Category: Austin (Page 93 of 317)

Something new is coming to Austin on Monday.

Office Depot is opening BizBox, a brick and mortar component of an online service it launched last November. BizBox will be located at the 14 Office Depot locations around Austin. BizBox offers everything from logo and website design to finance and accounting services. The location will also provide personal support and mentorship to local businesses, according to a news release.

Austin is the first market in the country to get BizBox in a store. It signals Office Depot’s shift into business services. The BizBox service is tailored to startups and small businesses. BizBox offers a subscription-based service starting at $99 a month.

Office Depot decided to launch the BizBox platform following a survey it did that showed nearly one-third of 1,500 small business owners didn’t have a website and more than half didn’t do any kind of social media marketing.

“BizBox is a platform designed to help reduce some of the stress and barriers that prevent entrepreneurs from turning their ideas into reality, and is the first service of its kind backed by the business expertise of a multibillion-dollar enterprise,” Office Depot Chief Digital Officer Kevin Moffitt said in a news release.

On the year of its 10th anniversary, SpareFoot, a storage marketplace, moved this month to new headquarters at University Park.

Sparefoot has raised $49.4 million since its founding in 2008, according to its Crunchbase profile. SpareFoot’s last round of funding came in 2015 led by Revolution Growth, founded by Steve Case, founder of America Online.

SpareFoot has 100 employees in its Austin headquarters, after moving it’s call center offshore in 2015.

“We’ve come a long way from our first offices inside Capital Factory, to the Perry Brooks Tower across the street at 720 Brazos, and now to our current space,” co-founder and CEO Chuck Gordon, said in a news release.

SpareFoot’s new location provides lots of amenities including a “gym and yoga room; free covered parking and indoor bike storage, and is dog-friendly — an absolute must for SpareFoot employees’ “SparePups,” according to a news release. It also has a kitchen with an in-house chef and culinary team and a gaming area.

SpareFoot has participated in the Startup Games since it began and the company has won gold four times, more than any other company. This year, SpareFoot won a silver medal and raised $10,000 for Breakthrough Central Texas. To date, the company has raised more than $100,000 for nonprofit organizations.

SpareFoot was named to the Top Company Cultures list in 2017 by Entrepreneur Magazine.

Correction: An earlier version of this story had the incorrect headcount for Sparefoot at the time of its last funding round. The company had 200 employees. We regret the error.

Catering to small business can mean big business.

Just ask the folks over at Main Street Hub, which sold Tuesday to GoDaddy for $125 million in cash plus up to $50 million more in future earnouts, according to a news release.

The transaction is expected to close by June pending regulatory approval and other requirements.

Matt Stuart and Andrew Allison, Stanford graduate students, moved Main Street Hub to Austin in 2011 after visiting the city during South by Southwest. The company now has more than 500 employees in Austin and New York.

Main Street Hub helps small businesses market themselves and interact with customers on popular social networks. The company has more than 10,000 small business customers.

Main Street Hub, which has raised $93 million of equity and debt financing according to Crunchbase, made the list of Silicon Hills News’ 20 hot Austin-based startups to watch in 2017. And its founder, Stuart, and Allison, are featured in the Silicon Hills News 2018 Austin Startup Calendar.

The acquisition of Main Street Hub, lets GoDaddy provide more professional services to small business owners and helps them to build their online presence, according to a news release.

“GoDaddy’s 17 million small business customers come to us because they know their online presence can help them reach their customers and grow their businesses, but even with the right tools, customers struggle to find the time or know-how to effectively manage their social media presence,” Lauren Antonoff, Senior Vice President at GoDaddy, said in a news release. “Joining forces with Main Street Hub better enables us to help our customers reach their goals, while saving them time and offering peace of mind.”

“Main Street Hub and GoDaddy both share the same unrelenting passion for helping small businesses succeed,” Stuart, co-CEO and co-founder, Main Street Hub, said in a news release. “We complement each other strategically, culturally and across our products and services. We now have the scale and resources to help millions more business owners realize the value of having an optimized social media presence – our team can’t wait to get started.”

Stuart and Allison will join GoDaddy in leadership positions and GoDaddy will mains Main Street Hub’s offices in Austin.

After working in stealth mode for two years in China and Austin, Wanchain launched its digital currency platform this week at a Bitcoin conference in Miami.

“Tokenization of assets is at its inflection point. With cryptocurrencies now worth over $700 billion, the digital economy is growing wildly, but there is a problem,” Jack Lu, Founder, Wanchain, said in a news release. “Digital assets are isolated in their respective blockchains. Wanchain is the first and only platform to unlock the real potential of global digital assets by placing them on a single blockchain. Mainnet is the fundamental first step towards the digital asset hub of tomorrow.”

Wanchain seeks to become the banking platform for all digital currency and plans to enable decentralized exchanges, lending platforms and asset management tools in one place.

The company plans to rollout more products to support additional public and private blockhains throughout this year and next.

Founder and CEO Lu’s previous venture was Austin-based Factom, a top 30 global cryptocurrency. “Registered in Singapore as a non-profit organization, the Wanchain Foundation was initially funded by Wanglu Tech, a for-profit enterprise with investors including River Capital and Fenbushi Capital,” according to a news release.

The Texas 5G Alliance launched this week to advocate for 5G telecommunications technology and infrastructure in Austin and statewide that is needed to bring smart city applications to life.

The alliance seeks to educate people about the technology for rapid deployment statewide and to make Texas a leader in telecommunications infrastructure.

Why is it needed? By 2020, there will be 20.4 billion connected devices worldwide. In North America, data traffic per smartphone will grow nearly 5 times from 5.1 gigabytes per month in 2016 to 25 gigabytes per month in 2022.

“We are on the cusp of groundbreaking technology that will change our everyday lives for the better,” Scott Dunaway, spokesperson for the Texas 5G Alliance, said in a news release. “Texas is setting the pace for innovative and life-changing technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, the internet of things, robotic deliveries, traffic flow solutions, and dedicated public safety and first responder networks, all of which will be dependent on small cell infrastructure that provides broad-scale 5G connectivity. We will aim to ensure Texas is a national and global leader in this pursuit.”

The alliance is made up of innovative companies, infrastructure providers, trade associations and more and includes Crown Castle, Dell, T-Mobile, Google Fiber, Ericsson, Bypass Mobile, Carnegie Technologies, SmartAustin, VERTICOM, Tech Titans and the Austin Chamber of Commerce.

5G Technology is the fifth generation of high-speed wireless technology. It provides vast improvements to 4G technology and is 40 times faster and provides at least four times more coverage worldwide. That kind of telecommunications network powers autonomous vehicles, smart homes, robotics and all kinds of Internet of Things applications.

“Our goal at Dell is to transform the Internet of Things from 100 billion connected devices to a network of 100 billion more intelligently connected devices, and 5G is integral to achieving this goal,” John Howard, Director of Public Policy, Dell, said in a news release. As Michael Dell recently said, “IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations operate and how the world works. … The implications for our global society will be nothing short of profound.”

Sputnik ATX announced this week it has chosen four startups to join its inaugural class for its accelerator program.

Those startups include YouPei.me, a cash-back platform for credit and debit cardholders to get Bitcoin rewards with more than 5,000 partner brands, Redenim, a data analytics platform for women to find the perfect pair of jeans, Backtracks, a podcast analytics and hosting platform and Meowtel, a platform to connect cat owners with pet sitters.

The Austin-based Sputnik ATX received 207 applications for its program from the U.S. and nine other countries.

“We not only selected startups with innovative concepts, we selected entrepreneurs with outstanding passion and grit,” Oksana Malysheva said in a news release. “The founders we chose exhibit the skills and vision necessary to defy the odds. We are excited to partner with these creators, innovators, trailblazers, and entrepreneurs to get their ideas off the ground and to the public where they can change the world. We are confident that the Sputnik ATX program will help these entrepreneurs reach their full potential and will continue to drive innovation in Texas.”

Each startup gets $100,000 in seed stage investment in exchange for an equity stake in the company by Sputnik ATX. The startups will participate in a three-month program that kicked off this week. The program includes classes, mentoring and funding information. Mentoring is focused on helping the entrepreneurs increase product and market fit and increase sales.

The program culminates with a Demo Day in which the startups pitch to a panel of investors for additional funding.

“At Sputnik, we believe early-stage investing is a team sport,” Joe Merrill, co-founder of Sputnik ATX, said in a news release. “In other words, entrepreneurs only succeed when they have a collaborative network to support one another. That’s why at the end of their time with us, we want our cohort members to graduate with a solid network of mentors, peers, and other investors.”

Sputnik ATX plans to open its next application round for its summer cohort in May.

“Entrepreneurs living within a 300-mile radius of Austin (including San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston), or those who agree to move their businesses within that radius if accepted into the program, are eligible to apply,” according to a news release. “Applicants are required to have a minimum viable product and at least one paying customer.”

Texas is the only state to have two cities as finalists for Amazon’s second headquarters in North America.

Austin and Dallas made the list of the top 20 cities in North America under consideration for the $5 billion project, which is expected to create as many as 50,000 jobs.

Amazon reported it reviewed 238 proposals from across the U.S., Canada and Mexico to host HQ2, its second headquarters.

The other cities being considered for the project include: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, Denver, Indianapolis, Indiana, Los Angeles, Miami, Montgomery County, MD, Nashville, Newark, New Jersey, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, North Carolina, Toronto, and Washington, D.C.

“Thank you to all 238 communities that submitted proposals. Getting from 238 to 20 was very tough – all the proposals showed tremendous enthusiasm and creativity,” Holly Sullivan, Amazon Public Policy, said in a news release. “Through this process we learned about many new communities across North America that we will consider as locations for future infrastructure investment and job creation.”

The next phase involves Amazon working with each of the locations to get more information and to “evaluate the feasibility of a future partnership that can accommodate the company’s hiring plans as well as benefit its employees and the local community. Amazon expects to make a decision in 2018.”

Reacting to the news, Justin Bayne, founder of Austin’s SkylesBayne, commercial real estate company and Chief Development Officer of Firmspace, said in a news statement: “Austin is poised to be the home for Amazon’s HQ2.”

“The city’s population has surpassed 2 million, which is the magic market number in terms of attracting next level national retailers, pro sports teams and sprawling corporate campuses like Amazon and Apple. Austin’s vibrant downtown scene and secondary business district at The Domain are intelligently built to disperse the city’s population density and accommodate the influx of growth that Amazon or Apple would bring,” Bayne said.

The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, through its Opportunity Austin economic development program, submitted a bid on behalf of the Austin Texas region for the proposed Amazon HQ2.

“We are pleased that the Austin region has advanced to the second round,” Mike Berman, senior vice president of communications for the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, said in a news release. “We look forward to presenting the best of what our region has to offer and how we can partner with Amazon. At this point we have no further information.”

In the first WeWork Creator Awards Finals, Samantha Snabes, founder of re:3D, took home the top prize of $1 million in the for-profit company category.

The Austin-based company makes Gigabot, a large 3D printer. It is also developing a new 3D printer that uses recycled materials.

In addition, WeWork announced a $1 million prize to J. Kevin White of Global Vision 20/20, a nonprofit organization that provides prescription eyewear to people in underdeveloped countries.

Adam Neumann, co-founder, and CEO of WeWork announced the WeWork Creator Award winners with Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week and Tribe of Mentors.

“We’re just trying to take it all in, and really appreciate what this opportunity is going to mean for us,” Snabes, founder of re:3D, said in a news statement. “We couldn’t be more honored to have WeWork as a partner. There have been very few people since the beginning that have really bet on this concept we had in 2012: to make a toilet-sized 3D printer powered by trash. To know now that this is going to become a commercial reality in 12 to 18 months, it’s just mind-blowing.”

Last June, Snabes won $180,000 at the South Regional Final competition at Austin’s ACL Live at Moody Theater. The WeWork Creator Awards, launched in the Spring of 2017, gave funding to more than 150 companies and nonprofit organizations at regional events held in seven cities worldwide. Snabes was one of eight regional winners selected to compete in the final event in New York City. All finalists took home a total of $4.2 million in funding.

“These organizations were selected for their impact on communities, how they plan to scale their business and their sustainability in-market, according to WeWork.

$500,000 Winners

Sebastian Jünemann of CADUS, based in Berlin, which develops and runs mobile hospitals.

Naveed R. Parvez of Andiamo, based in London, that uses 3D scanning and printing to create medical braces for patients.

Or Retzkin of EyeControl, based in Tel Aviv, creator of a wearable, screen-free and easy to use communication device for individuals with full cognitive function who are unable to speak or move their limbs.

$360,000 Winners

Elizabeth Lindsey of Byte Back, based in Washington, D.C., which provides free training for unemployed adults to enter the growing tech industry; most students are people of color, women, and unemployed/underemployed.

$180,000 Winners

Manal Kahi of Eat Offbeat, based in New York, which is a fresh take on catering, employing only refugees for their talented staff of chefs who specialize in the cuisine of their respective countries.

Becca Keaty of Bunker Labs, based in Chicago, which is a national nonprofit that provides educational programming, mentors, events, and thriving local networks to help veterans start and grow businesses.

Silicon Hills News has closely followed re:3D since its launch. Reporter Susan Lahey did this profile of Snabes and the company in 2015. Last March, at SXSW, Reporter Hojun Choi wrote this story on Snabes’ panel discussion. And Snabes was featured in Silicon Hills News’ 2017 Austin Tech Calendar.

To date, re:3D has raised very little money. It raised seed-stage funding from Start-up Chile in 2013 and most of its other funding has come from two successful Kickstarter campaigns, raising another $300,000. It has also won other prizes in pitch competitions.

One of the most successful startups to spin out of Capital Factory, WP Engine announced Thursday that it has received $250 million in funding from Silver Lake, a venture capital firm.

WP Engine, founded by Jason Cohen in 2010, now has more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 75,000 customers worldwide, according to a news release.

The company plans to use the funding for development of its technology and to expand internationally. As part of the deal, Greg Mondre, managing partner of Silver Lake, and Lee Wittlinger and Mark Gillett, managing directors of Silver Lake, will join WP Engine’s board.

Previously, WP Engine raised $40.72 million with investors Northbridge Venture Partners & Equity Growth and Silverton Partners.

“We are partnering with Silver Lake because of their incredible track record as technology investors, their understanding of digital platform businesses like ours and because of the alignment in core values we share,” Heather J. Brunner, Chairwoman, and CEO of WP Engine said in a statement. “This partnership will help us further invest in our Digital Experience Platform and bring the power of our platform to WordPress users all around the globe.”

WP Engine provides website hosting for WordPress customers. WordPress websites make up about 29 percent of all websites online, up from 13 percent in 2010.

“We believe WP Engine is poised to take a leading global position in the fast-growing WordPress ecosystem and we look forward to working alongside the company’s talented management team as it executes on its next phase of development,” Wittlinger of Silver Lake, said in a news release.

WP Engine opened an office in Brisbane last October. The company also has offices in London and Limerick, Ireland. In the U.S., WP Engine has offices in San Antonio and San Francisco.

“Clearly 2017 was an outstanding year for WP Engine, our customers and our employees,” Brunner said. “Our mission is to help our customers win online. We wouldn’t have this phenomenal success without our incredible employees delivering outstanding technology and service to our customers every day. We are looking forward to more customer success led growth around the world in 2018.”

Silver Lake, a global investment firm with about $39 billion in combined assets under management and committed capital, also has investments in Dell Technologies and SolarWinds in Austin.

Silicon Hills News’ 2018 Austin Tech Calendar Party took place last Thursday at The Zebra, an insurance comparison marketplace startup, in downtown Austin.

It was a wonderful evening and the event was a smashing success. This is the fourth time Silicon Hills News’ has created a tech calendar shining a spotlight on Austin’s most innovative startups and technology advocates. The event honored the 2018 calendar subjects:

Jag Bath, CEO of Favor

Insitome Cofounders Neeraj Rao and Spencer Wells

Localeur Founder Joah Spearman

Jan Ryan, UT Austin College of Fine Arts’ director of creative entrepreneurship and innovation

OJO Labs Cofounders John Berkowitz and David Rubin

Main Street Hub Cofounders Andrew Allison and Matt Stuart

Zoe Schlag, managing director of the Techstars Impact Accelerator

Dr. Luz Cristal Glangchai, director of the Blackstone Launchpad at UT Austin

Alex Schwartz, founder of Owlchemy Labs

OpCity Cofounders Michael Lam and Ben Rubenstein

Claire England, executive director of the Central Texas Angel Network

Andrea and Walter Kalmans, principals of Lontra Ventures.

John Davidson took all the photos for the 2018 Austin Tech Calendar.

Calendar sponsors include InnoTech Austin, Austin Chamber of Commerce, TARC Technology Solutions, The Zebra, and Procore Technologies.

TriNet sponsored the food: appetizers from Mama Fu’s Asian House.

Entertainment sponsors included PythonTek, Sputnik ATX, and Lontra Ventures.

Drink Sponsors included ServiceDirect, Underminer Studios, and Manzer Communications.

And a big thank you to our host and venue sponsor: The Zebra.

Other sponsors included Drink Slingers, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Twisted X Brewery, Rhythm Superfoods, Lantana Hummus, Shade Tree Lemonade, Hey Day Coffee, and Tiff’s Treats.

Everyone in attendance received a desktop or wall calendar. To order additional calendars please visit our Eventbrite form for our lunch and learn event on January 24th. You don’t have to attend the event to buy a calendar. Silicon Hills News will deliver it to you. But if you can attend the event, it will be great to see you and everyone attending gets a desktop calendar.

Also, Silicon Hills News will be making a donation to Austin Pets Alive for more than $200, representing 20 percent of ticket sales of the calendar.