Category: Austin (Page 67 of 318)

Soon, OJO Labs, an artificial intelligence startup, will have one of the best views in Austin.

OJO Labs is moving to the top floor of CityView, a four-story building under construction at 1007 South Congress Ave. OJO’s outdoor terrace offers a stunning view of the Texas State Capitol and downtown Austin along Congress Ave.

The Austin-based company has hired Sixthriver as its interior architect to design the 12,500 square foot office with the benefits of an open floor plan featuring blue, teal accent colors along with elements of the outdoors like moss and wood. It will have an energetic and playful vibe, with all the amenities of a high-tech workplace like a coffee bar, ping pong table and game room said Laura Davis with Sixthriver.

OJO is building a world-class product, said John Berkowitz, CEO of OJO Labs.

“It’s nice to do it with a beautiful view,” he said during a hard hat tour of the building last Wednesday.

Lake Flato Architects, the same firm that designed the award-winning Austin Public Library Building downtown, is the building’s designer. Two floors of CityView will be occupied by the Equinox Gym. The bottom floor will feature a variety of restaurants and retailers. OJO is scheduled to move in this summer. It currently has leased space at Eighth and Brazos.

Turnbridge Equities is the developer of CityView, which is being leased by  the Endeavor Real Estate Group. It is adjacent to Music Lane, which will be home to the future Soho House Austin and will offer on-site dining, retail and entertainment.

“It’s definitely going to be fancy, but with an Austin vibe,” Berkowitz said.

It’s the perfect setting for a creative company like OJO, Berkowitz said. And it will have a distinctly OJO feel to the space, he said. For example, the entrance will feature Warren Platner Lounge Chairs. Warren Platner was an architect and interior designer known for his iconic 1960s furniture collection.  He was also Berkowitz’s grandfather.

“You will be welcomed by chairs that came from childhood,” Berkowitz said. “It’s always been my dream to have them in my office.”

OJO Labs has created a virtual assistant that helps homebuyers and sellers. Its AI agent uses natural conversations conducted via mobile messages to help a person find a house. OJO’s product is available in 12 markets in the U.S. and Toronto, Canada. OJO is rolling out the product nationwide. Its biggest customers are Realogy and the Royal Bank of Canada.

OJO Labs recently closed on its Series C funding of $45 million. It is using the funds to accelerate its product development and for market expansion. It plans to hire more employees in the areas of engineering, data science, product and design. OJO has 60 employees currently in Austin, but the new space can accommodate up to 128 employees.

To date, OJO Labs has raised $76 million. Last October, the company merged with real estate data giant, WolfNet Technologies, based in St. Paul, Minn. The combined company has about 350 employees. OJO also has offices in St. Paul, and on the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean.

The new office will definitely help to attract top talent, Berkowitz said.

“You’ve got all of the benefits of being downtown without the traffic,” he said.

To attract top engineering talent in Austin’s competition market, it’s helpful to be downtown, Berkowitz said. And the CityView location offers access to all kinds of restaurants along South Congress Avenue like Hopdoddy, Guero’s, South Congress Café, Magnolias. It also has access to beautiful outdoor spaces like Lady Bird Lake Trail. And parking is more accessible with street parking as well as onsite parking, he said.

And OJO’s new offices will have a warm and inviting interior, said Davis with Sixthriver.

“You want an environment that is super functional, but you also want the space to feel connected and to bring people together,” Berkowitz said. OJO’s new office has about 15 what Berkowitz calls “pocket spaces” that allow people to get away from the openness if they need privacy.

“OJO’s work space being an environment that is inviting and encourages enjoyment and productivity will help us to achieve our mission of enabling millions of people to make better decisions,” Berkowitz said.

Slingshot Aerospace announced this week it has received $5 million in new seed stage funding.

ATX Venture Partners led the round with participation from new investor Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and previous investors Okapi Capital, Stage Venture Partners, Sway Ventures and Techstars Ventures.

Slingshot Aerospace is using artificial intelligence to provide detailed reports about the earth to industries such as defense, insurance, and energy. Its customers include BAE Systems, Boeing, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force.

“Slingshot is on the cutting edge of applying AI, ML and big data analytics to geospatial and orbital exploration at a time when insights are more needed than ever,” Colin Greenspon, Partner at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, said in a news release. “The company is another great example of a company finding advantages in scaling outside of Silicon Valley, and we look forward to supporting them as government and defense and other arenas apply their technologies.”

To date, Slingshot Aerospace has raised $9.1 million. The company plans to use the latest funds on product development and to hire employees in finance, business development and software engineering and data sciences.

“Together, we created Slingshot to bring decision makers more complete and timely awareness in the orbital and geospatial arenas,”  David Godwin, CEO and Co-Founder of Slingshot Aerospace, said in a news release. “The market opportunity for Slingshot is vast, as we have become a leader in AI-driven space tech products across multiple domains – closing the gap between data analysis and critical decision making.”

U.S. Air Force veterans Melanie Stricklan and Thomas Ashman and Serial Entrepreneur David Godwin founded Slingshot Aerospace in June of 2017. The company was part of the Techstars LA inaugural class.

Slingshot Aerospace’s products include Orbital Atlas, a space situational awareness platform; Earth Portal, a geospatial visualization portal; and N2X, an edge-AI framework for drones and spacecraft.   

The company recently hired a new Vice President of Finance, Tom Inman, and a new Vice President of Technology, Dean Teffer, among other software engineering and strategic business development hires.

“As follow-on investors in Slingshot, we believe they will become the leaders in geospatial AI and edge technologies to make a true difference in our world,” Chris Shonk, Managing Partner at ATX Venture Partners, said in a news release. “There is no better combination of people than Slingshot’s founders to commercialize this frontier technology. From leaders in the military with expertise on geospatial and orbital applications, to a proven serial entrepreneur and strategist on bringing products to market, this team is positioned to propel the company forward beyond our wildest imagination.”

eRelevance, an online marketing platform targeted at healthcare providers and the mortgage industry, has shut down.

The Austin-based startup posted a notice on its Facebook page on Monday “Due to an unexpected situation, as of April 15, 2019, eRelevance Corporation has ceased its operations.”

Bob Fabbio, the company’s Co-founder and CEO, confirmed the shut down in an email. He said he couldn’t provide any further details and that the company had 56 employees.

In a podcast interview a year ago, Fabbio said he planned to build eRelevance into a $1 billion company. eRelevance provided a marketing platform for small businesses such as healthcare providers to better connect with their patients outside their practices.

And last year eRelevance expanded to offer marketing services to the mortgage market.

Fabbio co-founded eRelevance Corp. in 2013 with Tim Smith. The privately-held company reported it had increased its Annual Run Rate revenue to $7.5 million in 2017, up from $3.6 million in 2016 and it had more than 1,500 customers.

The company had raised $13.7 million in venture capital. from investors including Capital Factory.

Last year, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce selected eRelevance as one of its 25 hottest startups in the growth category with less than $20 million in funding and $25 million in revenue.

And Entrepreneur Magazine also named the company one of the most entrepreneurial companies of 2017.

Fabbio previously founded Tivoli Systems, which went public in 1995 and IBM acquired the company a year later for $743 million. Next, he founded Dazel, which Hewlett-Packard bought in 1999 for $180 million. And then he founded White Glove Health, a subscription-based healthcare service that provided health and wellnesses services directly to patients.

By LAURA LOREK, publisher of Silicon Hills News

In 2004, at the University of Texas at Austin, Denis Ignatovich and Grant Passmore met and became roommates soon after.

They both enjoyed mathematics and solving difficult problems. Passmore received a bachelor’s in mathematics and Ignatovich received his degree in computer science and finance.

“We spent a lot of time daydreaming and planning about wanting to change the world together,” Passmore said.

Ten years later in London, they founded Aesthetic Integration, now known as Imandra, an artificial intelligence company that analyzes algorithms.

“In an unexpected way, we both ended up in the U.K.,” Passmore said. And now they are both intentionally back in Austin working on their five-year-old startup.

They moved the company’s headquarters from London to Austin this year and Thursday announced Imandra has received $5 million in seed stage investment.

Imandra has created algorithms that ensure a company complies with regulations and is secure. It first applied its technology to the financial services industry but has since expanded into other industries.

AlbionVC, IQ Capital and LiveOak Venture Partners led the investment into Imandra. The company plans to use the funding to expand in both the United States and the United Kingdom and to hire AI, engineering and product talent in Austin, London and Edinburgh.

Imandra’s software platform has applications for autonomous vehicles, robotics and machine learning.

And even though Imandra started in London, the company has deep ties to Austin.

Early on, Bob Boyer, a UT professor of computer science, mathematics and philosophy, and J Strother Moore, a computer scientist, at the University of Edinburgh in the early ‘70s inspired and served as mentors to Passmore and Ignatovich. Boyer and Strother Moore invented the Boyer-Moore string search algorithm in 1977.

That research led Passmore to the University of Edinburg where he completed his Ph.D. in AI for algorithm safety in 2011. Shortly after that, Passmore moved to Cambridge to work on algorithm safety for autonomous vehicles at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. And in 2009, Ignatovich was working as a quant for Deutsche Bank in New York and moved to London for them. He was running a large trading desk and he worried constantly about something going wrong.

That’s where they came up with the idea to apply algorithms to the financial services industry. Its product, Imandra, is now the name of the company, Passmore said. In 2014, Passmore resigned from the University of Cambridge to work on Imandra full time. Shortly after that, Ignatovich left his position to join the company fulltime.

Coincidently, in 2015, UBS ran a Future of Finance Challenge that gave the company an incredible opportunity to demonstrate its technology, Ignatovich said. In that challenge, Imandra won first place out of more than 600 companies from 52 countries by using its AI technology to find a fundamental flaw in the design of the UBS dark pool previously undetected by the bank and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The timing was perfect because the SEC had just issued $14 million in fines in the U.S. for various rules on how algorithms in the dark pool were running, Ignatovich said.

And just like that algorithm found a flaw in the bank’s technology, Imandra’s platform can work with other industries like autonomous vehicles. The technology has its roots in the algorithm development for microchips in Austin, Passmore said.

Algorithms have been used to analyze hardware for a long time, now Imandra is using algorithms to analyze software for flaws, Ignatovich said.

The roots of the industry can be traced to the industrial use of AI algorithms by Intel in 1994, Passmore said. The microchip manufacturer had a bug in its Pentium computer processor that led to a massive recall and cost the company $470 million, he said. That’s when Austin-based chip maker, AMD, hired a group of mathematicians including Boyer and Moore to work with its designers to fix its chip design, he said. And it worked.

“Classically it’s just been so difficult to use this technology,” Passmore said. Intel has a big group of PhDs to do this analysis, he said.

Imandra has gone back to its roots by establishing its corporate headquarters in Austin, Passmore said. It is based at WeWork University Park and has three local employees and ten employees altogether. The next phase is to scale the company and hire key talent, Passmore said. It considered Silicon Valley and other places but chose Austin because it has the best access to the talent it needs through the University of Texas at Austin, Passmore said.

“The startup ecosystem has grown so much since we were undergrads,” he said. But Austin still has a small town feel to it, he said.

And LiveOak Venture Partners, based in Austin, is one of the three top VCs leading its round, Passmore said.

 “Our investment in Imandra embodies the core of our investment thesis to back Texas based top notch entrepreneurs that are disrupting large industry categories,” Krishna Srinivasan, founding partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, said in a news release. “We recognized quickly that Denis, Grant and team are amongst the best in the world at this emerging area of algorithm and application security testing and that their approach has the ability for multi-industry transformational impact. We are also super excited to welcome Denis and Grant back to their Texas roots, leverage the tremendous local computer science talent and build something significant from where it all began.”

Imandra received its first patent last October and has several more pending, Passmore said. It has several customers already including Goldman Sachs.

By LAURA LOREK, publisher of Silicon Hills News

Oracle held its inaugural U.S. Global Startup Ecosystem Showcase at its Austin Waterfront Campus on Tuesday.

The event featured pitches from startups selected to participate in Oracle’s Startup Cloud Accelerator program in Austin. The six-month accelerator took place at Capital Factory in downtown Austin.

Five of the six startups that Oracle selected to participate in the program pitched their ventures: data.world, Molecula, ROIKOI, Senseye, and Transmute. Eventador did not pitch.

Before the startups began, the event featured Oracle executives and other dignitaries including Austin Mayor Steve Adler.

J.D. Weinstein, the head of the Oracle Startup Ecosystem in Austin, oversaw the Austin accelerator and served as master of ceremonies at the event.

Jason Williamson, vice president of the Oracle Global Startup Ecosystem, the company’s startup program for entrepreneurs worldwide, kicked off the event by giving an overview of the program.

 “We are basically here to provide an open platform for startups of all sizes,” Williamson said. “We want to help you build stuff.”

Oracle’s accelerator is an opportunity to grow revenue for startups, Williamson said.

Oracle does not provide startups with funding and does not take an equity stake in the startups accepted into its program, Williamson said.

“We are interested in seeing you grow,” he said. “We win if you do.”

Oracle does provide startups with access to its portfolio of products, Williamson said. It also provides startups with access to global marketing, public relations resources, events and gives them engagement opportunities with Oracles’ 430,000 customers.

In addition, startups get Oracle cloud credits, migration credits and technical support, access to Oracle’s product and development teams, mentoring and curriculum resources, and other discounts.

Oracle is allowing startups to join its program year-round, Williamson said. The program is open to business to business and business to consumer companies of all sizes, he said.

Next up, Angelica Erazo, Oracle’s diversity and inclusion coordinator, said half of its companies have either a diverse founder or a diverse mission statement.

Then, Mayor Adler talked about the importance of Oracle and startups in Austin. He said the iterative process startups go through is part of what makes Austin special.

Next, Joshua Bear, founder of Capital Factory, said what Oracle is doing in Austin is unique because it is offering access to customers for startups.

Oracle’s Global Startup Ecosystem chose Capital Factory as the site to operate its accelerator.

“It has been a big success,” Baer said.

The following startups participated in the accelerator program:

Transmute – Karyl Fowler, Chief Executive Officer of Transmute, presented her startup which uses the cloud, public key cryptography and blockchain technology for identification purposes. It has created Transmute ID which is user-centric identity governance for efficiency, traceability and privacy. One of the industries the startup is focused on is healthcare. With Transmute ID, doctors can authenticate and share files with patients, Fowler said. And patients can selectively share data and revoke access to their own data, she said. Transmute also graduated from the Techstars Austin program last year. Transmute, founded in 2017, has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round.

data.world Matt Laessig, COO, and Co-founder of data.world, presented his startup which is a platform that allows companies to catalog data and analyze data across clouds, databases, warehouses, spreadsheets, and third-party services. “Technology alone does not create data-driven companies,” Laessig said. “People do.” data.world brings data, people, and analysis together in one place to create a data-driven culture, he said.  data.world has a growing ecosystem of 40 plus integrations with the data and analysis tools enterprises already use and a patented semantic foundation that allows people to easily search data. It’s being used within Oracle to teach data best practices. Overall, data.world is being used by 40 plus customers in the financial services, healthcare, professional services, and media industries. data.world, founded in 2015, has raised $44.7 million to date.

ROIKOI – The startup has created a talent acquisition platform for companies based on employee recommendations. Andy Wolfe, CEO of ROIKOI, called it the “talent recommendation graph.” Top companies like Google, Dropbox, Facebook, and Amazon build internal employee referral systems. ROIKOI is bringing that concept to all companies. Its talent recommendation graph helps companies hire better talent, cheaper and more efficiently, Wolfe said. ROIKOI combines the benefits of referrals, sourcing and job boards and improves sourcing efficiency by ten times, he said. Its system uses artificial intelligence to match existing referrals to available jobs and automatically sends out emails to the top candidates, he said. And it’s not just for technology jobs, but works to fill blue collar jobs in retail, healthcare, real estate, construction, trucking and more, Wolfe said. It also improves employee diversity because the system removes names and faces and does a blind screening. ROIKOI runs on the Oracle Cloud and the program gave ROIKOI access to top executives at Oracle, Wolfe said. ROIKOI, founded in 2013, has raised $1.7 million to date.

Senseye –  David Zakariaie, CEO of Senseye, founded his startup seven and a half years ago as his high school science fair project. He then went on to receive a Naval Science Award. With that grant, he began working on his company’s Human Interface Technology. Zakariaie said the eye is the window to the soul. It is also the key to reading a lot of data about a person.  “Iris’ muscles are linked to the brain through the nervous system, by monitoring muscle movements which represent brain activity, we can wirelessly read stress, cognitive load, executive function, hormones, memory,” according to Zakariaie. His company is building a direct link between humans and computers. Senseye’s customers include the United States Air Force which started using the technology a year ago to train pilots on virtual reality flight simulators. Senseye’s software receives data from a person’s eyes to gauge their state of mind and ability to handle stress and how it affects their performance. Lloyd’s Register is also using biometric scans and Senseye’s technology to test people for impairments such as sleep deprivation, drugs, and alcohol influence or emotional distress, prior to engaging in a task on an oil rig. Its technology has other applications in automotive, gaming, personalized health and deception detection, Zakariaie said. “If you can use the data out of the brain, you can use Senseye,” he said. Senseye, founded in 2015 in Los Angeles, has raised $450,000 in seed stage funding, according to CrunchBase.

Molecula – H.O. Maycotte, CEO of Molecula, formerly known as Pilosa, has created a streaming artificial intelligence platform that analyzes 100 percent of a company’s data instantly, so machines can make decisions in real time. Today, only one percent of the world’s data is being actively analyzed, according to Oracle. IDC predicts that in 10 years, four out of five of your decisions will be made by machines, Maycotte said. His startup is helping companies to access their data easily and quickly. During the Oracle program, Maycotte met dozens of teams at Oracle, attended 12 events including OpenWorld Singapore and generated more than 100 customer leads. “On top of it, they ask for nothing,” he said. ‘This is a lifetime relationship we are building with Oracle.” The company, founded in 2017, has raised $3.7 million to date, according to CrunchBase.

Following the pitches, Oracle hosted the startups and guests to a gathering featuring Texas barbecue, drinks, and networking.

Mastercard announced Tuesday that it has acquired Austin-based Vyze, a cloud-based financial technology company.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Vyze, founded in 2008, has raised $48.1 million to date.

Vyze works with lenders to provide consumer finance products like branded store credit cards, installment loans and lease to own payment plans. It is available in thousands of stores throughout the U.S. It’s also available through online stores and call centers.

“Vyze shakes up traditional models by connecting merchants with multiple lenders, allowing them to offer their customers a wide range of credit options online and in-store,” according to Mastercard. “These financing options provide shoppers with additional payment flexibility at the exact moment of purchase, complementing Mastercard’s existing card and ACH-based solutions.”

“Both consumers and businesses want the best choice and service, exactly when they need it,” Blake Rosenthal, executive vice president of global acceptance at Mastercard, said in a news release. “Vyze adds to our ability to empower banks and other lending partners to participate in the growing trend of retail financing. The combination of their platform with our technology and network complements our existing payments programs.”

The acquisition gives Mastercard even more ways to serve merchants and lenders. Vyze’s platform provides retailers with a one-stop solution for payments and financing customer purchases.

 “Shoppers looking for new ways to pay and merchants looking to sell higher ticket items and deter abandonments has driven a flurry of activity in the ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ market,” Raymond Pucci, director of merchant services practice at Mercator Advisory Group, said in a news release. “This acquisition creates a new market making approach that supports operation at scale, helping banks offer and merchants shop for the terms that best fit their needs. Mastercard’s existing relationships will assure both take a serious look at this new solution.”

Several top U.S. retailers work with Vyze for special financing options.

“Mastercard has a long history of building an incredibly powerful network, connecting some of the world’s most influential financial institutions, merchants and innovators,” Keith Nealon, CEO of Vyze, said in a news release. “With their relationships and scale, we see a great opportunity to reach exponentially more partners and consumers.”

EverlyWell, the Austin-based healthcare testing platform, announced Tuesday that it has received $50 million more in venture capital funding.

To date, the Austin-based company, founded four years ago, has received $55 million in total funding.

Goodwater Capital led the Series B funding along with Highland Capital Partners. Other investors included Next Coast Ventures, NextGen Venture Partners, SoGal Ventures and others.

Everlywell plans to “use the funding to expand its digital platform and scale existing partnerships with leading brands like CVS and Humana,” according to a news release.

Everlywell is a digital health platform that provides at-home health tests and lab results.

The company makes and sells at 35 home lab testing kits for sexual health, thyroid, metabolism, men’s health, and other health needs. It sells the kits online and at retail stores like CVS and Target.

Julia Cheek, EverlyWell’s founder and CEO, told the Wall Street Journal that the company “has shipped 275,000 kits to date and had more than $20 million in sales in 2018 because it offers an affordable shortcut to the often laborious, expensive process of ordering lab tests.”

“Overall, what we are seeing now is the impact of educating consumers about the possibility of using digital health for certain conditions,” Cheek said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

EverlyWell has also been bringing on key executives and has hired former uShip Chief Technology Officer Nick Parker. Other key hires include bringing on former Pinterest executive Jenifer Dasho as chief marketing officer and Executive Medical Director Dr. Marra Francis.

Today, EverlyWell also announced that Dr. Robert Langer will join the company’s Scientific Advisory Board.

“Lab testing is arguably one of the most important steps in preventing and managing illness, but has been largely ignored by digital health companies,” Eric Kim, managing partner at Goodwater Capital, said in a news release. “With a clear consumer pain point and a strong executive team that integrates both consumer and healthcare expertise, EverlyWell is successfully navigating an entrenched industry to offer consumers an opportunity to take charge of their own health.”

Silicon Hills News also named EverlyWell as one of Austin’s 25 Hot Startups to Watch in 2019.

By LAURA LOREK, Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Zoho wants to keep things weird in Austin.

The software company officially announced this week at its annual Zoholics conference that it is moving its headquarters from Pleasanton, Calif. to a 369-acre campus near the Austin airport.

“I like Austin,” said Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s founder and CEO, when asked during a press conference Wednesday afternoon at Zoholics about the move.

“My only thing is, I hope that not too many people are like us and select Austin because we don’t want to lose it,” Vembu said. “Actually, I was talking to someone today: Austin is how San Francisco used to be 30 years ago. It had the weirdness. It had all this stuff. The artists and the live music.”

On his way back to his hotel Wednesday night, Vembu came across a band playing and had to stop and listen to the music.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I thought man, this is heaven.”

But if too many people move here, they are going to screw it up, like they screwed up San Francisco, Vembu said. That echoes a sentiment many in Austin feel with the dramatic expansion of the technology industry in the past decade.

In addition to Zoho’s new campus, Amazon is expanding its presence with a new building and 800 more employees in the Domain, and Apple is putting in a $1 billion campus in North Austin. And Oracle’s Larry Ellison said its new downtown campus, which opened last year with 2,000 employees will expand to 10,000 employees in coming years.

But Zoho isn’t the typical technology company. And Vembu, sporting jeans, a red Go Zoho T-shirt, and sandals, is not a typical tech founder. He’s a laidback entrepreneur who thinks differently about business and he focuses on long-term accomplishments instead of short-term results.

For example, Zoho, founded 23 years ago, is bootstrapped and has never taken on any outside investment. And its approach to doing business is decidedly different than most in Silicon Valley.

“To do interesting things you cannot have outside investors that have a different mindset,” Vembu said.

In addition, Zoho doesn’t do merger and acquisitions to expand its product line but instead develops all of its own software. It has 7,000 employees today with many of them based at a 45-acre campus in Chennai, India. Zoho makes a suite of software applications to run a business. It calls its Zoho One product “an operating system for business.”

And here’s a fascinating tidbit – Zoho’s campus on the outskirts of Austin off Texas State Highway 71 near Kellam Road – cost less to buy than Zoho’s 45-acre campus in India, said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho.

Vegesna heads up Zoho’s Austin operations. The company has been in Austin for about 10 years. It currently leases 27,000 square feet of space in the Bergstrom Tech Center, next to where Opcity has its headquarters. It has 60 employees currently but expects to reach 100 by the end of the year, Vegesna said. He moved to Austin two years and he bought the first 90-acre plot, under the name T&V Holdings, a year ago and recently Zoho bought an adjacent 279-acre tract. The two plots of land are valued at  $4.7 million by the Travis County Property District. But Zoho did not disclose what price it paid.

And here’s another thing that sets Zoho apart:  Zoho is not going to seek incentives from local or state government or ask for tax abatements on the property, Vegesna said. It might ask the City of Austin for help in dealing with getting permits to set up wastewater and water to the site, Vegesna said.

“It’s currently farmland,” he said. “We have cows on the site.”

The land is listed as dry cropland and native pasture on the property roll.

Plans call for Zoho to build a 100,000 square foot building on the campus, which should be complete in 2021, Vegesna said. That building will house about 500 employees, he said. Zoho plans to hire most of those workers locally and plans to keep its Pleasanton office, he said. He doesn’t expect many workers to relocate from California.

Zoho also hopes to open its first Zoho University in the United States at the site. It has a Zoho University in India. At the school, Zoho pays students to learn how to create and use Zoho software. It hires many of its graduates. About 15 percent of Zoho’s engineering workforce is made up of graduates from Zoho University. It’s hoping to have a similar program in Austin, Vegesna said.

“We create our own talent,” Vembu said.

At the Zoholics event, Zoho invited 50 high school students from the Del Valle Independent School District, which is where its campus will be located, to participate in the program. It hopes to work closely with Austin schools, Austin Community College and others in the local education system, Vegesna said.

The Zoholics event at the Palmer Events Center was the largest user conference to date with more than 1,600 people attending, including 200 Zoho employees.

During his keynote talk, Vembu, CEO of Zoho, told the audience that Zoho has a “particular kind of vision” that’s “insanely ambitious.”

“You almost have to be crazy,” Vembu said.

Zoho has a unique culture that focuses on holistic thinking, Vembu said.

“The entire Zoho products suite came from that kind of thinking,” Vembu said.

Zoho has built a culture and strategy with vision, drive and patience, he said.

“We have achieved all of this while keeping the human element at the center,” Vembu said.

Zoho has created 48 software apps for sales and marketing, finance, email and collaboration and more. It put them altogether and offers them to business as Zoho One. The company has seen an explosion in interest from customers in the last few years, Vembu said.

Zoho is succeeding because it has relentless determination to make its software work together and to keep going, Vembu said. It also has patience in execution, he said.

“The patience and boldness especially in today’s world is really, really hard,” he said.

That’s why Vembu seeks solitude. He doesn’t carry a phone with him. He likes to get an hour or two of solitude a day to contemplate, think and create.

Zoho has had a 15-year research and development period. It started its office suite in the fall of 2003, Vembu said.

“It took us 10 years to get to the level where we thought it was something good,” Vembu said.

Being a privately-held company allowed Zoho to take its time to develop Zoho One, a suite of software apps for every kind of business from small to medium to Fortune 500 companies. Its largest customer is a publicly-traded company with 28,000 employees. About 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies are Zoho customers.

Zoho doesn’t have a rush to the “exit,” mentality and that has given the company the ability to do things differently than other tech companies, Vembu said.

“We are not going anywhere,” he said. “There is no exit. Startups now are supposed to aim toward the exit. We said no to that.”

“You do something because you love it,” Vembu said. “Why would we exit what we love?”

Zoho still supports customers, like IBM, which it signed up in 1999.

When competitors melted away during the dot com bust, Zoho was still standing, Vembu said.

“We will survive the present bubble too,” he said. “We believe there is a bubble right now. Tech bubble. Housing bubble. All bubbles always bust.  You need to build durable companies that can navigate these huge cycles…We have built this company to survive these bubbles.”

Freedom from Wall Street is what has allowed Zoho to afford its unique culture, Vembu said.

“We don’t have worry about making particular numbers,” he said.

Zoho believes in cultivating long-term customer relationships and long-term employee relationships, Vembu said.

“We take care of employees. I actually never want to lose them,” Vembu said.

It also doesn’t outsource its customer support. It wants its support people to build careers with Zoho, Vembu said.

Zoho’s compound annual gross revenue grew 37 percent the last five years, said Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer of Zoho. The company worries that it might be growing too fast, he said.

The U.S. market makes up 42 percent of Zoho’s revenue, down from 52 percent in 2012, Sundaram said.

But it has big plans for Austin, Sundaram said.

“We are going big in Austin that’s the only way to do it in Texas,” he said. “It’s mind boggling to think you can buy that can of land in a major city only 15 minutes from the airport.”

University of Texas at San Antonio Associate Professor Arturo Montoya is a civil engineer and an expert on how earthquakes and hurricanes impact bridges and buildings.

It’s that expertise that attracted Purdue University principal investigator Shirley Dyke to ask him to collaborate on the Resilient Extra-Terrestrial Habitats Institute for NASA to explore building homes and other structures on the Moon and MARS.

No matter what they encounter in space, the crew has to be prepared to respond to it, Montoya said. And it is his job and others at UTSA to think up worst case scenarios and then subject model buildings to them to see how they hold up. And in space, they are dealing with a whole lot of other factors than on earth like zero gravity, Montoya said. The UTSA research will use computational models and physical models to study adverse conditions on the Moon and Mars and how that might affect various structures.

The five-year project, which involves Purdue University, the University of Texas at San Antonio,  University of Connecticut and Harvard University will receive $15 million in funding.

The new institute “will design and operate resilient deep space habitats that can adapt, absorb and rapidly recover from expected and unexpected disruptions,” according to NASA.

NASA just awarded the project this week to create two new Space Technology Research Institutes.

The other project is called Habitats Optimized for Missions of Exploration, or HOME. That project is led by Stephen Robinson, principal investigator at the University of California, Davis. He is working in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, Carnegie Mellon University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Howard University, Texas A&M University and the University of Southern California. Industry collaborators include Sierra Nevada Corporation, Blue Origin and United Technology Aerospace Systems. 

The two new institutes will help to develop technologies that are “critical to a sustainable human presence on the Moon and Mars,” according to NASA. “The smart habitat, or SmartHab, research will complement other NASA projects to help mature the mission architecture needed to meet challenging exploration goals.”

“Partnering with universities lets us tap into new expertise, foster innovative ideas, as well as expand the research and development talent base for both aerospace and broader applications,” Jim Reuter, acting associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a news release. “We’re excited to work with these two new STRIs to develop smart habitat technologies for exploration missions on the Moon and Mars.”

At the University of Texas at San Antonio, Montoya said he expects to build scaled-down models of habitats for Mars and the Moon and then subject them to radiation, sudden impacts like those a structure in space might encounter from meteorites, extreme heat, and cold and other adverse conditions to see how the structures hold up.

“It’s a very exciting project,” Montoya said.  

UTSA graduate students and undergraduate students will also be involved, Montoya said. And they will work closely with Purdue University and the others involved in the project, he said.

By LAURA LOREK, publisher of Silicon Hills News

Austin’s venture capital investments rose to $704 million in the first quarter of 2019, up 16 percent from the same quarter a year ago, according to the PwC/CB Insights MoneyTree report.

However, the number of deals in Austin dropped almost 8 percent to 37 in the first quarter of 2019, compared to 40 deals for the first quarter of 2018.

That means fewer, but bigger, deals are getting done in the Austin area, which is mirroring what’s going on nationally with VC investments, said John Cummins, partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, based in Austin.

Overall, Texas companies received $1.16 billion in venture capital in the first quarter of 2019, a 51 percent increase from the same quarter in 2018, according to the MoneyTree Report.

Deals statewide remained relatively flat with 66 reported for the first quarter of 2019, compared to 67 for the same quarter a year ago.

Nationally, California led VC investments in the first quarter with 461 deals worth $13.1 billion, followed by New York’s 201 deals worth $3.8 billion and Massachusetts with 117 deals and $2.7 billion invested. Texas ranked fourth.

The Texas venture capital deals included three big deals worth in excess of $150 million each with Onit, a project management software company in Dallas receiving $200 million, Magnitude Software in Austin receiving $179 million and Peloton Therapeutics in Houston receiving $150 million, said Cummins with PwC. Those big investments led Texas to buck the national VC trend in the first quarter.

Nationally, venture capital investment fell 36 percent in the first quarter to $25 billion, with four percent fewer deals compared to the fourth quarter of 2018, according to the MoneyTree report. And the report showed “mega-deals were also down from a record fourth quarter in 2018, but well above historic levels with 46 deals worth more than $100 million in the first quarter of 2019.”

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

“Seed stage deals began to decline starting in Q3’17, at 35 percent of all deals, falling to 24 percent in Q1 ’19,” according to the MoneyTree report.

And the march of the Unicorns continues with ten new private companies valued at $1 billion plus in the U.S.

Artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and fintech are the categories that led investments nationally, Cummins said. Those are all strong categories in Austin also, he said.

Austin’s technology ecosystem continues to build, Cummins said.

“We are always watching the big tech companies that are putting larger and larger footprints in the market, Cummins said. “That is certainly helpful. It will drive competition for talent and drive demand for those types of skill sets.”

Established companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, Zoho, Amazon and others moving campuses here will also lead to a maturation of the market and more startup activity, Cummins said.

Not unlike Silicon Valley, folks that defect from these larger companies, might jump down and launch startups, Cummins said.

“Creating that cycle is what Silicon Valley is today,” he said.

And although people have talked of a bubble for years in the tech industry, all signs in Austin look good, Cummins said.

“It’s all positive momentum from what we can tell,” he said. “When you look at these companies, they are developing real products and services and are focused on real business issues. These aren’t just ideas.”

And venture capital firms like LiveOak Venture Partners announcing the close of its second fund, Fund II, with $105 million are all good signs for the venture capital community and Austin startups, Cummins said.

“The quality of the startup community here is strong,” he said.

Austin’s Top 10 Largest VC Deals for the 1^st Quarter 2019    

           Name                                 Industry                           Funding (in millions)

1. Magnitude Software    Software                              $179
2. Siete Family Foods        Food & Beverage                  $90
3. RigUp                                Software                               $60
4. Outdoorsy                       Internet                                 $50
5. CS Disco                            Internet                                $50
6. Ojo Labs                           Mobile & Telecom               $45
7. ScaleFactor                      Internet                                 $30
8. AlertMedia                      Mobile & Telecom               $25
9. MAP Health                      Healthcare                           $25
10. SpyCloud                          Internet                                 $21

Source: PwC/CB Insights MoneyTree Report