For the first time half of the Techstars Austin cohort hails from Austin.

This is the fourth class for the popular Techstar accelerator in Austin and the first one led by its new managing director, Amos Schwartzfarb.

“It was not intentional,” Schwartzfarb said. “We were very location agnostic. It wasn’t a field in the spreadsheets we have….I do think it’s a testament to how the community is really evolving and growing in Austin.”

The theme is as much as possible no theme, Schwartzfarb said.

“We were really looking for things that were interesting that were pushing limits – innovative in some way in the space they were already playing in,” he said.

The program begins Feb. 15th and runs through May with Demo Day scheduled for May 19th.

“During SXSW Techstars will have a presence here and our teams are highly encouraged to go get out of the office and take advantage of all the people coming to town,” Schwartzfarb said. “They’re encouraged to go out and meet potential customers and meet potential investors.”

“I think this is a really phenomenal class I can’t wait to get started and get under the hood with everyone and see what kind of fantastic things come out the other side.”

The local startups include Authors.me, a platform to connect authors with publishers led by Monica Landers, David O’Brien and Henrik Kjallbrin and CarServ, a platform that transforms communication and workflow in the auto repair industry led by Marshall Mundy. The others are Kandid.ly, photography services led by Sam Ulu and Maria Walley, PenPal Schools, a global education platform led by Joe Troyen and Miguel Vazquez and Popup Play, founded by Bryan Thomas and Amelia Cosgrove.

Another close-by startup is The Helper Bees, a service that connects seniors with local helpers, based in Georgetown, founded by Char Hu, Danny Lynch and Eric Corum.

And Remidi, the maker of a wearable musical instrument, is listed as being based in Turin, Italy and Austin with founders Andrea Baldereschi, Andrea Bulgarelli, Marco Casolati, Mark DeMay and Alberto Forneris.

Bamba Group, a web-based data collection tool, hails from both Toronto, Canada and Nairobi, Kenya. Its founders include Al Ismaili, Faiz Hirani and Shez Tejani.

Casabots of San Jose, Calif., a general purpose commercial cooking robot, is founded by Deepak Sekar.

FieldVine, a task management construction tool based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, is founded by Ray Antonino, Rebecca Antonino and Adam Michel.

Twenty finalists from all over the world will be in Austin on Saturday to compete in the 2016 Food+City Challenge Prize Showcase Day.

A panel of 17 judges will evaluate the finalists and select the winners of $50,000 in prize money and perks from Food+City partners. The showcase day runs from 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday and is free to attend and open to the public. RSVP through Eventbrite. The event will be held at the McCombs School of Business on the University of Texas at Austin campus.

The panel of judges include Bob Metcalfe, professor of engineering, innovation and entrepreneurship at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, Martin Berson, founder of Snap Kitchen, Edwin Marty, food policy manager for the Office of Sustainability of the City of Austin, Claire England, executive director of Central Texas Angel Network, Randy Evans, HEB Director and Executive Chef for Restaurants and 12 other experts in the fields of food, nutrition and innovation.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A new startup, OJO Labs just closed on $5.8 million in Series A funding from local investors.

Austin-based LiveOak Venture Partners and Silverton Partners led the financing.

John Berkowitz, co-founder of Yodle and David Rubin, founder and former CEO of ProfitFuel founded OJO Labs in February of 2015. Yodle, which merged with ProfitFuel, is the fifth largest tech employer in Austin and provides an online marketing platform for 50,000 small to medium sized businesses.

“We love Austin,” said Berkowitz.

Berkowitz raised $50 million from investors on both coasts for Yodle and OJO Labs could have gone outside of Austin to raise its money. But Berkowitz said Austin now has the ability to fund its own. And LiveOak Venture Partners and Silverton Partners provide a “refreshing take on V.C. funding,” he said.

“We wanted to make this a cool Austin story,” Berkowitz said.

Instead of getting venture capital from a big name in Silicon Valley, in the end it’s a people story, Berkowitz said.

“Krishna and Kip are a great team,” he said.

“We look at hundreds of companies each year and are excited to work with OJO because it combines a best-in-class team with a massive vision,” Kip McClanahan, General Partner at Silverton, said in a news release.

“We are very excited to provide our resources and experience to help accelerate the OJO vision,” Krishna Srinivasan, General Partner at LiveOak said in a news release. “We are confident that with the combination of John and Dave’s entrepreneurial experience and leadership, the differentiated technical approach and the magnitude of this opportunity, this will be a huge success story.”

OJO Labs, with 11 employees, is based at WeWork on Congress in downtown Austin. The startup is building a technology that uses machine learning, neural networks and proprietary conversation models.

OJO Labs is attacking a big problem at the right time with the best team, said Berkowitz.

“We’ve assembled the best possible technical team,” Berkowitz said. “We can compete with all the teams in New York and in the Valley. The team we have now is an incredible group of rock stars.”

They are building a text-based customer service agent using artificial intelligence. The company is in private beta with a select group of businesses and consumers right now. It is working on perfecting the product, Berkowitz said.

This is not a new vision, Berkowitz said. People have been talking about creating intelligent conservation-based agents since the 1980s, but now the time is right, Berkowitz said.

“It used to be a dream,” Berkowitz said.

In the past, the technology wasn’t up to par yet. But now it is and people are comfortable talking to a machine, he said. OJO Labs technology focuses on text-based conversations.

A huge segment of the population doesn’t mind if it’s a machine or a human as long as it is smart and provides great customer service, Berkowitz said.

Over the past year, the market has gained significant momentum and companies of all sizes are investing heavily in AI and messaging-based interfaces. “We are building technology that will power conversations between humans and machines in ways that have never been done before,” said Josh Levy, PhD who is Chief Data Scientist at the company.

The startup plans to use the money to pay its development team while it perfects its product.

“This gives us a long runway to take our time to create something really great,” Berkowitz said. “Once we have a great product and market fit we will release it into the market. We’re going to take our time and do it right.”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The birth of a new microscope industry is taking place at the University of Texas at Austin that can change the way scientists view living cells at the smallest stage.

On Tuesday night at the Austin Chamber of Commerce, a small group attending UT’s Startup Studio got a seek peek at the ground breaking technology.

Martin Poenie and Jeffrey Kuhn, PhDs in molecular biosciences and Thomas Milner, PhD in biomedical engineering at UT Austin have created a startup, Spectrapol Imaging, to build and market its patented microscope technology. UT paid to develop the technology and holds the patent which the startup has licensed. The group created a microscope that uses polarized light images that can show the molecular structure of things in a living cell.

“There’s a world of applications,” Poenie said. “The power of it is impressive.”

Spectrapol Imaging was one of three early-stage professor led startups spinning out of UT Austin that pitched their ventures to an invite-only crowd of about 40 people including angel investors and other interested parties from the Austin technology community. It’s part of a monthly series conducted by the Innovation Center at UT designed to shine a spotlight on new technology and companies emerging from the university.

“We’re trying to help Austin be a better Silicon Valley and one of the ways we do that is to encourage professors and students to start companies,” said Bob Metcalfe, professor of Innovation at UT. “Because we think startups are a very effective way to innovate and have an impact on research and on the world.”

Metcalfe, Louise Epstein and Ben Dyer run the Innovation Center. They have identified a funding gap between research and creating a startup with a product. The center will be making innovation grants to bridge that gap, Metcalfe said.

The Austin Chamber of Commerce, WeWork and the Office of Technology Commercialization at UT Austin sponsor the monthly events.

Spectrapol is creating a whole new market for microscopes, Poenie said. It has developed an attachment that can go into a standard microscope. It includes a light source, known as a hot spot lamp coupled with specially designed optical modules, Poenie said.

“You don’t have to buy a whole microscope for it to work,” Poenie said.

The Spectrapol microscope provides cellular detail invisible to standards microscopes, he said. It can display structures that are as tiny as 25 nanometers in diameter and that’s unprecedented for a light source microscope, Poenie said. For example, the technology can provide high resolution images of T-lymphocytes killing a cancer cell in real time without the microscope harming the cell. It can even show viruses emerging from living cells. In fact, the U.S. Center for Disease Control is interested in using the technology to examine how the Ebola virus attacks living cells.

One of the unique features of the microscope is that it doesn’t depend on fluorescents to show objects. Most advances in microscopes depend on fluorescents. The UT technology relies entirely on optics and the physics of light, Poenie said.
Overall, the microscopy market is growing, Poenie said. This technology has applications for In Vitro Fertilization, identifying and working with viruses like Ebola and in the nanotechnology field. They also think there is a market for the light source.

Spectrapol is now looking for investors to help them take the technology to market, Poenie said. The market is in the hundreds of thousands, he said. The microscope attachment would sell for $35,000 to $50,000, he said.

The next presenter, Matthew Cowperthwaite, director of research and technology at St. David’s Neuroscience department, presented TyPos. He has developed the company with Andrew D. Ellington, professor of biochemistry at UT.

TyPos developed keyboard analytics or keystroke analytics software aimed at detecting the early onset of Parkinson’s Disease by analyzing typing patterns.
TyPos uses cell phones and standard computer keyboards to capture the way people type and to detect patterns in that typing.

“It shows a lot about your emotional state and disease state,” Cowperthwaite said. “We’re able to capture keystroke timings at a millisecond recognition.”
The software also measures hold times on keys and how long a typist goes between pressing keys, Cowperthwaite said. He sees a lot of applications in the consumer and healthcare space.

The current diagnosis for Parkinson’s Disease is 50 percent accurate and the TyPos software could improve that diagnosis and lead to earlier treatment for patients and increased quality of life, he said.

TyPos is looking for a $100,000 investment to take the current keystroke software it has created and turn it into a consumer version, Cowperthwaite said. He compared the software to Luminosity’s brain games with 70 million users. It’s a way for people to monitor their health, he said.

The last presenter, Pradeep Ashok, a research scientist at UT, presented r5, a startup focused on the oil and gas industry and drilling automation. r5 drilling makes drilling automation software, Ashok said.

“To drill a well it takes about 100 people on land. Off shore multiply that by five times. No two wells are the same,” Ashok said. “Data is so disorganized. We have a solution.”

The startup aggregates all the data from an oil well and makes automation possible, he said. Its first product is the drilling advisor software. It can show a company where to operate and drill in a region, Ashok said. It ultimately saves companies time, he said.

“Time is really money when it comes to drilling,” Ashok said. Its software can save at least 10 percent in drilling time, he said. The software costs $100 per day or a company can license it for $25,000 to $35,000 a year. Even though the price of a barrel of oil has dipped below $30, an estimated 1,800 rigs still operate every day in the world with 571 rigs operating in the U.S., according to Baker Hughes, an oilfield services company.

“We plan to revolutionize drilling,” Ashok said.

Correction: This article originally incorrectly reported the oil rig count for the world as the oil rig count for the U.S.

Austin-based Pivot3 announced Wednesday it will acquire NexGen Storage, a privately held maker of hybrid storage appliances based in Louisville, Colorado.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Pivot3 intends to market and enhance all current and planned NexGen products.

“Everyone talks about the need for agility in terms of business needs, but in hyper-convergence, workload utilization and performance have been gating factors to expansion beyond the usual initial use cases,” Ron Nash, CEO of Pivot3 said in a statement. “With the addition of NexGen’s capabilities, Pivot3 is now the only company in the market that broadly and deeply addresses this central data center challenge with a solution that allows IT to prioritize application performance based on business priority. We believe this agility is critical as customers move from legacy data centers to a software-defined data center that effortlessly handles a heterogeneous set of workloads. We welcome the NexGen customers, partners and team to Pivot3.”

“We’re proud of our rich history and our reputation as a leader in new technology storage products, and we see enormous synergies in bringing together these two innovative businesses,” John Spiers, founder and CEO of NexGen, said in a news statement. “The pedigrees of our teams in the storage and high-performance computing markets are unparalleled in the industry. Combining these powerful teams and innovative solutions gives our customers and partners an incredible advantage in their respective markets.”

This is the kind of warm and fuzzy story that warms our hearts and our stomachs during the height of flu season in Austin.

Austin-based Favor, the on-demand delivery service, has teamed up with Kinsa, the maker of the smart thermometer that tracks the spread of illness, to send out hot soup via Soup Peddler, SmartyPants Vitamins and a Kinsa thermometer to a sick friend in Austin for free.

To sen a care package for free to a sick friend, you simply use the hashtag #KinsaSendSoup on social media. Favor will deliver the package while supplies last.

The partnership is a part of Kinsa’s mission to Keep Austin Healthy.

The Zebra, which created an auto insurance aggregation and comparison site to save consumers money, has raised $17 million in Series A funding.

The Austin-based company’s investors included Silverton Partners, Daher Capital, Ballast Point Ventures, Mark Cuban and Mike Maples Jr.

“Insurance shopping is a major pain point for the 250 million-plus U.S. drivers on the road,” Mike Maples Jr. said in a news release. “With The Zebra, we’re demystifying an opaque insurance industry and simplifying that process in a way that serves both drivers and insurance companies.”

The Zebra aims to help insurers more efficiently acquire customers by bringing transparency to the space and educating consumers about car insurance.

“These antiquated distribution models require innovation. Today, consumers expect optionality and speed in nearly every area of their lives, and now technology allows us to create the tools needed for insurers and consumers,” CEO Adam Lyons said in a news release. “The Zebra’s proprietary solutions enable us to qualify and match drivers with insurers. Insurers love it and consumers need it. This win-win scenario has helped us grow very fast.”

The Zebra provides visibility into the murky world of car insurance pricing and coverage by allowing drivers to compare side-by-side customized quotes in seconds from over 200 insurance companies across all 50 states. It also provides resources for drivers to evaluate companies based on coverage, customer reviews, claims satisfaction and more. The Zebra saves drivers an average of $368 per year.

The announcement caps off a year in which the company provided 3.5 million unique drivers with customized quotes and expanded relationships with over 40 top insurers.

The Zebra plans to use the capital to enhance its product offering, strengthen partnerships with insurance carriers, and expand its quickly growing team. The company, named a 2015 Best Place to Work in Austin, is hiring across engineering, business development, sales, and marketing.

Silicon Hills News did this profile of The Zebra in 2014.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

uShip won the 2016 Austin Startup Games on Saturday afternoon at Fair Market on Austin’s East side.

SpareFoot, a three-time champion, came in second, followed by LawnStarter, a new competitor to the games.

More than 1,000 people attended the event, which raised $57,500 for local charities, said Sara Levy, executive director of Austin Startup Games, a nonprofit organization. The top three winners spilt the bulk of the money, but each team received $1,000 for its chosen charity just for participating, she said. uShip is donating its winnings to Communities in Schools of Central Texas. SpareFoot’s money goes to Kure It, a kidney cancer research group. And LawnStarter raised money for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

The games started five years ago at uShip, which won the inaugural games.

“In the last five years, we’ve given away $175,000 and after today, we’ll have given away $225,000,” Levy said.

The games bring members of the Austin startup community together for a full day of fun and competition. A lot of people dress up in team colors and carry flags.

“It’s fostering that culture of competition among the companies in the startup community,” Levy said. “It’s the biggest games like this in the country. It’s helping to instill the culture of giving back early on in the lifecycle of a company.”

Startup Games has been such a success in Austin, the organization wants to expand outside of the city, Levy said. Its goal is to give away $1 million to charity eventually. Levy is also executive director of the Notley Fund, a newly launched philanthropic investment firm. Startup Games joined the Notley Fund as one of its signature programs. Dan and Lisa Graham created the Notley Fund.

The Startup Games are only for companies with less than 250 employees. So Startup Games created “Level Up” for the bigger companies with more than 250 employees. Eight teams will compete on April 23rd in that event.

This year 14 startups competed in ping pong, foosball, beer pong, flip cup, pop a shot, darts, shuffleboard, connect four, trivia, MarioKart, liar’s dice and the mystery event.

This year’s mystery event was human powered Hungry-Hungry Hippos. It featured people lying on their stomachs on boards with wheels. Two handlers grabbed their feet to steer them around the floor to snatch up colored balls with a container. The “Hippo” with the most balls won the match.

In the past, the mystery events have included jousting and bull riding. The whole idea of the mystery event is so that no team can prepare for it in advance, Levy said.

Last year, The Bunker Austin received $1,000 from ATX Seed Ventures, which played in the games on behalf of the nonprofit organization, said Johnathan Paul Wojtewicz, co-founder of The Bunker Austin. He attended the games on Saturday to show his support and to volunteer to help.

“This is an amazing experience with a lot of great companies,” Wojtewicz said. “It’s a win for the team members who participate in a healthy competition. But it’s also a win for the people who come out who might not be a part of the startup community and want to join a company.”

The key to success at the games is “practice, practice, practice,” said Chuck Gordon, founder and CEO at SpareFoot, a three time winner with 125 employees. He said his team starts training on Monday for the next Startup Games.

SpareFoot’s best events are trivia, pop a shot, foosball and shuffleboard, Gordon said. He participated in liar’s dice, a competition for executives at local startups.

“I think that Startup Games is amazing how we bring all the Austin startup community together in a fun competitive atmosphere to benefit charity,” he said. “It’s amazing what the team has built and I’m proud of them.”

SpareFoot has raised $70,000 throughout the years for its charity, Kure It Cancer Research, which focuses on finding a cure for kidney cancer and other cancers.

Ryan Farley, co-founder of LawnStarter, with 25 employees, entered the games to win it. And the LawnStarter team did well. They placed first in beer pong and they also placed in pop a shot and the mystery event.

“I think it’s a way to get our name out there for recruiting,” Farley said. “It’s also for our employees. They are working super freaking hard and this gives them an outlet to have some fun.”

One of Austin’s newest startups, Waldo Photos, attended the event to photograph participants for its new photo finding platform.

“We wanted to come out and support Startup Games,” said Rodney Rice, co-founder and CEO of Waldo Photos. “It’s an easy way for everyone out here to get their photos.”

Waldo Photos Just launched in closed beta and the startup hopes next year to participate in the games, Rice said.

“It’s an electric atmosphere,” Rice said. “It’s cool to see all of these people competing.”