer system using stolen credentials. They can then steal financial information or intellectual property and damage a company’s reputation. SpyCloud’s system is designed to catch them before they breach the system.

The novel coronavirus pandemic has created a whole lot of changes, making people adapt faster than a coyote chasing a roadrunner across the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas.

It has also given rise to the quarantine cocktail party on Zoom. People who once crowded Austin’s bars for meetups and happy hours, now congregate online to imbibe a beverage from their homes with friends and colleagues. Pets and kids also frequently make cameo appearances in these informal gatherings.

On Thursday, Naturally Austin and SKU teamed up to host “The End of Summer Cocktail Sling Virtual Happy Hour.” About 70 people participated in the online event via Zoom from Dallas, Austin, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Colorado. Those who signed up early got a box of goodies delivered to them with cocktail recipes featuring Austin beverages.

The box contained local products like Deep Eddy Vodka, Austin Eastciders watermelon seltzer, Waterloo sparkling water, Meridian Hive lemon, Soley Mango Passion, Tequila Sheela and more to make a variety of cocktails. The box also had snacks from Yellowbird Sauce, Chinook Seedery, Rockit Snacks, Karma Nuts, and Krakatoa Hot Chips. The assortment showcased just how much Austin’s consumer packaged goods industry has grown in the past decade.

To kick off the event, Chris Ivey from Dragon Spirits Marketing gave a drink demo, mixing up the Corkless Soley Sangaria with a can of Corkless pinot grigio, HEB blood orange Italian soda, Mango Passion Soley and frozen mixed fruit. The kit also contained a recipe for a Mango Margarita using Tequila Sheela Reposado, Soley Mango Passion, simple syrup and a squeeze of lime served over ice. Participants had all of the ingredients to follow along at home, including a lime. Next, the event featured four breakout rooms with sessions on marketing, financing, direct to consumer selling and packaging and design.

The idea for the happy hour event came about after Michelle Breyer, chief operation officer of SKU, was having a socially distanced glass of wine with Emily Kealey, executive director at Naturally Austin.

“We were both talking about how we missed the live gatherings where you could share a drink with the CPG community,” Breyer wrote in an email response to questions. “And we decided to come up with a way to do something virtually.”

Overall, CPG startups have fared better than those in many other industries during the Pandemic, especially if they had a strong e-commerce presence with direct to consumer sales and Amazon sales, Breyer said. Companies with cleaning products and wellness products have done really well, she said.

Nationwide, stay-at-home orders have driven increased demand for consumer packaged goods, according to the Consumer Brands Association, a trade group for the industry, based in Arlington, Va. In fact, the industry grew almost 10 percent in May of 2020, compared to the same month a year ago. And panic buying in March sent CPG purchases up 21 percent compared to the same month a year ago.

“Access to capital has been challenging for some startups, especially those who didn’t already have lines of credit,” Breyer said. “In terms of investment, deals are still getting done.”

But shipping and logistics have presented new problems with supply chain issues, Breyer said.

“One of our founders from Track 8 had a new product that was being manufactured in China, and when the pandemic hit, everything temporarily came to a standstill.”

SKU and Naturally Austin plan to host more virtual cocktail events in the future.

“Austin’s CPG industry has an amazing sense of community who really enjoys getting together,” Breyer said. “That’s been one of the hardest parts – not seeing everybody. The End of Summer Cocktail Sling Party was a chance to fill the void until we can all gather again in person.”