Category: Austin (Page 92 of 318)

Austin’s pioneering venture capital firm, True Wealth Ventures, founded by women to invest in women, announced on Tuesday the close of the firm’s first fund with $19.1 million.

Kerry Rupp and Sara Brand, partners in True Wealth Ventures, plan to use the funds to invest in about 12 women-led startups in the sustainable consumer and consumer health technology industries.

True Wealth Ventures also announced that more than 80 percent of its limited partners are women.

While women-owned businesses continue to be founded and flourish, the funding has simply not kept pace. In 2017, women-led companies received just 2.2 percent of all venture capital funding in the U.S., according to True Wealth Ventures. That’s a problem that True Wealth Ventures set out to correct.

“We’ve seen the statistics: companies led by women show consistently higher performance. Continuing to look away from this massive investment opportunity doesn’t make business or economic sense,” General Partner and MBA Harvard Business School graduate Kerry Rupp said in a news release. “With women making 85 percent of consumer purchase decisions and 80 percent of healthcare decisions, there’s an additional advantage for companies with women on the management team in designing products for, selling to and servicing this customer base.”

So far, True Wealth Ventures has invested in Austin-based UnaliWear, a smartwatch for the senior population to guard against falls and other risks, and Houston-based BrainCheck, a startup that exists as a cognitive testing platform to manage mental health.

“When I started True Wealth Ventures, I saw women-led businesses as an extraordinary investment opportunity that had yet to be realized,” Founding General Partner and Ph.D. Sara Brand, said in a news release. “As there are no other early-stage funds targeting this market in the central/southern part of the U.S., Texas was a natural choice for this blind spot with Austin as an active startup hub and with market affinity for the target verticals.”

At South by Southwest next month, True Wealth Ventures will launch the True Wealth Ventures Startup Pitch Session focused on startups addressing problems, gaps and issues in the sustainable consumer and consumer health and wellness verticals.

Watch out Austin there’s a new accelerator in town.

Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., on Tuesday, announced it’s launching a residential Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator program in Austin.

The Austin program is Oracle’s first residential accelerator program in North America. Oracle has eight other global locations in Bangalore, Bristol, Mumbai, Delhi, Paris, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Tel Aviv.

“Austin has a vibrant startup ecosystem and a history as a hotbed for cloud companies,” Reggie Bradford, Oracle’s senior vice president, Startup Ecosystem and Accelerator, said, via email, in response to a series of questions. “It is also surrounded by great universities, which often produce entrepreneurs, engineers and tomorrow’s startup leaders. Oracle is also expanding in Austin more broadly – from our new campus to rapid hiring – and we are working to create a flywheel effect, making it a great place for our first U.S. residential accelerator.”

Oracle just finished building a massive campus in Austin. The current phase includes a 560,000-square-foot building, as well as a parking garage, on 40 acres on the Lady Bird Lake waterfront, according to Oracle. On-campus amenities include fitness facilities, a full-service café, food truck court, expansive business training and conference center, game rooms, terraces and outdoor collaboration areas, as well as the adjacent 295-unit Azul apartment complex, which serves as a housing option for Oracle employees.

“In 2017, we launched eight residential programs ahead of schedule and attracted almost 4,000 global startups for only 40 program slots—a clear indication of the tremendous demand,” Bradford said in a news release.

Oracle will announce details including location and timing for the call for applications in the coming months, Bradford said. It plans to select five to six startups per cohort, with two programs a year that last six months each. The selected startups will receive technical support, mentoring by Oracle and industry experts, Oracle Cloud credits, co-working space, and access to Oracle’s customers, investors, partners and others. Any startup that has been in business at least six months can apply, according to Oracle. Interested startups can signup now here.

“Our current programs have ended with a pitch day, and we plan to continue this tradition in our new Austin location,” Bradford said. “Our pitch days are not “traditional” as we try to provide as much value and exposure for our startups, so often we will incorporate our pitch days at big events. For example, we recently did this for our Tel Aviv and Sao Paulo startups at Oracle CloudWorld in NYC – giving them additional exposure and engagement with our global customers, partners and product teams.”

Oracle does not take an equity stake in the companies in its accelerator, Bradford said. Oracle also works to connect the startups to customers, partners and sources of funding, helping them through their next phase of growth, Bradford said.

“Our new Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem program collaborates with PE and VC firms and will target high-growth entities across EMEA, JAPAC, and the Americas, as well as a select number of investment groups and strategic partners, Bradford said.

In addition to the Austin accelerator, Oracle also announced its first, virtual-style, non-residential global program: Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem.

Oracle’s new programs are focused on cloud-based technology. A key advantage is the participants get to partner with Oracle and its customers and partners.

The virtual program is aimed at startups and venture capital and private equity portfolio companies, according to Oracle. It offers help in product development, sales, marketing, migration assistance, cloud credits and discounts and access to Oracle’s customer and product ecosystems.

Jason Williams, industry veteran and Amazon Web Services alum, will lead the Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem program. Applications for Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem are accepted on a rolling basis here.

Oracle’s cloud-based accelerator is not the first in Central Texas. San Antonio launched the first Techstars Cloud program in 2012. It graduated four classes of startups before shutting down in 2016.

In addition to the new Oracle accelerator, Austin has several existing technology accelerators that include cloud-based companies. Austin’s accelerators include Techstars Austin, Capital Factory, Austin Technology Incubator, Tarmac Texas, MassChallenge Texas and SputnikATX. And then there are specialized accelerators like DivInc, which emphasizes diversity and inclusion, SKU, consumer products goods and the International Accelerator.

Austin’s tech scene is always hopping. No matter what the day or the time, it seems there is always something fun to do.

So if you’re looking for something to do this week, check out these fine events:

Monday – Saturday – Austin CPG Week by TEN Capital Group features more than 42 sessions across 18 venues in Austin this week.

Monday – Co-Founders Meetup at Capital Factory by the Tech Map featuring Krishna Srinivasan with LiveOak Venture Partners. The event kicks off at 6:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15.

Tuesday: Blockchain Basics: Legal Implications and Business Viability at noon at the University of Texas Law School: TNH 2.140 (Wright Classroom) Event is free and open to students, staff, faculty and the public.

Tuesday – Intro to the Austin Startup Scene AMA & Happy Hour with Joshua Baer at Capital Factory starting at 4 p.m. Cost is $10.

Tuesday – Tech Ranch’s Venture Forth Meet the Team Bootcamp at Impact Hub Austin’s North Lamar location. Select a time to meet with the team. It’s free.

Thursday – Open Coffee Austin Downtown – starts at 8:30 a.m. at the Houndstooth Coffee shop. The event is free.

Thursday – Big Ass Social Happy Hour, known as #BASHH and put on by Lani Rosales and The American Genius, kicks off at 6 p.m. at the Hangar Lounge. It’s free.

Friday: Sputnik’s Lunch and Learn: How to Raise Your First Round featuring a talk by Roger Chen from Silverton Partners at noon at Sputnik’s headquarters. The event is free but requires advance registration.

SXSW – March 9 – 18 at the Austin Convention Center and locations all over Austin.

Upcoming events: (sponsored content)

Silicon Hills News’ lunchtime workshop: How to Get Featured in the Media – Wednesday, Feb. 28th from noon to 1:30 p.m. at Galvanize Cost is $7.

CXL Live 2018 event is in Austin March 28-30: CXL Live is a 3-day growth and conversion optimization event. Growth leaders from Shopify, Instagram, Airbnb, Google and other impressive companies share their strategies and tactics. See the full lineup here. Use this coupon code for $200 off: SHN

GroundBreak Construction Conference by Procore Technologies, Nov. 13-15 in Austin. Use the Code “LocalsOnly” to save $100 on registration costs through April 2018.

Something new is brewing in East Austin.

It’s the Notley’s Center for Social Innovation, a campus for nonprofit organizations and for-profit companies with a socially innovative focus. And recently the center partnered with Capital Factory, a tech coworking and accelerator site, to launch the new social entrepreneurship and nonprofit coworking community at Springdale General in East Austin.

The community aims to work with entrepreneurs and organizations tackling society’s biggest challenges. It will be a hub of educational resources, mentors, capital and other resources to drive change in issues ranging from education to environment to healthcare and poverty.

“The world is experiencing an emergence of social enterprise spilling out of our universities, nonprofits, and for-profit businesses,” Dan Graham, Cofounder of Notley, said in a news release. “As Austin becomes the next social innovation capital, this coworking model is poised to provide an important missing piece – a space for people inciting action around social causes to connect with nonprofits, educational systems, and entrepreneurial programs while coming together to drive scalable and sustainable purpose-driven ventures.”

“Notley’s portfolio of successful social impact initiatives makes them an obvious partner for us and our social ventures who will be moving into the coworking space later this year,” Joshua Baer, Founder and Executive Director of Capital Factory, said in a news release. “By leveraging the Capital Factory network, coworking at CSI is much more than just a place to work – it connects social impact entrepreneurs to their first employees, mentors, customers, and investors. Austin is now one of the most exciting and connected places for social innovation in the world.”

Notely’s Center for Social Innovation will have 10,000 square feet of co-working space including private studios, dedicated desks, conference rooms and lounge areas and another 5,048 square feet of meeting space.

The center is expected to open this summer and is currently accepting coworking membership applications. Its current members include Black Fret, Half Helen Foundation, MU/DAI, and The David Weekley Family Foundation.

Graham, founder of BuildASign.com, founded Notley Ventures in 2015 with his wife, Lisa. Notley partners with seed and early-stage social impact companies and nonprofit organizations ready to scale.

Austin-based MineralSoft announced on Wednesday that the company has raised $4 million in funding.

The company plans to use the funds to market its software platform, which helps mineral, royalty, investors and others manage their assets. MineralSoft also signed an exclusive partnership with oil and gas data provider Austin-based DrillingInfo.

Investors included Cottonwood Venture Partners, based in Houston. Earlier investors included Bear Capital and Y Combinator.

“50% or more of the value produced by an oil or gas well might be distributed to non-operating interest owners, yet the vast majority of tools in the market today were designed with the operator in mind,” Gabe Wilcox, CEO of MineralSoft, said in a news release. “We built our technology platform and services specifically for the non-op asset class and we’ve been met with a tremendous response so far – and with interest and investment in the category skyrocketing, MineralSoft is poised to grow accordingly.”

MineralSoft’s customers include private equity, investment funds, family offices, endowments, foundations, E&P companies, and individuals.

The company, launched in 2015, recently moved to larger headquarters in Austin. It is also expanding its sales and marketing efforts.

“Investment in mineral, royalty, and non-op interests has grown substantially over the last few years, but owners faced challenges and inefficiencies before MineralSoft’s product streamlined and optimized the management of those interests,” Jeremy Arendt, Managing Partner at CVP, said in a news release. “MineralSoft has established itself as the clear leader in the modernization of minerals management and we are excited to partner with the MineralSoft team.”

Austin-based Employee Wow, a software company, announced Wednesday that it has raised $1 million in seed funding.

The funds come from Sean Tomlinson, an investor based in Hong Kong. He also joined the company’s board of directors.

Employee Wow plans to use the money to hire sales staff and market its Anonymous Employee Feedback Platform, its flagship product. The platform lets businesses, employees, managers, and customers communicate better.

“I am very excited to become a part of Employee Wow,” Tomlinson said in a news release. “Through a decade of operating hospitality and other retail businesses, I’ve seen firsthand how beneficial this type of employee feedback technology could be. I expect demand for this software to increase massively in the coming years. Employee Wow benefits employee retention and saves time and money onboarding new staff members, all of which are quantifiable benefits to business owners and operators.”

Employee Wow’s Anonymous Employee Feedback Platform is like a modern-day suggestion box that is available on the Apple iPad and iPhone app, as well as via the web and through email. It also has Snapchat integration.

“Research indicates that happy, more engaged employees lead to more profitable businesses, and we’re seeing that younger employees increasingly require real-time feedback on top of check-the-box evaluations,” Jessica Ciabarra, CEO and co-founder of Employee Wow, said in a news release. “Our Anonymous Employee Feedback Platform—including its unique Snapchat integration—is the catalyst for creating new feedback loops that can lead to greater customer loyalty and employee engagement, performance and happiness.”

Chirs Ciabarra, chief technology officer, co-founded the company with Jessica Ciabarra.

Austin-based RigUp announced it has raised $15.8 million in funding.

The company, founded in 2014 as an online marketplace for services and labor for the energy industry, also secured a $30 million credit line from Silicon Valley Bank.

RigUp has raised $63.8 million to date, according to CrunchBase. The company plans to use the money for product development and to hire sales staff.

The company has created an online digital platform for oilfield services and personnel. The platform provides access to 22,000 service providers across more than 100 categories.

“Everything we’re doing is to help our service providers get more work and make more money,” CEO and co-founder Xuan Yong said in a news release. “Our service model continues to grow nicely every month. We’re excited to reach this milestone as a company and have Jeffrey Harris and the team at Quantum Energy Partners join us as investors. We are also pleased to welcome Napoleon Ta from Founders Fund to our board.”

Its investors for the Series B investment round included Quantum Energy Partners, Global Reserve Group, and Founders Fund.

Bryan Menell, a serial technology entrepreneur, announced Tuesday the launch of Verimos, a data bank with information on health and wellness powered by Blockchain technology.

Menell, who unveiled his latest company at a press conference at Capital Factory, said the company is partnering with all kinds of businesses in the wellness industry including health food suppliers and fitness studios.

“People are wearing devices, monitoring health measurements, and downloading apps on their phones to track workouts, jogging, calories, water consumption, and almost every aspect of their wellness,” Menell said in a news statement. “Verimos is creating a protocol that makes it easy to store this data in a new type of database called a blockchain.”

“People distrust big technology companies that continue to accumulate personal data for the purpose of selling us more products. Verimos will allow individuals to store their information in such a way that details are private to them, but available as aggregate data to researchers tracking trends in public health and wellness.”

Blockchain technology is the same technology that is used in Bitcoin. It distributes the data to hundreds of computers worldwide and no single entity has control over it.

Customers can then access their health data and use it to get discounts with health insurance companies.

Other uses include pharmaceutical companies looking for clinical trial candidates with certain health traits. Healthcare professionals can also design precision therapies and medicines targeted at the individual. It can also be used by companies for workforce risk assessment.

The Verimos team includes Menell, CEO, Jason Stoddard and Michael May.

In Amazon’s Super Bowl ad, there are major hints that Austin is definitely on Amazon’s radar.

Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa, a hardware device that runs on artificial intelligence, is the ad’s star along with Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos.

The ad opens up with a woman in her bathroom brushing her teeth, listening to Alexa.

Alexa says: “In Austin, it’s 60 degrees with a cha…cough, cough.”

Then the commercial breaks to a newscaster reporting that Amazon’s Alexa lost her voice this morning. Then the scene cuts to Bezos, founder, and CEO of Amazon, talking to his staff who assure him that they’ve got substitutes ready to fill in. Then the commercial shows off a string of celebrities providing commentary and not really being helpful at all to customer inquiries.

The commercial is fantastic. But it’s the opening that has Austin buzzing the morning after the Philadelphia Eagles 41 to 33 victory over the New England Patriots. Austin is in the running along with 19 other cities for Amazon’s second headquarters project that could bring billions in investment and as many as 50,000 high paying jobs. On the Austin Startups Facebook page, someone posted the ad and others speculated whether Amazon was sending Austin a message.

Texas Monthly wrote a story speculating that the entire ad signaled Austin as Amazon’s favorite from the ad’s references to country music and peacocks.

“This ad, in our estimation, bodes poorly for the mayors of nineteen other cities in the running for Amazon’s HQ2,” according to Texas Monthly. “Austinites, meanwhile, should come to grips with the changes to their city and its housing availability, its traffic, and its property taxes. From the clues in this ad, it’s already a done deal.”

And according to USA Today, the Amazon Alexa Loses Her Voice ad won as the best ad of the Super Bowl on its Ad Meter.

Now whether Austin wins Amazon’s HQ2 project, is yet to be confirmed. Amazon has said it will make an announcement some time this year.

In 2013, Dell went private in a $24 billion buyout deal backed by Silver Lake and Michael Dell.

Today, Dell Technologies filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosing that the company’s board is considering taking the company public again with an initial public offering or by merging with VMWare. Normally, the company doesn’t have to disclose the information since it’s private, but it owns 82 percent of VMware, which is public, and that required Dell to make a public filing with regulators.

“Nothing has been decided and alternatives are just being considered at this stage,” Dell wrote in an internal memo to Dell Technologies employees, which was included with the public filing. “While this process continues, it is business as usual for team members, customers and partners with no changes to current structures, practices and processes. There will be continued press coverage and speculation, and it’s important to stay focused on delivering for customers and closing the quarter strongly.”

“For my part, I remain completely committed to our mission and extremely excited about the opportunities ahead,” Dell wrote.

The complete filing, which is short, can be found here.

In a statement, VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger said, “We are not in a position to speculate on the outcome of Dell’s evaluation of potential business opportunities. Dell has been a tremendous partner since it became our majority owner and as we’ve accelerated our growth. We look forward to Dell’s continued support as we work to execute our growth plans in the years ahead. The VMware management team remains laser-focused on serving our customers and partners with the best portfolio of software products and services across cloud, mobile, networking and security.”