Category: Austin (Page 63 of 318)

TalentGuard, a career and talent management software startup, announced this week it has raised $4 million.

The Austin-based startup plans to use the funding for global sales and marketing expansion and product development.

LiveOak Venture Partners of Austin led the Series B funding round. Previously, the company raised $3.5 million from angels and other investors, according to a CrunchBase story.

Linda Ginac founded TalentGuard in 2010. The company has more than 80 customers including Fortune 500 companies including Campbells, Bose, Mitsubishi Chemicals and Applied Materials.

TalentGuard’s cloud-based software helps companies retain workers. The platform gives managers deep insights into the skill sets of its employees. It also uses machine learning to help employees manage their careers. It shows employees where they are within their organizations and recommends career paths.

 “We are excited to have LiveOak Venture Partners as our lead investor. They’ve provided us with expert advice and guidance over the past few years, so it was a natural next step to partner with them as investors,” Ginac, CEO and Founder of TalentGuard said in a news release. “They have a strong track record as enterprise software and technology investors, experience with global SaaS businesses, and closely align with our values. This partnership with LiveOak will help us to enhance our talent management platform, accelerate growth in international markets and expand our team.”

“We’ve tracked TalentGuard over the years and have been blown away by their incredible grit and tenacity to create a comprehensive talent management platform and by their success with numerous blue-chip F500 companies,” stated Krishna Srinivasan, founding Partner at LiveOak.

As part of the funding deal, TalenGuard adds former Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron, Horizon Bank Chairman and former CFO of Dell James M, Schneider, and Srinivasan to its board of directors.

New Knowledge, a Cybersecurity firm, announced on Tuesday that it has received $3 million in additional funding.

BuildGroup and Lux Capital provided the funding.

Last August, New Knowledge announced it had raised $11 million in funding, led by GGV Capital. To date, the company has raised $18 million and it has 50 employees.

New Knowledge plans to use the funding to enterprise platform later this year. The software platform helps companies detect, monitor and mitigate social media manipulation.

“We are excited to partner with BuildGroup with this investment,” New Knowledge Founder and CEO Jonathon Morgan said in a news release. “We’re ready to scale our platform and bring our information integrity capabilities to a wider enterprise audience. It’s crucial for modern businesses to understand the authenticity of conversations that impact their brand and their customers, and identify the online groups that are trying to undermine their brand integrity. New Knowledge is proud to work with companies that share our vision for a more authentic internet.”

BuildGroup, based in Austin, invests in business to business startups that use data science and cloud services to radically alter existing industries. Rackspace’s former CEO Lanham Napier and other former Rackspace executives founded BuildGroup.

“New Knowledge is precisely the type of company with a modern business model that we look to partner with,” BuildGroup CEO Lanham Napier said in a news release. “Their technology offers insight into how a brand is being discussed and potentially manipulated online, and we think provides the next generation of tools for companies to manage their brands and customer networks. Jonathon and his team are in precisely the right position to scale aggressively and have a major market impact.”

New Knowledge, founded in 2015, was one of the first organizations to identify Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election.

TurnKey Vacation Rentals, one of the nation’s largest vacation rental management companies, recently announced it has secured $48 million in funding.

The Austin-based startup plans to use the funds “to fuel market expansion and the development of new vacation rental offerings and technologies for individual owners and small property managers,” according to a news release. Altos Ventures, a current investor, led the funding round with participation from existing investors Adams Street Partners, Greenspring Associates and Harmony Partners.

To date, TurnKey has raised $120 million since its founding in 2013.

“This investment in TurnKey highlights our deepening conviction that technology is the key to driving quality and efficiency in vacation rental management,” Anthony Lee, Managing Director at Altos Ventures, said in a news statement.

“This is our largest funding round ever and the third time our current investors have led the effort,” TurnKey Chairman and CEO John Banczak said in a news release. “TurnKey will hit the million-guest milestone this year, delivering industry-leading hospitality on the most sophisticated technology platform in the business.”

Banczak and T.J. Clark founded Turnkey in 2013, pioneered a new model for full-service vacation rental management.

Along with the funding announcement, TurnKey also announced that Clark will now serve as President and Chief Development Officer, Banczak will continue as Chairman and will also serve as CEO, and CFO Jen Ford will also assume the role of Chief Commercial Officer.

Correction: the headline previously misstated the amount raised.

TrustRadius, a platform for software reviews, announced Tuesday that it has received $12.5 million in additional funding.

The Austin-based company has raised $25 million since its founding in 2012.

Next Coast Ventures led the Series C funding round with participation from returning investors the Mayfield Fund and LiveOak Ventures.

TrustRadius plans to use the funds to hire key employees with a focus on sales and engineering. TrustRadius, with 59 employees, “plans to double in size through 2020 as the company grows recurring revenue by 223% and more than triple its customer base,” according to a news release.

“I founded TrustRadius because I experienced first hand the consequences of making the wrong technology selection, and witnessed how difficult it was for our team to conduct effective due diligence with resources like analyst reports and vendor-driven references and case studies,” Vinay Bhagat, founder and chief executive officer of TrustRadius said in a news release.

TrustRadius has created a platform where customers leave reviews of software products they purchase. Its customers include LogMein, TIBCO, and Solarwinds.

“Reviews are hosted both on TrustRadius and are syndicated to vendors’ own sales and marketing channels to improve conversion and accelerate purchase,” according to a news release.

“Enterprise software is a nearly half a trillion-dollar industry with high-quality, trusted reviews becoming one of the most effective tools for capturing market share, and NCV’s market research with major players in the software industry confirmed TrustRadius has the highest caliber reviews in the industry,” Thomas Ball, co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures who will be joining TrustRadius’ board as part of the firm’s investment, said in a news release.

A real estate tech startup, Homeward announced on Monday that it has raised $25 million in funding.

That includes $4 million in equity funding and $21 million of debt funding.

Austin-based LiveOak Venture Partners led the equity funding and Genesis Capital and Keystone Bank provided the debt funding.

“Founding team members of Opcity, ApartmentList, and a few other real estate tech startups also participated in the round,” according to a news release.

Homeward has created a product called The Homeward Way that allows its customers to make all-cash offers to secure their next home before selling their existing home. The company plans to use the funds raised to further develop that product along with other expansion plans.

 “The current process of home buying is backwards,” Tim Heyl, founder and CEO at Homeward, said in a news release. “Buyers have to sell their existing home and then rush to find a new one. We remove this uncertainty by letting buyers use our cash to secure their next home first. Then they can take their time and sell their existing home for its full market value.”

Heyl, a real estate professional, founded Homeward in 2018. The company operates in Texas, Georgia and Colorado.

“The Homeward Way gives homebuyers credit for their home equity up front, and lets them make an all-cash offer to secure their next home using the company’s funds. Homeward customers also receive a floor price guarantee on their existing home in case they’re unable to sell it for its full market value,” according to a news release.

Homeward charges a fixed 1.90 percent of the purchase price.

“We partner with exceptional entrepreneurs who are looking to transform large established industries. We recognized early on after meeting with Tim, given his incredible domain expertise and accomplishments and our experience as the first institutional investor in Opcity and Ojo Labs, that Homeward has real potential to disrupt the real estate market by empowering the consumer,” Krishna Srinivasan, Founding Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, said in a news release.

By LAURA LOREK, Publisher of Silicon Hills News

HOUSTON – The astronauts get all the glory, but hundreds of thousands of people worked behind the scenes to put the first men on the Moon.

“It took around 400,000 people to land humankind on the Moon from engineers to computer programmers to the people who sewed airtight space suits,” said Astronaut Mike Collins, who along with Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, flew the Apollo 11 Mission to the Moon. He made that statement in a Google video.

Last week, a group of engineers from IBM met at the Gilruth Center at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston to talk about the work they did on helping to make the Apollo 11 mission to the moon a success. IBM had more than 4,000 people working on the Apollo 11 mission, said John E. Kelly, executive vice president of IBM.

They were all working on a national goal set by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961, to land on the moon and return safely to earth. Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin accomplished that by safely landing on the moon, 50 years ago on July 20^th.

 “It’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong said as he stepped foot on the moon.

At that historic moment, Homer Ahr, former IBM computer programmer, was at the dynamics console in the Mission Operations Control Room, known as MOCR, in Building 30 at the Manned Spacecraft Center, later renamed the Johnson Space Center. That room, under the control of NASA’s Gene Kranz, a former fighter pilot, served as the nerve center for the Apollo 11 mission.

Ahr watched the second by second real-time processing of the data for Armstrong’s descent piloting the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle.

The last-minute and 45 seconds became fairly-tense as Armstrong flew above the surface of the moon looking for a place to land the Eagle, Ahr said.

“I remember praying at a minute and thirty seconds,” he said. “Dear Lord, just tell him to put it down, just put it down. And a few seconds later he put it down.”

On his descent to the moon, two alarms sounded that almost led NASA to tell Armstrong to abort the mission. Both signaled the computer was overloaded with data and couldn’t process it all. Kranz gave the astronauts the go-ahead to land despite the alarms. But that wasn’t the only problem the astronauts had to deal with on descent.

“At about 600 feet, noticing Eagle’s computer was taking them down into a boulder-strewn area near West Crater, Armstrong took over manual control of the descent,” according to NASA. “He pitched Eagle to a more vertical orientation, which slowed the descent, and decided to overfly the rough area and look for smoother terrain to land on.”

During that time, the Eagle almost ran out of fuel. At about 100 feet, a fuel warning light came on, that meant Armstrong only had 90 seconds left of hover time, according to NASA.

With less than a minute of fuel left, Armstrong found a place to land in the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon and shut down the spacecraft announcing back to NASA the historic words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

“The truth is if anyone in the world was going to land on the moon, it was Neil Armstrong,” Ahr said. “During some of the training, using a lunar module simulator at Ellington Air Force Base, up the road here, the trainer crashed.”

On May 6, 1968, Armstrong narrowly escaped with his life after the simulated lunar landing research vehicle he was flying at Ellington Air Force Base malfunctioned, according to NASA. Armstrong lost control of the vehicle because of a loss of helium pressure, according to an accident investigation by NASA. Armstrong ejected from the vehicle 200 feet from the ground and the vehicle crashed and burned on impact. Armstrong parachuted to safety and wasn’t injured.

“The vehicle’s instrumentation did not provide adequate warning about the adverse situation,” according to NASA. They corrected the problems for the eventual Eagle landing.

“He held on to the bitter end,” Ahr said. “So, we knew he was going to hold on till the bitter end. He was not going to get that close to the landing and not land.”

IBM’s computers played a major role in the Apollo 11 mission. They were the most powerful computers in the world at the time, said Kelly, executive vice president of IBM. And to see how much computing power has advanced in 50 years, today a smartphone has more processing power than the entire mission control operations that landed men on the moon.

“The biggest risk was not that the technology wasn’t up to it, we did everything we could in terms of the quality of our code, the accuracy, and precision of our code, the performance of our code, we trained for months to do this,” Ahr said. “What I was worried about as the biggest risk was me screwing up. Because we had to put in a lot of inputs into the computer and if you messed them up you had to redo them and redoing them took time.”

During training simulations, NASA almost didn’t make the go-no-go call during descent because Ahr had messed up.

“But that was what training was for,” he said.

The engineers were doing things between man and machine that had never been done before, Kelly said.

“We didn’t know we could fail,” said Sadie Stanley, former IBM Radar Programmer; one of the few women programmers at the time.

The Apollo missions built upon themselves and each one provided lessons and information to improve for the next one, said Dave Proctor, former IBM engineer who coded the lunar descent maneuver model. They also built on intelligence learned from NASA’s Mercury and Gemini missions before the Apollo program, he said.

“I thought the risk was in the descent and ascent, the rest of it we had done before, we had several training missions, 8 9, 10, we had gone into orbit around the moon before,” Proctor said. “The new part was descending and ascending, these parts we had never done before, but it worked out really well even though it was a little close on the landing.”

Everyone working on the Apollo 11 mission was scared, but they just focused on doing the best job they could to get through that phase and then onto the next phase, said Phil Pollacia, former IBMer who managed the preflight trajectory.

“At some point in time, we just had to say, we didn’t know we couldn’t do it, so we just did,” Pollacia said. “And one step after another step made it happen. And sure enough at the end of the mission, we all took a deep breath and relaxed.”

“Until the next mission,” Stanley said.

Tommy Steele joined IBM right out of college at the Huntsville Marshall Space Flight Center and he became the lead engineer on the instrument unit for NASA’s Saturn V, a three-stage liquid-propellant expendable rocket developed for the Apollo program to take humans to the Moon.

Most of the people working on the Apollo 11 mission were in their 20s and a lot of them were kids right out of college, Steele said.

“All of this stuff we were working on, there weren’t any bad ideas,” Steele said. “Even a raw recruit out of college got to work on important things.”

“No one had ever attempted an engineering project like this,” Steele said. NASA did an outstanding job of getting the mission accomplished and working with all the companies working on it, he said.

“We never flew a mission that didn’t have something go wrong,” Steele said. “The key was to be able to accomplish the mission in spite of that.”

Today, Steele, who retired from IBM in 1992, lives in Round Rock and is part of the “Round Rock Gang” a group of former engineers and staff that worked on the Apollo, Space Shuttle and Skylab missions. They get together to reminisce about the work they did and how much has changed. Today, NASA astronauts hitch a ride to the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with Russian Cosmonauts. At the time of the Apollo 11 Mission, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were in a Cold War and that kind of collaboration seemed impossible, Steele said. For a young engineer right out of college, it was the most exciting project in the world to work on.

Apollo 11: The Untold Story Of the IBM Team Behind the Moon Landing

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“Everything about the space program was embryonic and it was pretty exciting stuff,” Steele said. “There were so many people who dedicated their every thought for six or seven years toward getting this done. They did things that have never been done before. And they did it without worrying about who got credit.”

Steele also thinks the U.S. will get to Mars, but it will first have to have a better understanding of how space occupancy and long-flight space missions work.

“Mankind’s’ thirst for the next frontier – it never changes,” Steele said.

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Austin-based Everlywell, a healthcare testing platform, received $50 million early-stage investment in April, making it Austin’s top venture deal for the second quarter.

Flosports, a sports media startup, claimed the number two spot with $47 million in expansion-stage financing, followed by Lung Therapeutics with $36 million, Arrive Logistics with $25 million and Elligio Health Research with $20 million, according to the PwC/CB Insights MoneyTree report.

Others in the top 10 included Aunt Bertha with $16 million, Coder with $11.4 million, KERV with $11 million, Atmosphere with $10 million and SubjectWell with $10 million.

Overall, Austin’s venture capital investments dropped 52 percent from the first quarter of 2019 to $337 million in the second quarter of 2019, according to the MoneyTree report.

But the number of deals in Austin rose slightly to 41 deals, compared to 39 in the first quarter.

The big decline in Austin’s investment dollars during the second quarter signals a return to normalcy following a few big deals that got done in the Austin area for the first quarter, said John Cummins, partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, based in Austin.

The Austin-Round Rock area have been experiencing record investment levels for the past several quarters just like the national VC industry, Cummins said.

The Austin-Round Rock area ranked seventh nationally in the top ten most active markets for VC investments by deal activity for the second quarter. San Jose-San Francisco topped the list, followed by New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver. The Austin-Round Rock area didn’t make the top 10 markets for dollars invested.

Overall, Texas companies received $687 million in venture capital in the second quarter of 2019, according to the MoneyTree Report.

Deals statewide rose slightly with 72 reported for the second quarter of 2019, compared to for the same quarter a year ago.

Nationally, California led VC investments in the second quarter with 576 deals worth $16.2 billion, followed by New York’s 203 deals worth $3.8 billion and Massachusetts with 112 deals and $2.2 billion invested. Texas ranked seventh.

Nationally, venture capital investment rose almost 10 percent in the second quarter to $28.7 billion in 1,409 deals, up three percent, compared to the first quarter of 2019, according to the MoneyTree report.

“At the 2019 halfway point, US VC funding shows no signs of slowing: At the end of Q2, US VC funding was at $55B, well above the mid-point for 2018 ($48B), which ultimately saw a near-record $116B raised (compared to the record $120B in 2000),” according to the report. “$100M mega-rounds drive funding higher: Driving the trend toward bigger deals, US companies raised a record quarterly number of $100M+ VC rounds in Q2, with 64 mega-rounds accounting for nearly half of all funding raised.”

Another trend that is continuing is a decline in seed-stage funding

“After rebounding last quarter, seed activity dropped below levels last seen in Q1 ’14.,” according to the report.

A robot rolling down the road bringing butter, milk, and eggs.

That’s on the horizon for San Antonio-based H-E-B. Texas’ largest grocer announced Wednesday plans to use an autonomous van to deliver groceries in San Antonio.

The pilot program will roll out later this year.

Customers in Olmos Park, north of downtown San Antonio, will be able to order from the Olmos Park H-E-B and get their groceries delivered in an autonomous van. It’s the first test market for the new driverless delivery technology.  Initially, the van will have a driver but will eventually become completely driverless, according to H-E-B.

H-E-B is not the first grocer to turn to driverless technology to deliver milk, eggs, bread, and ground beef. Last December, Kroger, the nation’s largest grocery chain, rolled out autonomous delivery in Arizona. It is working with Nuro, based in Mountainview, Calif., according to the Associated Press.

And Kroger’s Nuro driverless vans are coming to Houston this year, according to a story in The Verge.

In a blog post on the H-E-B website, the grocery company reported that “people will continue to play a major role throughout the company’s business.” H-E-B, with 116,000 employees, is the largest private employer in Texas.

 “Our success starts with our people, who provide exceptional hospitality and drive us to open more engaging stores that offer a world-class shopping experience,” Craig Boyan, H-E-B President, said in a blog post. “We’re committed to winning through people and hiring more people, and we’re adding necessary skills to become both a better tech company and even stronger brick-and-mortar retailer.”

H-E-B is partnering with Udelv, a California-based company that creates Autonomous Delivery Vehicles, which are outfitted with temperature-controlled compartments for fresh, frozen and dry goods. The autonomous vans also travel at city street and highway speeds.

“Companies like H-E-B are taking the first steps to explore the benefits autonomous deliveries can bring to their customers and employees,” Daniel Laury, CEO of Udelv, said in a blog post . “As the most loved retailer in Texas, H-E-B is an amazing partner for Udelv as we scale our Autodeliv^TM service and work to make deliveries faster and safer. We look forward to serving the people of Texas with Newton, our second-generation ADV.”

H-E-B is beefing up its digital efforts and this pilot is part of that effort. The company recently opened a new Digital Technology Hub in East Austin. That came about after it bought Favor, an on-demand digital delivery service last year. It was the first acquisition in the company’s 114-year history.

H-E-B also offers H-E-B Curbside, which allows customers to order their groceries in advance and pick them up at the store and H-E-B Home Delivery, which delivers groceries to a customer’s house. And H-E-B has created H-E-B Go, a mobile solution that allows people to scan and pay for their items with their phones.

 “At H-E-B, we continue to evaluate and utilize innovative technologies in all parts of our business,” said Paul Tepfenhart, Senior Vice President of Omnichannel and Emerging Technologies at Central Market and H-E-B. “As a leading digital-retail leader in Texas, we will continue to grow our Partner population as well as technology presence to complement our store operations, enabling customers to choose how they shop, pay for and receive products.”

The London and Austin technology ecosystems have developed a strong relationship during the last decade.

And on Wednesday, Capital Factory, a technology accelerator in downtown Austin, officially announced it has joined forces with Plexal, an innovation center that sits within London’s Here East technology campus.

The deal came together following meetings last March at South by Southwest and in June during London Technology Week. As a result, Here East’s Chief Operating Officer Michael Magan, and Plexal’s Managing Director Andrew Roughan signed an agreement with Capital Factory’s Director of International Affairs Fred Schmidt.

In Austin,  Andy Jones, a London native who runs Marvelous Events in Austin and Schmidt will help U.K. and Texas companies seeking to do business with each other. Capital Factory members will have a hot desk at Here East and they will get to work out of there while overseas. And the same is true for members of Here East and Plexal when they come to Austin or Dallas. They get to work out of Capital Factory’s facilities in either city.

“We can help make this affordable,” Jones said, making it easier for companies to do business overseas. The two working together can help startups find inexpensive housing, find mentors and develop other relationships to expand into a new market, he said.

Schmidt has been courting the relationship with the U.K. since 2012 and a trade mission which led to a sister city relationship with the London Borough of Hackney where Here East is located.

Here East is a technology redevelopment project from the 2012 London Olympics. It has 1.2 million square feet of space in three buildings in East London. Today, it has more than 3,000 tech, creative, science and academic professionals with plans to grow to 5,000. Its tenants include the Plexal accelerator, BT Sports, Ford Motor Company, Loughborough University, City College London, and The Gantry creative studios.

Capital Factory and Here East will work together in programs in areas such as cybersecurity and defense, mobility, diversity and inclusion, education, health, and AR/VR, according to a news release.

Plexal and Capital Factory are also focused on corporate partners, Schmidt said. They can introduce tech startups to established companies for partnerships and customer relationships, he said.

Among the startups that could benefit from the relationship is Senseye, a four-year-old startup with 26 employees, that has customers in the United Kingdom. Senseye, which is part of the Capital Factory accelerator, works with Lloyds of London to evaluate employees for safety risks in the marine industry, said David Zakariaie, Senseye’s founder and CEO. Senseye has raised $4 million in seed stage capital to date and moved from Capital Factory to larger offices at Eighth and Congress.

About 75 percent of the accidents that happen in the marine industry have all been because of human error, Zakariaie said. Senseye’s high tech system scans a person’s iris to check if they are stressed, impaired by alcohol or drugs or fatigued. If they are, they get a red light that doesn’t allow them to work that day, Zakariaie.

“It’s essentially a platform to mitigate for the human element of the risk,” he said.

With the new agreement between Capital Factory and Plexal, Senseye has an office now in the Here East technology campus, Schmidt said. And that’s the focus of the relationship to make it easy for Austin companies to set up shop in the U.K. and enter the European market for U.K. companies to have a desk at Capital Factory and entry into the Austin, Dallas, Texas and U.S. market, he said.

Already, 80 U.K. companies have a presence in Austin and about 40 to 50 Austin-based companies have a presence in the U.K., said Haileigh Meyers, with the U.K. Department of International Trade. Meyers has an office at Capital Factory.

Working together makes sense, Schmidt said. Texas, overall, is the world’s 10^th largest Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, economy in the world and the U.K. is the 5^th largest economy. Combined, they represent the third largest global economy, he said.

The key for U.K. startups is having a point of contact in Austin, Dallas and Texas overall to start building relationships, Schmidt said.

“We try to make very qualified and useful introductions to people that hopefully will be lasting and result in success,” Schmidt said.

Collaboration between the two ecosystems make both economies stronger, said Maia Donohue with 3 Day Startup.

3 Day Startup, which is based at Capital Factory, has done more than 20 programs in the U.K. with Queen Mary University of London, University of Edinburgh, Donohue said. 3 Day Startup is holding its fifth annual Global Roundup Conference this week at Capital Factory and will be hosting several entrepreneurs from the U.K., Donohue said.

Developing long-term relationships is essential, he said.

There are subtle differences in doing business in each country that can make or break a deal, Donohue said.

3 Day Startup and Capital Factory also brought in student groups from Hackney Community College to solve problems for British Airways, RetailMeNot and Adobe Systems and present them onstage at Hackney House at South by Southwest, Schmidt said.

And Schmidt said no matter what happens with Brexit, which refers to the British Exit from the European Union, Capital Factory will continue to cultivate its relationship with the U.K. Capital Factory is also in active discussions with other countries within the European Union to set up a relationship similar to the one it has with Here East, Schmidt said.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s full speed ahead, business as usual,” Schmidt said.

By LAURA LOREK, Publisher of Silicon Hills News

In a historic office building close to Capital Factory in downtown Austin, Rocket Dollar is disrupting the way people invest retirement dollars.

The two-year-old startup allows people to use self-directed retirement accounts to make a wide variety of investments into real estate, startups, precious metals and more.

“Eighty million people have over $50,000 in a retirement account today,” said Henry Yoshida, Rocket Dollar’s Co-founder and CEO. That represents $10 trillion in just IRAs, he said. “Our goal is to let people take those accounts, the money inside of them, and keep the tax benefits and invest in things that are not stocks and bonds.”

And it’s working, Yoshida said. To date, Rocket Dollar has customers from all 50 states and $50 million in assets under management coming from Rocket Dollar accounts, he said

Rocket Dollar’s lead investor is Village Global, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund that invests in early-stage startup and is backed by Billionaires like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt and more.  Rocket Dollar has raised a seed round of $3.5 million. Other investors include Capital Factory and the Central Texas Angel Network.

Yoshida, a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Honest Dollar, which sold to Goldman Sachs, has been busy travelling coast to coast to raise awareness about Rocket Dollar’s offering to investors, and arranging for channel partnerships. Last month, he gave a tour of his offices to those attending the Digital Banking conference in Austin.  The Digital Banking conference attracts more than 1,700 senior level executives from financial institutions and FinTech providers worldwide.

In addition to founding Honest Dollar, Yoshida is an angel investor with the Central Texas Angel Network. He is also a mentor at Capital Factory and Techstars. And he’s a Certified Financial Planner and former Merrill Lynch Vice President.

“My background in Austin is I set up a lot of these 401ks here, I set up several hundred over the last 15 years on the company side,” he said. “And then I helped the individuals leaving those companies find places to establish IRAs.”

Today, Rocket Dollar only works with individuals, he said.

This type of investing has been allowed since 1978, Yoshida said. Rocket Dollar didn’t invent it, he said. But it’s largely been out of reach for most people, he said. Rocket Dollar makes it accessible and easy for the masses, he said.

“I represent a digital platform to let people achieve 21^st century diversification and do something other than the set it and forget it: 60 percent stock and 40 percent bond portfolio,” Yoshida said.

Set it and forgot it is a slogan for a slow-roasted rotisserie chicken and not for the retirement industry, Yoshida said. He wrote a popular blog post about why that is not the way to manage a retirement account today.

At the Digital Banking conference, Yoshida presented a case study with its partner bank, Solar National Bank of Denver, Colorado. Its assets are held at that bank, which has a national charter. It also works with IRAR Trust, IRA Resources Inc. of La Jolla, California.

When Rocket Dollar’s assets under management hit $100 million, the startup plans to open a second office in Denver, Yoshida said. Right now, Rocket Dollar has 13 employees and a slate of interns, Yoshida said. It occupies 1,500 square feet at 221 E 9^th Street.

Rocket Dollar accounts allow people to unlock their retirement dollars and invest in their communities and in startups, Yoshida said. The government prohibits people from using retirement dollars to invest in startups that they or their immediate family members control but allows them to invest in startups run by friends and more distant family members.

 “You can’t invest in your company, but you can use Rocket Dollar as a way to raise money from individuals who want to take a small portion of their investment accounts and invest in a brewery or some other business,” Yoshida said. “It represents a good diversification. It might be something they have a personal attachment to it.”

It allows someone to purchase an apartment complex or invest in a partnership that own multiple properties to provide affordable housing in a community, Yoshida said.

Rocket Dollar makes money by charging a one-time $360 account setup fee and then $15 per month for account administration and compliance. It does not charge a fee for assets under management or add-on fees for new investments, according to the company.

“I make revenue from customers by giving them the ability to make their investment choices instead of making my revenue off of their investment, which is what the existing financial services industry does” Yoshida said.

Whether someone has $10,000 or $200,000 in a Rocket Dollar account, they pay the same fee, he said.

Leo Ramirez Jr., founder of Encast, opened a Rocket Dollar account to diversify his investment.

“I’m an entrepreneur and I also mentor some entrepreneurs,” he said. “I sit on two startup boards. I saw that this could be a way for me to potentially invest in their companies.”

“I think they have an amazing idea,” Ramirez said. “If I didn’t like them as much as I do, I wouldn’t keep sending friends and families to invest with them. They are changing the landscape for people looking to invest their retirement funds in diverse ways.”