Category: San Antonio (Page 16 of 62)

Austin claimed the top spot in the Kauffman Index for Startup Activity nationwide and San Antonio took the 10th spot.

That makes the Central Texas region a powerhouse of entrepreneurial activity.

Kauffman measures the rate of new entrepreneurs, opportunity share of new entrepreneurs and startup density. Kauffman measures all entrepreneurial activity from restaurants to law firms and not just technology startups.

Miami ranked second on the list, followed by San Jose, Los Angeles, Denver and San Francisco.

Overall, Texas ranked 17th among the states, down from the 13th spot last year, according to the Kauffman report. It slipped slightly in the rate of new entrepreneurs and startup density.

This Fast Company story has the nationwide breakdown on trends in entrepreneurship emerging from the Kauffman report.

Rapamycin Holdings, a drug developer, Tuesday announced it has raised $2.5 million in a Series A round of funding from a group of San Antonio angel investors.

The San Antonio-based company, founded in 2012, plans to use the money to manufacture eRapaTM,a drug aimed at prolonging the life of pets. It also plans to spend money on regulatory filings.

“The Company is actively pursuing regulatory approval for the eRapaTM compound to address significant diseases in the companion animal market for which there are no treatments,” Rapamycin Holdings CEO Randy Goldsmith said in a news release. “We aspire to offer a solution that will improve the lives of pets and their owners, and offer hope for long-term survival of diseases where currently there is little hope of a positive outcome due to the limited treatment options available.”

The company has raised $5 million to date and plans a Series B financing later this year or early next year.

The Global Innovators Pitch Challenge is looking for Central Texas startups with a foreign-born founder to present their ventures at its event on June 12th at Cafe Commerce in downtown San Antonio.

The deadline to apply for the event is midnight on Friday, May 29th.

“The challenge is hosted by FreeFlow Research and Fwd.US. and includes $2,000 in cash prizes plus $500 in pro-bono legal services from MWR Legal and a 3 minute Univision television segment,” according to Peter French, the event’s organizer. A panel of judges will select the winner.

June is Immigrant Heritage Month and this event is designed to highlight San Antonio’s diverse technology community which has experienced a lot of growth in recent years. It’s also designed to highlight the role immigrants play, in San Antonio and the U.S. in founding new ventures, hiring employees and growing the overall economy.

The event will also feature a talk from Tahmina Watson, the author of The Startup Visa: Key to Job Growth and Economic Prosperity in America.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Tom Cuthbert founded Click Forensics in San Antonio a decade ago but he moved the startup to Austin because he couldn’t find funding and technology talent locally.

That company evolved into Adometry, an ad tracking and fraud detection firm, which Google acquired last May.

Now Cuthbert wants to grow San Antonio’s startup community as a member of a new grass roots organization, SATechBloc, focused on bolstering and promoting San Antonio’s technology ecosystem. Its sponsors include Geekdom, Codeup, Giles-Parscale, Rackspace and SecureLogix.

“I live in San Antonio and it is my home,” Cuthbert said. “TechBloc is focused on building a better San Antonio to both attract and retain talent. I’m proud to be a founding member and blown away by the support and excitement this event has generated.”

On Tuesday night, more than 700 people, including both Mayoral candidates, County Judge Nelson Wolff and other local politicians, turned out to Southerleigh Fine Food & Brewery at The Pearl for the kick off event for SATechBloc. At one point, the event had reached capacity and the organizers had to wait until people left to allow more people in. Attendees received two bottle caps and a glass for two free drinks. Organizers wore black and red t-shirts emblazoned with a man’s clenched fist, as the symbol for an uprising and a revolution in the San Antonio tech community.

SATechBloc wants to encourage progressive high technology policies on a city level, recruit and train talented and highly-skilled tech workers, install high-speed fiber Internet and attract venture capital and economic development funds to bring more technology entrepreneurs to the area.

Brad Parscale, co-founder of Giles-Parscale and one of the founding members of SATechBloc, sees a big need for the technology community to have a unified voice on issues of importance.

“The city has every piece to make a huge technology industry happen locally,” Parscale said.

Parscale is the kind of technology entrepreneur San Antonio wants to attract and retain.

Parscale is originally from Topeka, Kansas. His dad previously served as CEO of NewTek and helped move the company here. Parscale graduated from Trinity University and then moved to California to work in the technology industry. He returned to San Antonio in 2004 and started a web design company with $500. In 2011, he partnered with Jill Giles to form Giles-Parscale. They own an 18,000 square foot building on Broadway and they have 46 employees and 800 clients including Trump Enterprises.

San Antonio lacks some of the talent in other high tech hubs but not because they don’t want to be here, Parscale said. But to attract them, the city needs to support the issues and amenities that are important to a tech-savvy workforce, Parscale said. That includes bringing Uber and other ride sharing services back to the city, he said.

Both San Antonio Mayoral run-off candidates, Mayor Ivy Taylor and Leticia Van de Putte, attended the SATechBloc event.

Mayor Taylor said she wants ridesharing to come back to San Antonio.

“I never wanted it to leave,” Mayor Taylor said. “I certainly welcome the technology and innovation. At the end of the day, we wanted to make sure our citizens are safe. Uber left because we wanted to do background checks on its drivers.”

Taylor said she’s hopeful the city can bring Uber back and plans to restart negotiations with the company now that a statewide bill to enact ride sharing appears to have died in the state legislature.

Mayor Taylor said she attended the SATechBloc event to support the city’s burgeoning tech industry.

“I want to help develop jobs here and support entrepreneurship. My focus has been on workforce development,” Mayor Taylor said. “We’ve got people here who can do these jobs but they need skills development to do the jobs.”

As part of that initiative, President Obama in March selected the city of San Antonio to participate as one of the cities in its TechHire program in which $100 million of federal dollars are earmarked to help Americans get the skills they need through universities, community colleges and coding bootcamps like Rackspace University and Codeup.

“We need to grow the technology industry here and highlight the advantages we have,” Mayor Taylor said. “We need to do a better job of marketing San Antonio to young people who are here and to attract new people.”

The Veteran’s Administration is also teaming up with Codeup to train veterans in the VA Accelerated Learning program, said Jack Coley, who runs a consulting and training firm with 50 employees in San Antonio. The veterans will attend bootcamps at Codeup and get web development and other technology skills in demand, Coley said.

Programs like Codeup are helping fill the need in San Antonio’s technology community for workers, Coley said. But the city needs to attract more skilled workers.

“It’s really hard to find good people,” Coley said. “We need more good people to drive growth in this community.”

Issues like workforce development, Uber and Google Fiber and even Bike Share, a program people might not think of as a tech issue, affect a company’s ability to get top tech talent, said Lorenzo Gomez, director of the 80/20 Foundation and Geekdom. He’s a founding member of SATechBloc and wants the community to come together regularly to keep the momentum going.

“We’ve got a lot of other events planned,” Gomez said. “The goal is to do as many events as we can on a regular basis.”

San Antonio’s technology industry needs more visibility, said Lew Moorman, former president of Rackspace and now a founding member of SATechBloc.

“There are 1,000 people here today doing all kinds of cool things,” Moorman said. “We want to have one resource where you can have all the resources of San Antonio’s technology community.”

The next SATechBloc event is scheduled for August 11 with Robert Hammond, a San Antonio native and a co-founder of The High Line, an urban park project in New York

“This thing got started informally and now we’re going to figure out what to do,” Moorman said. “The city has a lot of potential. We need to realize it.”

Members of the San Antonio technology community want to have a voice in city policies affecting the technology industry.

They also want to promote and build the local technology industry.

So several founding members created “SATechBloc,” a grassroots movement to bolster the industry here and shine a spotlight on everything going on.

“It came out of the frustration the community had around Uber and that’s what got people together,” said Lew Moorman, former president of Rackspace who is one of the organizers.

Last month, Uber ceased operations in San Antonio when the ridesharing company could not come to an agreement with city officials over regulation of its business. Uber got mismanaged from the beginning from the City of San Antonio, Moorman said.

Uber is one of the services important to a modern city, Moorman said. As members of the tech community started talking they decided to have a unified voice to advocate for issues important to the technology industry, he said.

“We don’t necessarily promise to change the world,” Moorman said. “We just want to do a few things and get people talking to each other.”

The founding members include Lorenzo Gomez, executive director of the 80/20 Foundation, Pat Matthews with 81 Ventures, Tom Cuthbert, founder of Adometry, Rodney Rice, founder and CEO of Blue Yonder Labs, Clint Watson, founder of Boldbrush, Lanham Napier with BuildGroup, Peter French, president of Café Commerce and dozens more.

The corporate sponsors include Rackspace, Codeup, Giles-Parscale, SecureLogix and Geekdom.

The kick off event is Tuesday, May 19th at 5 p.m. at Southerleigh Brewery at 136 E. Grayson.

The main focus right now is to bring ridesharing to San Antonio and to create a comprehensive tech directory and to bring Google Fiber to San Antonio, Moorman said.

“It can be whatever the city needs,” Moorman said.

Rackspace announced it is now providing support and managed services for Microsoft Office 365, a suite of business software programs.

The San Antonio-based company will offer migration assistance and support to customers for Office 365 licenses. Rackspace will resell and support six Office 365 plans with management services for small and medium sized businesses and mid-market customers. It will also offer support and services to mid-market and enterprise customers with Office 365 licenses.

For eight years, Rackspace has supported Microsoft Exchange and this announcement extends its relationship with Microsoft.

“As more businesses adopt cloud collaboration tools, they will need a trusted provider to help manage them, so they can focus on their core business,” John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, said in a blog post. “The launch of Rackspace support for Office 365 furthers Rackspace’s commitment to deliver the workplace collaboration and productivity tools that customers need with the added value of Fanatical Support, so customers can avoid the pain of managing these tools themselves. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and four-time Hosting Partner of the Year, Rackspace is thrilled to further expand our relationship with Microsoft and continue to support applications and technology outside our own datacenters.”

StemBioSys, which focuses on research with adult stem cells, has closed on $8 million in Series A funding.

San Antonio-based Targeted Technology Fund led the financing with $2.25 million which included more than 50 angel investors.

San Antonio-based StemBioSys, founded in 2010, plans to use the money for manufacturing facilities and to prepare for the launch of its stem cell culture system later this year. The system is HPMETM, High Performance Microenvironment, for sale in the stem cell research market.

“StemBioSys is actively pursuing therapeutic applications for its products and is currently engaged in more than 14 strategic partner collaborations focused on the feasibility of therapeutic applications using the company’s patented core technologies,” StemBioSys CEO Bob Hutchens said in a news release. “In addition, we have initiated multiple collaborative, sponsored research agreements with leading academic institutions to further validate the utility of the HPMETM technology. These include The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, University of Texas at San Antonio, and Langer/Anderson Laboratories at MIT.”

StemBioSys plans to raise a Series B round of financing later this year or early next year to commercial launch its HPMETM research product, according to Hutchens.

The 7th Annual Emerging Medical Technology Symposium kicks off Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

The conference features a luncheon keynote address by Rick Hawkins, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lumos Pharma, based in Austin. He will talk about the sea change taking place in the pharmaceutical industry.

Afternoon sessions include one on the three pillars of a successful startup with successful entrepreneurs. And another on trends in the medical technology industry with five minute talks on a variety of topics including 3D Printing, Venture for America, Wearable Devices and Social Media Regulation.

The symposium also features the third annual fast pitch competition. Eight companies will present before a panel of judges and the winner will receive a $1,000 check from the Targeted Technology Fund and other perks. Last year, ENTvantage Diagnostics of Austin won the competition.

The companies include Perseus Holdings USA< MobileStemCare, Inner Ally, Microdermis, Lumedica, Bluegrass Vascular Technologies, Pryor Medical and Aerin Medical. The Emerging Medical Technology Symposium takes place a day before InnoTech’s annual technology conference in San Antonio. The event cost $54 and includes lunch. Registration is required.

InnoTech is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News