In Austin, the hunt for venture capital is not easy.

But one group plans to make it a little easier. The TEN Capital Group is holding the Texas Venture Summit 2016 on Oct. 6th at the Brazos Hall in downtown Austin.

The event is invitation only and brings together national and statewide investors and qualified Texas technology companies for one-on-one sessions. To request an invitation, visit the organization’s website.

This is the second annual Texas Venture Summit. Last year, 27 companies connected with 42 investors. Since then, seven of those startups have received funding worth $84 million.

This year, the event will bring together over 40 expansion stage and over 60 growth stage technology companies with over 100 investors from across the US.

From the first Texas Venture Summit, in 2015, Delta-v Capital met Austin-based NSS Labs and invested $16 million in its Series B, along with initial investor Live Oak Venture Partners.

TEN Capital Group, formerly known as Texas Growth Capital Forum, a financial services company, produces the summit.

“Our mission is to measurably increase venture capital and investor presence throughout the state,” Hall T. Martin, director, TEN Capital Group, said in a news release. “Startups founded in Texas need broader access to capital at every stage of growth to maximize their potential to achieve global scale.”

TEN Capital Group also put on its first “HealthCare Texas” conference earlier this year with more than 20 speakers, 30 investors, and 40 company innovators in healthcare information technology, digital health, life science, and therapeutics.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Justin Stewart, co-founder of New York-based Industrious, visited Austin on Tuesday for the launch party of his company’s latest coworking space.

During a brief interview, Stewart recounted how he and his childhood friend, Jamie Hodari, founded Industrious. Stewart was running the U.S. division for a Chinese-based company. He was the only one in the U.S. and his boss told him to get some office space in Chicago to host clients.

“I wanted to be around that energy that I was so used to,” Stewart said.

At first he tried an open floor coworking space, but even though it had a ton of energy it was the wrong kind of energy, Stewart said.

“It was kind of young,” he said. “There was a keg in the corner and people were on razor scooters. It was good for traditional out of the box startups who were just thinking up an idea. But it wasn’t right for someone like myself who wanted to bring clients in and meet later stage companies.”

Stewart left and went to an executive suites office, which had an even worse vibe, he said.

“If I wanted to introduce myself to someone in the hallway, no one cared,” Stewart said. “I said this isn’t any good. There has got to be a hybrid between the high energy and the professional. There has got to be an in between. So I decided to start one of my own. I brought my business partner (Hodari, co-founder) on and I said let’s do one of these.”

In 2013, they picked Chicago for their first location, close to their Midwestern roots. Both founders grew up as next door neighbors in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

“Before we had any dry wall up, we had room for 82 spots and we had well over 600 applications,” Stewart said. They were full from day one and they’ve been full ever since, he said.

Then they launched a second location in Atlanta and both of them quit their full time jobs to work solely on Industrious.

Today, Industrious has 12 locations around the country including its only site in Texas on the entire 11th floor of a brand new high rise office building at 201 W.Fifth St., in the heart of Austin’s downtown area. The 19,000 square foot space boasts lots of natural light with floor to ceiling windows in the offices and gorgeous views of Austin. The space has 83 private offices and lots of common spaces. Desks start at $500 a month with private offices starting at $925. The space has superfast Internet. It also plans to have a fitness room with showers, a new mother’s room, concierge service, huddle rooms and members-only events. It also features indoor parking on a first come, first serve basis and a monthly discounted rate with Luxe Valet service.

The core customer for Industrious is later stage, more mature companies, Stewart said.

“Not that there is anything wrong with the startup world,” he said. “I just think people can appreciate being around other like-minded people later in their career. People aren’t trying to sell something or looking for funding. It’s a place where people are on the same page.”

Industrious also works with later stage companies like Pinterest, Spotify and Pandora. They work with established companies looking for flexible workspace, Stewart said.

“You won’t see the name Industrious anywhere in this space,” Stewart said. “We want people to feel like they are coming into their own space – not like they are coming into an Industrious. We want to represent them well.”

The companies are here to showcase themselves, not to showcase us, Stewart said.

The Austin Industrious location is 64 percent full right now. Its members include sole proprietors like a graphic designer or up to 20 person teams like Zynga, the gaming company.

“We put a lot of our energy and efforts into hospitality,” Stewart said.

Industrious members also get access to all the other offices nationwide, Stewart said.

Austin was actually slated to be Industrious’ second location after its Chicago launch, Stewart said. But he couldn’t find the right office space, he said. He began looking in 2013 and he made six trips to Austin before finding the space.

“We wanted a building that would allow a lot of light in and that wouldn’t be super-corporate,” he said.

Industrious faces a lot of competition in the coworking space now in Austin. The coworking options for individuals, startups and companies has just exploded in last five years. Capital Factory was the first downtown coworking space that opened up in 2011. Since then, TechSpace, WeWork, Galvanize and Fiber Cove all have launched downtown co-working offices.

But that doesn’t worry Stewart. He thinks of the coworking space as a similar model to a hotel. It’s all about the hospitality experience and how the staff treat people on whether they want to maintain an office there, Stewart said. He thinks that is Industrious’ competitive advantage in creating an atmosphere where people feel comfortable and like coming to work.

“Anyone can put glass walls up,” Stewart said. “But it’s about effectively managing the space and getting people to stay….If you are not managed effectively, it’s going to be very hard for you to be sustainable.”

Industrious has two employees in Austin: a community manager and a community coordinator. Sarah Lawton Hawkins is the community manager and Jeremiah Dalmacio is the operations associate for Industrious Austin.

Overall, the company has 44 people nationwide. The company also has retreats twice a year to bring everyone together. The last one was in New Orleans in January and the next one is later this month in New York.

“We don’t want people to feel like they are here for no purpose,” Stewart said. “We believe in them and they’ll believe in our members.”

Industrious this month closed on $37 million in financing. The company is looking at opening up additional locations in Dallas and Houston and it might open a second Austin location in the future, Stewart said.

William Hurley, known as Whurley and co-founder of Honest Dollar and Chaotic Moon in Austin, is on a global mission to help women and girls learn technology skills and find jobs.

International Telecommunications Union and United Nations Women announced Tuesday that they have teamed up with Whurley to drive an intensive global engagement and outreach effort.

“I’ve been an advocate of the widespread access to information and technologies my entire career,” Whurley said in a news release. “These technologies have the power to change lives, reinvent industries and create entire new economies. Women and girls play a vital role and are fundamental to an ecosystem of innovation. Gender equality must be the focus of the technology industry if we are to continue to innovate in the future.”

ITU and UN Women launched on Tuesday Equals: the Global Partnership for Gender Equality in Digital Age, which will focus on getting more women to use information and communications technology worldwide to promote the empowerment of women. Today, 250 million fewer women are online than men, according to UN Women data. The global Internet user gap grew from 11 percent in 2013 to 12 percent in 2016. And in third world countries, the digital divide is even worse with a 31 percent the gap.

In particular, the new effort will focus on three areas of action including access with the goal of achieving equal access to digital technologies. The second goal is skills and empowering women and girls with skills to become ICT creators and lastly to focus on leadership to promote women as ICT leaders and entrepreneurs.

Whurley began working on issues of equality for women a few years ago.

“I have been advocating for women in STEM for some time now,” he said. “I started working with the UN ITU on the British Airways UnGrounded flight a few years ago. Since then I’ve become friends with most of the ITU staff so when Doreen Bogdan reached about starting a new effort to help meet the United Nations SDG goals for gender equality by 2030 I jumped on the opportunity.”

The organization is based at the ITU in Geneva, Switzerland with team members based around the world. Whurley has put together a small team in Austin that’s been helping with the initial efforts in getting the program kicked off.

“For me there simply couldn’t be a better cause to put my efforts into,” he said. “It’s something I’m extremely passionate about, have a lot of experience with, and most importantly an area where I can make an impact. I really feel that if more men got involved with programs like this we would be a lot further in solving the gender equality equation.”

Whurley plans to remain in his role at Honest Dollar, the Austin-based financial technology company which he co-founded that Goldman Sachs acquired earlier this year. He believes Austin can play a big role in helping the world to achieve gender equality.

“I believe that Austin can become an example for the world in this area,” Whurley said.”We live in a very progressive city. However even in Austin you can see some of the inequality Equals aims to address.”

How can people get involved?

“Right now we’re looking for people to help raise awareness of the issue, and the new organization,” Whurley said. “We’ve started a campaign where people take a photo of themselves making the “Equals sign” and tweet/post about it with the hash tag #beEquals. Organizations interested in partnering can email partners@equals.org for more information.”

By Laura Lorek
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Nurturing professor led startups to help them take their inventions out of the laboratory and into the marketplace is the focus of the Innovation Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The center, which is part of the Cockrell School of Engineering runs The StARTup Studio, which is held monthly during the Fall and Spring semesters to bring together professors, investors, engineers and other invited guests to hear 15-minute-long presentations from startups followed by a question and answer session.

UT Professor of Innovation Bob Metcalfe, Ph.D., leads the center. Louise Epstein is its managing director and Ben Dyer serves as entrepreneur in residence.

On Thursday, three professors took to the podium in a conference room on the 10th floor of Ernest Cockrell Jr. Hall to present a diverse mix of ideas including a new type of cement block, a fiber optic catheter to deliver drugs to treat glioblastomas or brain tumors more effectively and a random number generator to ensure encryption of data.

The audience included several UT faculty members including Professor Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and Professor John Goodenough, the inventor of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

First up, Professor Francisco Gomes, associate dean for graduate programs in the school of architecture, presented MineralBuilt, which is creating better, cheaper and more energy efficient cement building blocks. Gomes, who also founded Gomes+Staub Architects in 1999, began working on the idea a few years ago and formed his company in the last year to take its invention to market.

“It’s lighter and uses less material than a normal concrete block wall,” Gomes said.

A builder can get 50 percent more efficiency per wall using the MineralBuilt blocks, he said. The blocks use a new mold that is configured in a way that uses less materials and still provides for structural integrity.

Gomes has gone through the iCorp Program, based at UT’s IC2 Institute, which helps researchers commercialize technology.

The initial customer for the MineralBuilt blocks are owners and developers of low-rise buildings like retail stores, schools and warehouses. The company’s business model is to charge the manufacturers of cement blocks a licensing fee to use its mold. The company has two utility patents on its product and one patent application pending. It is also working with the University of Texas’ Office of Technology Commercialization to license the technology.

MineralBuilt is raising $100,000 to complete its structural testing. It is also building a house to showcase the blocks to potential customers and it’s working with a company based in Round Rock to produce its production molds.

Next up, Chris Rylander, Ph.D., assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering, presented the Arborizer, a new kind of catheter to deliver drugs more effectively to eliminate brain tumors at the root. He hasn’t yet created a startup company.

Rylander has been working on the Arborizer project for several years. The intellectual property behind the technology is owned by Virginia Tech. Rylander moved to UT two years and has been working with the Austin Technology Incubator and IC2 Institute since then. He also went through the I-Corp program.

The Arborizer focuses on treating glioblastomas, which is a deadly brain form of brain cancer that afflicts 12,120 people every year in the U.S. And 95 percent of those people die within five years of diagnosis, Rylander said. The treatment is surgery, radiation and systemic chemotherapy. The challenge to treatment is the brain blood barrier that makes accessing the entire tumor difficult. With the Arborizer, the treatment involves inserting a catheter in the brain and pushing drugs directly into the brain to kill the tumor cells. With the Arborizer, drug companies can push large molecules into the brain in a much more targeted way.

The Arborizer has received one patent and a second patent application is pending review. Rylander has raised $1.2 million in funding so far. The next step is to apply for additional grants and funding and to begin pre-clinical trials in animals, he said.

The market for the Arborizer has potential beyond treatment of brain tumors, Rylander said. It can also be used as a platform technology to treat soft tissue tumors such as colon, pancreas, prostate and others, he said. And it also could have applications in the cosmetic surgery industry, he said.

Lastly, Benito Fernandez, associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering, presented “CHECK,” a chaotic hybrid encryption communications kit. The hardware solution combines analog and digital signals to create encryption technology for a random number generator device used to secure data. The project has received National Science Foundation funding and the team has gone through the I-Corp program at UT.

The startup is in the process of building a prototype and then selling it, Fernandez said.

The technology can be used to secure power plants, data centers and other facilities, Fernandez said.

San Antonio doesn’t attract as much venture capital as Austin, Houston and Dallas.

But now a group of high net worth individuals are trying to change that.

Last week, they launched the San Antonio Angel Network and announced Chris Burney, a former Rackspace executive, as its executive director.

While San Antonio has had investment funds, this is the first organized angel network. And it seeks to be as big a force as the Central Texas Angel Network in Austin, which is routinely listed as one of the most active networks in the country.

CTAN along with the Austin Technology Incubator and the Austin Technology Council were instrumental in establishing Austin as a major technology center.

The head of the new angel network most recently served as a finance manager at Rackspace. He also previously worked as a market data analyst for Thomson Reuters and an analyst for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

“The San Antonio Angel Network is interested in investing in companies in a variety of industries, in addition to tech,” Burney said in a news release. “Our city and the professionals within it excel in many fields, such as biomedical and healthcare, hospitality, and energy, among others. We want to be a source of funding for all startups with growth potential in those spaces.”

Members of the San Antonio Angel Network include Michael Girdley of Codeup, Lew Moorman of ScaleWorks, Pat Matthews of Filestack, Cole Wollak of FlashScan3D, Amit Mehta of Intrinsic Imaging and Brent Barry, former Spur. Girdley and Wollak also run the Geekdom Fund, which invests in technology startups.

“Given the growth in the tech and medical industries, among others, an angel network is something we are desperately in need of in San Antonio,” Girdley said in a news release. “The network will open startup investing to a new group of investors who, until now, have had to travel outside of San Antonio to get deal flow. For entrepreneurs, it will provide funding opportunities without having to leave town access investment dollars.”

Geekdom, a coworking site and tech incubator, plans to help attract angel investors and companies to the San Antonio Angel Network.

The Department of Defense on Wednesday officially launched a Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, known as a DIUx, at Capital Factory in Austin.

The defense department already has DIUx offices in Silicon Valley and Boston.

The Austin office will focus on national security challenges and cutting edge technologies to help the nation’s warfighters. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter made the announcement at a press conference Wednesday morning at Capital Factory along with Mayor Steve Adler and other local and state officials as well as Austin technology leaders.

“I created DIUx last year because one of my core goals as secretary of defense has been to build, and in some cases rebuild, the bridges between our national security endeavor at the Pentagon and America’s wonderfully innovative and open technology community,” Secretary Carter said in a news release. “Austin’s commitment to innovation, access to talent and academia, as well as the department’s longstanding ties to Texas make this an ideal next location for DIUx.”

Christy Abizaid, who previously served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia and on the National Security Council staff, will lead the DIUx office in Austin. The rest of the staff will primarily be filled by local reservists and National Guard members already working within Austin’s tech community. Abizaid will report to DIUx Managing Partner Raj Shah.

“This Austin presence will introduce us to even more innovators looking to help America’s warfighters,” Abizaid said in a news release “The entrepreneurs in this area, including many veterans, are working on cutting-edge technology that could benefit our troops. We want to make it easier for them to do business with the DoD.”

DIUx is focused on a wide range of technologies including autonomy, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybersecurity and analytics. Already, the DIUX offices have signed five agreements worth $3.5 million and another 22 projects are in its pipeline totalling $65 million in investment.

Q.  In your role as Senior Vice President Global Technology and Innovation what are the goals you wish to accomplish?

MS: I work on behalf of Austin’s Economic Development Corporation and Opportunity Austin with the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. I lead the organization’s vision for Austin to be a top global region for technology and health care innovation, company formation and expansion, in addition to increasing access to venture capital, private equity and attracting top talent.

In this role, my primary function is to provide leadership to cultivate emerging and strategic economic dynamism in the Greater Austin region. This focus on next generation technology and innovation trends aim to continue to seed and drive the long-tail of Austin’s sustainable and prosperous economic growth.

Q.  What are the biggest challenges you think Austin faces right now? How is the Chamber working to overcome them?

MS: Over the past 15 years, Austin has seen many highs and lows. Austin in the late ’90’s was living large. The technology industry was at its peak, driving a booming economy throughout Central Texas. A few years later, that boom turned bust for the U.S., and Austin’s economy took one of the most profound hits.

To combat our economic pains, business and community leaders in Austin created a public-private initiative with the goal of building and diversifying our economy. Opportunity Austin, has since been the driving force behind notable improvement in job, wage, salary, and high-tech growth among the nation’s 200 largest metro areas and benchmark communities. We have not just survived, but thrived despite the 2009 economic crash and resulting recession.

Today, Austin continues to have several foundational advantages: a central location, favorable tax climate and most importantly one of the most highly-educated workforces and incredible talent pipelines in the country. On top of that, Austin is continually recognized and branded as a place for innovation, growth and lifestyle. Entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial spirit are powering so much of what makes Austin’s current economy so exciting.

Q. So how do we extend our current success for the next decade?

MS: A large part of our success now and in the future will depend on our curation and support of our rich culture of music, creativity and our innovative spirit of collaboration. Nurturing the “Soul of Austin” must be embedded in every aspect of our growth and development and how we build the future of the city we love.

Tactically, one of the greatest opportunities Austin has, is the creation of a new blueprint for Austin to support the next-gen, innovation-based economy. We can optimize our growth by leveraging our strength in Tech with the opportunity to revolutionize healthcare. This convergence of Health and Tech by advancing innovation from discovery to outcomes and improving health in our community, can act as a prolific job creator and as a model for the nation if we get it right.

At the heart of our economic growth strategy is the opening of the Dell Medical School and Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas – Austin (UT), and the Central Health Brackenridge Campus redevelopment.

Q. What is Austin’s life sciences industry like right now?

MS: Austin is home to best-in-class research facilities and boasts one of the most educated populations in the U.S. The dynamic, creative and entrepreneurial environment is fueled by the availability of funding, research collaboration, clinical trials, and skilled talent. Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, welcomes its first class in 2016, transforming the local economy as dramatically as the semiconductor and dot.com industries did in previous decades.

Through a mix of strategic relocations and continued support for our existing industry, Austin’s life sciences cluster has evolved into a well-rounded representation of the industry as a whole. Over 200 life sciences companies in the region, and a workforce of nearly 12,300 is focused on the highest growth segments and research areas in the industry, including the specialties of biologics, medical devices, diagnostics, pharmaceutical, contract research, and others. We’re in good company: more than 3,700 companies with 93,800 workers make the State of Texas one of the leading biotech states in the country.

Austin’s Life Sciences Industry
•Medical device/diagnostics (33%)
•Biologics/biotech (12%)
•Contract Research Organizations (17%)
•Pharmaceuticals (16%)
•Other (22%)

Q. Does Austin have enough talent in the life sciences field to support the growing industry here?

MS: In the Austin metro area, you’ll find a combined enrollment of 177,000 students in four-year and community colleges. This provides an ample supply of well-educated workers to area employers. The student population within 100 miles of Austin exceeds 414,000, providing one of the world’s strongest talent pools. Life and physical scientists number over 4,500 in the metropolitan area’s workforce—approximately 43% of those are in life sciences fields.

With a strong talent pipeline and rapid emerging growth surrounding our development and growth phase, Austin will continue to add a deeper bench of talent that will be attracted to the unparalleled new opportunities, as we set our vision as a model healthy city of Healthcare innovation.

Q. What is going to set Austin apart from other healthcare centers around the country and world? What are the key factors we need to accomplish this vision?

MS: Leveraging the creative spirit of Austin that itself in innovation is key to this success.

Collaboration is key. Both inter-industry and inter-organizational collaboration is essential to the success of the community. Austin’s current high-growth industries within technology – creative/digital media, data management and life sciences/healthcare – have natural synergies that can create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, if proactive collaboration is sought.

Investing in knowledge communities. The importance of knowledge communities cannot be overstated, particularly in the life sciences field. The primary source of funding for medical research comes from the National Institutes of Health, which has been consistently declining in recent years, driving the need for additional autonomous research pipelines. Austin is working towards the creation of an innovation growth strategy that seeks to provide research testing facilities and incubators for early stage life science companies.

Everything rests on talent. Talent supply is the currency of innovation. While Austin has among the strongest workforces in the country –since 2000, more than 225,000 people with a bachelor’s degree or higher have moved to Austin – we must do more, particularly in the realm of middle class job creation and re-training. Programs at UT and Austin Community College (ACC) are pioneering efforts in short-term skills certification, and have an opportunity to provide far greater resources with their recent expansion and enhanced offerings.

Know your strengths – and be honest about your challenges. Austin has a unique opportunity to approach the next phase in its evolution in a way that’s exclusively Austin – focused on lifestyle and a thoughtful, creative and inclusive community. Austin should focus on being a better Austin, not becoming Silicon Valley. Austin has phenomenal things happening in music, art, technology and culture, and projects should stitch all of those things together. A current challenge for Austin is a gap in the talent pool focused on life sciences, but convergence from its strength sectors within technology will go a long way towards influencing digital and software driven innovation that has applications in healthcare.

There is a national opportunity to transform the medicine and life science sectors. While the “IT and Informatics Revolution” has escalated massive innovation in industries like banking, communications and media, making inroads in the healthcare industry has proven much more difficult, with “a broken innovation system”. For multiple reasons, healthcare has been notoriously resistant to technology advances. As a country, we spend more than any industrialized nation on healthcare, but our health outcomes are roughly equivalent to that of Cuba. New, collaborative research organizations that cross sector and industry lines offer the opportunity to be at the forefront of this transformation.

Q. What other ingredients does the city need to create a thriving life sciences industry?

MS: What we choose to invest in now will shape Austin’s future prosperity, and seizing opportunities presented by a new Tier-1 research medical school and teaching hospital and a thriving, hungry creative community, is a great first step. To address and build the innovation economy, we must collaborate, continue enhancing our workforce and build private capital.

Most importantly, we must continue with collective passion and fire, to accomplish this big, bold vision and opportunity.

Editor’s note: this is the first in a series of Q&As with the people featured in the Silicon Hills News 2016 technology calendar.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

If you have a bad experience at a hospital—and just having to go to the hospital is often a bad experience—you may write a letter of complaint, post something in social media or blast the hospital on your patient survey.

And there’s a good chance that if someone got around to reading it, it would be long after you were gone.

That sucks for the patient, but also for the hospital. According to a May survey by Accenture, hospitals that can provide superior patient service show up to 50 percent more in net margins than hospitals without it. Plus, if you’re a hospital with low patient satisfaction ratings, Medicare and Medicaid will reduce your reimbursements.

So there are a lot of reasons why optimizing patient experience should be of enormous importance to everyone. Recently, the two Austin founders of NarrativeDx figured out how to do it.

NarrativeDx uses natural language software to process everything from patient surveys to letters, phone call transcripts, and comments on social media. It can “read” this information and identify key issues in the hospital that can be as broad as a cleanliness problem in the hospital and as specific as the bedside manner of a particular provider. Historically, hospitals relied on patient satisfaction surveys from Press Ganey, but that took forever.

“You wait one to two months for patient experience surveys from Press Ganey,” said Geoffrey Hall, a NarrativeDx advisor who uses the service as administrator of Rusk Rehabilitation at New York University Langone Medical Center. “When I first started doing the pilot (with NarrativeDx) the information came back in 24 hours. Now it’s almost instantaneous. It can mine and capture data and map that out…now we might actually resolve the issue while the patient is there. It’s a game changer for me.”

Shawn R. Smith, VP of Patient Experience at Christiana Care Health System in Delaware said that, with the volume of feedback they collect, he said, it would be impossible for even a team of people to compile themes from the information they receive. NarrativeDx does it almost instantly and can identify problems in myriad areas.

“When looking at medications and adherence (a patient’s willingness to take meds according to instructions) to patient side effects, you can learn that a particular side effect has a lot to do with this one medication. You can go very granular. And you might never have thought that these side effects would be connected with this medication.”

Patients Tell Their Own Stories

One of the big advantages of NarrativeDx is that it lets patients tell a story about what happened. Too often in filling out patient surveys, there is no box to mark for the issue they faced. NarrativeDx co-founder Senem Guney did her master’s and doctoral work at the University of Texas studying the communicative fabric of work organizations and the issue of high-technology innovation in complex, multi-site organizations. Part of her studies included researching the importance of personal narrative in getting the message across. At hospitals, she said, the most important thing to patients is empathy, compassion. Patients consistently rank that higher even than providers’ knowledge. And that’s easier to capture in a narrative.

Co-founder and CEO Kyle Robertson said the team did a deep dive into patient experience before launching in 2014. “We did a lot of research before to find out what’s important about patient experience: What about listening, empathy, compassion, kindness? What’s important about meals? There is this huge tree of all those things that are important.” Robertson has degrees in computer engineering, economics, and math from Iowa State University and a juris doctorate from Boston College Law School. “We plug these into machine learning algorithms that actually learns new stuff. It categorizes the comments and builds off that. It takes the human bias out of it…. It basically marries the insights from qualitative date with scaleability of quantitative.”

NarrativeDx has its own “smart survey,” known as adaptive rounding, that is used when someone from the hospital makes patient rounds and asks about their experience. It can add questions based on previous responses. For example, if many patients complained about dirty showers in the rooms, it will add a query about whether patients were satisfied with the cleanliness of their showers.

Both Robertson and Guney worked for major institutions before embarking on the entrepreneurship journey. Robertson worked for National Instruments and was an IP attorney representing organizations including Cisco and Apple, before starting his first company. Guney served on the faculty of State University of New York and was a Fellow at the Center for Technology in Government, a SUNY Albany think tank.

NarrativeDx was accepted into DreamIt Health accelerator in Philadelphia in 2014. They received $50,000 as part of the incubator and have since raised $1.35 million from angels, LiveOak Venture Partners and Capital Factory. They will be working on a $3 million series A in the fall.

Since they returned from Philadelphia, they said, they noticed a big improvement in the ecosystem for medical startups. For example, Seton’s hiring of national virtual care pioneer Dr. Kristi Henderson as an advocate for medical innovation. But Austin has a long way to go to catch up with the northeast in terms of support of innovation and tech startups in the healthcare system. Part of the problem is that the sales cycle in hospitals can be “long and brutal,” Robertson said. There are so many different people who have to sign off on any innovation.

With help from people like Dr. Henderson, the Dell Medical School and proposed Innovation Zone, they said, the next generation of startups should find it a lot easier. Maybe Austin needs a NarrativeDx for entrepreneur experience….