By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Developing new products for the medical industry requires special facilities like mock surgery rooms and lab space and the community in which to brainstorm ideas.

“Whatever policy, procedure or product you’re working on we want it in an operating room environment so we can mimic those same problems and solutions,” said Dr. Aaron Ali, CEO of MedtoMarket, the parent company behind HeLiX, a new coworking and bioskills lab space.

Redefining coworking, HeLiX is opening this spring in Austin with plans to offer its members everything they need to develop products for the medical, life sciences and healthcare sectors.

“HeLiX will even feature a cadaver lab and a human factors engineering lab where inventors can watch people work with their products,” said Ali, a board certified anesthesiologist, who has worked on several startups. He understands the needs of innovators working to take a product to market.

“The resources are here but they are kind of scattered,” Ali said. “We’re trying to bring everything together in one place versus trying to find them all over the place.”

“Right now, HeLiX is soliciting information from members of the medical, life sciences and healthcare sectors through a survey to make sure they meet their members needs,” said Loxley Browne, Executive Director of HeLiX. “Imagine Tony Stark and Richard Branson collaborating to create the ultimate business ecosystem…that is the space that I am designing for our community.”

“You have got to have the right community – the same like-minded people in the same trenches,” Ali said. “Under our roof you will find members from every sector of the life sciences, healthcare and medical field – medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, reps, biotech companies, dental companies, healthcare IT, medical devices, digital health, universities, hospitals, service providers, associations, startups and individuals. The ability to conversate over coffee to work out the minute details of your plan and have the insight of someone who understands the problems you are addressing. That factor is key in taking your product to market successfully.”

The HeLiX site will be 15,000 square feet featuring collaborative workspaces with 10 desks, 20 private offices, three break-out meeting rooms with whiteboard walls, a luxurious boardroom, a lecture hall equipped to seat 50 people, a bioskills lab space, mock surgery rooms, and a few special items that Browne has designed into the space. Browne plans to announce the site location soon. It is in negotiations for the space currently, she said.

“I want our members to feel the vibrancy of the space and for that to translate into what they are doing,” Browne said. “The design of the space itself will be cutting edge and filled with the latest technology. The factor that will set us apart is the combination of the space, the vetted members and the testing of products in our laboratory facilities.”

HeLiX will also feature events and mentorship with renowned board members and industry leaders for emerging, existing and established individuals and companies creating new products and devices for the healthcare industry, Browne said.

“It’s going to be an absolutely incredible space to collaborate. It’s extremely unique,” Ali said.

Community involvement is also one of the core values at MedtoMarket. In the past, students have participated in labs and have walked away in wonder and with new career choices in mind, Ali said.

“HeLiX plans to do a summer outreach program to work with middle school and high school students to get them interested in medicine,” Ali said.

“We are already creating programs and involving schools in our new space,” Browne said. “We plan to not only mentor businesses and adults but also our future leaders. It is important to show them what is available and the choices they can make. Watching a teenager find that magic niche that excites their mind and makes them want to come back to learn more, that is what makes the hard work and effort that we have put into this worth every minute.”

“The HeLiX coworking space meets a need in Austin that others have not,” Browne said. “It will give Austin the advantage we need to become a shining star in the medical field. I’m excited to open the doors and showcase our talented members to the world.”

Editor’s note: HeLiX is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.

By EVA RUTH MORAVEC
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A licensing rights agreement with the Walt Disney Company has awakened the force at an Austin company known as a global leader in 3D visualization.

Zebra Imaging is taking pre-orders for the result of that agreement: a 3D hologram of one of five images from the Star Wars franchise, which sell for $125 a pop or $250 when packaged with a bottom-lit display designed to look like Darth Vader.

Zebra Imaging plans to make more than 40,000 images over the next year, and has had to ramp up operations and capabilities to meet their targets.

But selling holograms hasn’t always been this easy.

For years, Zebra Imaging survived off of government contracts. The commercial side was later to catch on, first at trade shows, and then by architects, oil and gas companies and others who used Zebra Imaging’s products for marketing.

The company’s gallery, tucked in the back of its North Austin building, takes visitors from the beginnings of Zebra Imaging – founded in 1996 by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory – to the future.

In Zebra Imaging’s infancy, the MIT team entered a contest to help Ford come up with new technology to develop cars. The founders had already been working on holograms, or three-dimensional images that are produced by lasers, but the Ford competition got the founders’ idea out of the lab, said Mike Masters, Zebra Imaging’s chief marketing officer.

“They wanted a replacement for their clay models,” said Masters, explaining that Ford used the models to design new vehicles. “So they made holograms. The early models were $30,000 and took four or five days to print.”

Then came the military, which hired Zebra Imaging to make 3D holographic maps that could be rolled up and carried in a tube, then displayed in the field with a flashlight, sunlight or the headlights of a Humvee. Zebra Imaging made more than 14,000 maps for the U.S. Department of Defense of war theaters in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“There were lots of topography challenges,” Masters said. “But they could send a plane overhead, to a Lidar scan, then we could use those to make a map that can be used in the theater.”

In the gallery, featured alongside a giant Mickey Mouse, before-and-after-9/11 images of the World Trade Center buildings and a sheik-commissioned custom interior plane window image of Arabian horses are several of these military maps, all made in the color green.

The federal government grants, including a $30 million one from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, carried Zebra Imaging through the 2000s, Masters said. But due to the highly confidential nature of the work, it also shrouded Zebra Imaging’s operations in secrecy.

“It was initially thought to be hush-hush. That requirement later went away, but we didn’t do white papers,” said Zebra Imaging’s President and CEO Chuck Scullion.

Then came a failed federal contract bid, followed by changes in war strategy that caused the demand for military maps to evaporate. The company hit a low point in 2012, shrinking from about 50 people to 18.

Meanwhile, though, Zebra Imaging had carved out a niche on the cutting edge of technology, polishing every step of the hologram production process down to the hogel, which is striped like a zebra and the hologram’s equivalent of a pixel. Zebra Imaging also created their own printers, the material that images are printed on, and much more – in all, the company now has about 50 patents with more pending.

Reaching out to other markets, Zebra Imaging continued to make images and eventually, the government contracts returned. In September, the company announced an $86,000 contract to create high-resolution 3D maps of the borders for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Customs and Border Protection.

According to Zebra Imaging’s CrunchBase profile, the company has raised $24.5 million in venture capital in five rounds. The Austin Business Journal reported that Zebra Imaging was projected to generate $6 million in revenue in 2015.

And then there’s the force. After working with a company to produce small, consumer-sized holograms in malls, the idea arose to work on a Star Wars project.

“We didn’t go out looking for Star Wars,” Scullion said Zebra’s President and CEO Chuck in a recent interview. “But it seemed like a perfect fit, and we kind of went all-out.”

After wooing executives in a virtual tour of the company’s gallery, Zebra Imaging secured the licensing rights. Focus groups followed, and uber-nerds of the franchise helped Zebra Imaging’s talented artists and designers tweak products to perfection.

Now, Zebra Imaging will have to decide how to grow. Producing holograms for other franchises like Marvel Comics or Star Trek would be “actually pretty easy,” Masters said, and the company is already working with a children’s TV show on designing playing card-sized holograms. If a customer provides the 3D image, Zebra Imaging can produce a hologram in three hours, at a price starting at $200.

“Whatever we do, we want to make sure we expand properly,” Scullion said. “We can’t grow too fast, but if this grows as we think it will, then debating expansion strategies is a champagne problem at that time.”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Ten years ago, four technology workers in Austin got an idea to start a social network for IT professionals.

Today, that network, Spiceworks, is one of the largest IT social networks in the world with millions of monthly users, thousands of customers and hundreds of employees. This week, Spiceworks is celebrating its 10th anniversary by taking its entire workforce to see Stars Wars at the Alamo Drafthouse Theater on South Lamar, said Jay Hallberg, one of the co-founders and its CEO.

The other founders Scott Abel, Greg Kattawar and Francis Sullivan are all still with Spiceworks, which recently moved into much larger headquarters in the Westlake area. Hallberg took over the CEO job from Abel last year.

Spiceworks now has 450 employees and it plans to hire another 100 employees this year, Hallberg said. The company has also raised $111 million in venture capital funding in five rounds from six investors. It last raised $57 million from Goldman Sachs in 2014. Other investors include Adams Street Partners, Tenaya Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures and Austin Ventures.

The company has had steady growth and never had trouble making a payroll, Hallberg said. When it hired a guy from Dell in 2007 at its second office building, that guy showed up on his first day on the job. A longhaired engineer wearing crocs answered the door to let the guy in and the office, which had heating problems because of problems with the building, was about 55 degrees. Everyone had space heaters by their desks. The guy thought Spiceworks was having trouble paying its heating bill, Hallberg said.

Spiceworks took some deliberate steps to get to achieve a high rate of adoption and growth, Hallberg said.

“Even before we officially incorporated the company, we drove around Austin and talked to IT Pros,” he said. “We asked them what did they like, love and hate in their jobs. In listening to them we realized we could build a product that could help them do their job.”

The key to Spiceworks success has been having a constant conversation with an ever growing base of IT professionals on how Spiceworks could help them do their jobs better, Hallberg said. It seems to be working. Spiceworks fans call themselves Spiceheads and its mascot is an orange T-Rex called SpiceRex. It holds two major events each year for its customers. Spiceworld in the Spring in London and Spiceworld in the Fall in Austin.

Another key strategic move was making Spiceworks free, Hallberg said.

A lot of services and products are free online for consumers so why wouldn’t they be for businesses? Hallberg said.

“We decided to build a great product that people would use and rave about,” Hallberg said. “This community of users grew around Spiceworks and what we were doing.” Spiceworks attracted a community of like-minded people who supported each other, he said.

Spiceworks revenue comes from advertising. Its products include a Help Desk solution, IT Asset Manager, Network Manager, Mobile Device Management, IT Concierge and the Spiceworks Community.

“My thought back in 2006 – this model works for Google and Facebook, why wouldn’t it work for IT,” Hallberg said. “There’s almost no industry in the world that changes more rapidly than IT. It’s 100 times more complex today than it was ten years ago. Networks exist because there are technology companies. It’s the perfect market for an advertising based model. Every month, millions of IT pros are in Spiceworks doing their jobs and they can learn about services to help them do their jobs better.”

Spiceworks launched advertising essentially from day one, Hallberg said.

“We’d rather know from the beginning whether it’s going to work,” he said. “Secondly, though in the spirit of having an open conversation with our audience, we thought it was a lot better to be open from the beginning.”

On July 24, 2006, Spiceworks launched its Beta product, which included advertisements. Its first download came from Australia, Hallberg said. Today, the network is used in nearly all countries of the world, he said. It’s also used on all continents including Antarctica.

And Spiceworks has more plans for growth in 2016, Hallberg said.

“We’ve been cranking away growing the team,” he said. “We plan to build more products and value for IT pros. We’re working on some more interesting ways for IT pros to find the products they are looking for.”

Silvercar, a rental car startup with a fleet of silver Audi A4 sedans, announced Monday it has raised $28 million in Series C funding led by Audi.

Other investors included Austin Ventures and Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook.

Austin-based Silvercar plans to use the funds to expand into other markets nationwide. Also, Silvercar plans to work with Audi to “develop Audi Shared Fleet, a turnkey solution for businesses looking to provide accessible transportation to their employees on corporate campuses,” according to a news release.

“Audi’s confidence in Silvercar allows us to extend our reach even further, and bring forth the concept of shared mobility into many more markets, applications and product offerings,” Silvercar CEO Luke Schneider said in a news release. “It is our goal to accelerate the expansion of our successful airport business in order to integrate these new mobility products into the market as soon as possible.”

In addition, Audi North America President Scott Keogh will be joining Silvercar’s Board of Directors. Keogh will join Ken DeAngelis, Austin Ventures, Samrat Ganguly, Velos Partners, Blair LaCorte, formerly of Texas Pacific Group, and Silvercar CEO Luke Schneider on the board.

“Silvercar represents not just the future of the car rental industry, but a vision for the future of mobility,” Keogh said in a news release. “We want to utilize the company’s strengths in technology and innovation to merge connectivity and mobility for today’s consumer.”

Silvercar, founded in 2012, has raised $58.5 million to date from eight investors in five rounds, according to its Crunchbase profile.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Looking back at 2015, Austin’s technology industry had a really good year. It was a year filled with big acquisitions, the largest of which was Dell’s offer to buy EMC Corp. In addition, lots of interesting developments like Google’s autonomous cars testing on the streets of Austin continued to showcase the city’s innovative backbone.

So without further ado, here’s our picks for the most talked about tech topics in Austin in 2015.

1. Google Driverless Cars – Hand’s down the number one story of 2015 for Austin. People are beginning to understand how transformative this technology is going to be on our society. And Austin is playing a major role in the development of the autonomous car industry. It is the only market outside of California where Google is testing its self-driving cars.

2. Why do People Keep Moving to Austin? The city lands on the top of just about every list for hottest startup market and most robust technology industry. Add to that the new Dell Medical School and the healthcare and life sciences opportunities it is going to generate and it’s no wonder Austin is experiencing a population explosion.

3. Ridesharing – Does anyone remember HeyRide which first disrupted the transportation industry with ridesharing back in 2012? The City of Austin slapped them with a cease and desist order. Well the controversy continues with new regulations on Lyft and Uber that some think might lead to those services leaving the city. Let’s hope this all gets sorted out in the New Year.

4. On Demand Delivery Services – Amazon launched its two-hour delivery service for Prime customers in Austin and then rolled out its one hour restaurant delivery. Things are getting heated up in the Austin market with so many options for delivery that folks never have to leave their houses any more. The startups include Favor, Burpy, Postmates and Instacart for food. For booze, there’s Drizly, BrewDrop. And for courier services there’s Dropoff.

5. International Connections – Ireland opened up Ireland House, the first Irish consulate in Texas in Austin this year. Angelos Angelou’s International Accelerator is helping foreign startups set up operations in Austin. And Kahoot from Oslo became the first company to join Capital Factory’s international program. Kevin Koym with Tech Ranch also forged new international connections this year with Japan.

6. Coworking explosion – Austin now has dozens of coworking sites, up from just a handful a few years ago. WeWork launched in Austin in February, filled up and expanded. Techspace announced plans for a new coworking space to open in March next year. And Galvanize is opening in Austin. And Urban Co-Lab set up shop on the city’s East Side.

7. Acquisitions – The biggest news, of course, was Dell’s announcement to acquire EMC for $67 billion in what is deemed as the largest tech merger ever. Meanwhile, Expedia announced plans to buy HomeAway for $3.9 billion and private equity firms acquired SolarWinds for $4.5 billion. Other notable acquisitions included Heaven Hill Brands of Kentucky buying Deep Eddy Vodka, Accenture acquiring Chaotic Moon, Oracle buying Stack Engine and Ultra/Standard buying Texture Media.

8. Crowdfunding – The SEC adopted new equity-based crowdfunding rules. Texas had already approved crowdfunding last year. And the first Texas crowdfunding portal received approval from the state’s securities board. This is expected to free up a lot more capital for investment into mom and pop businesses.

9. The Tech Bubble and Unicorns – At SXSW, Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Bill Gurley told the crowd to enjoy the upside while it last. Discussions about Unicorns and the tech bubble continued throughout the year. Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at UT Austin, participated in a discussion about the deflation in valuations of so-called technology unicorns or private companies with valuations in excess of $1 billion.

10. Data – Data and analytics continue to transform entire industries like healthcare. Austin startups like Capsenta and PotentiaMetrics are using data to improve healthcare. And it’s not just in the healthcare field, People Pattern is helping brands better understand and cater to their customers through data analysis.

Phunware, a mobile marketing platform for brands, Monday filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $49.9 million.

The Austin-based company, founded in 2009, has previously raised $47.7 million in five rounds of funding, according to its Angellist profile.

In June of 2014, Phunware raised $30.7 million in Series E funding. Its previous investors include Fraser McCombs Ventures, Maxima Ventures, Wild Basin Investment, the Central Texas Angel Network, Cisco and WWE.

Alan Knitowski, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Phunware, recently tweeted several jobs Phunware is looking to fill including director of platform engineering, account executives in software and sales for media and entertainment and healthcare and a manager for software development.

By GRAHAM DICKIE
Special contribution to Silicon Hills News

The world of tech innovation may be colored by mythological dropout figures — Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Austin’s Michael Dell — but at the University of Texas, a course called Longhorn Startup is showing how students can stay in college and still pursue the next Facebook.

Or, to use some ideas from last semester’s group of enrollees, Longhorn Startup is showing how they can start the “Uber for dry cleaning,” the “Netflix and AirBnB for cosplay,” or a powdered drink company while studying for an engineering midterm happening right down the hallway.

Now in its fifth year at UT, the course teaches students through a mixture of talks from community figureheads, Ask Me Anything sessions (lingo borrowed from the website Reddit), and mentor programs. In the fall it functions as a once a week, seminar-style class, and in the spring it becomes a full, one-on-one lab experience about furthering a specific business venture.

In a typical session, Longhorn Startup could include a visit from Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, free pizza sponsored by a business like HomeAway, discussion on how to sell a company, and 30 minutes set aside for open pitches to like-minded peers, most of whom have serious entrepreneurial ambitions. It’s a place for ideas and people to meet.

“It always helps when you’re in a class with people who are similar to you,” said Nelson Tao, who started the so-called “Uber for dry cleaning” with classmate Ryan Norton. “Students are all out there, but it’s just random, different mentalities. It’s very helpful when everyone’s all clustered together.”

On a recent Thursday, inside the gleaming Bill and Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex on the east side of campus, the course’s main instructor, Josh Baer, is giving a history lesson. Baer is a looming figure in the Austin startup scene: In addition to his work with Longhorn Startup, he is the founder of Capital Factory, the downtown crossroads for tech life here that President Obama once visited.

He starts by showing a Youtube video involving jelly beans that draws an analogy about why one should take advantage of every day and do something special. He then begins a discussion about the many people who followed that advice in Austin, giving a primer on the startup scene here back to its origins in the early 1980s.

Baer goes on to note the big Austin success stories of the last few years (HomeAway, RetailMeNot, BazaarVoice) and lists current office spaces available for entrepreneurs, Capital Factory among them.

The class closes with a Q&A session alongside fellow startup guru Damon Clinkscales. The students quickly begin asking: “What’s the importance of a convertible investment?” “Is it appropriate to pass out fliers for our business at another startup’s party?” “How do I stop people from stealing my intellectual property?”

“I wouldn’t say they all have ideas,” Longhorn Startup teaching assistant Sanchana Vasikaran said. “But I think every single student has the same drive and motivation and desire to have a startup or are interested in the startup community.”

Lessons for the class have also touched on somewhat arcane concepts like accelerated financing, how to find a co-founder, and, in the case of student Abel Hernandez, the importance of fashion choices. (Remember the controversy around Zuckerberg’s hoodie during his initial public offering presentations?)

“Always dress nice,” Hernandez says. “Don’t ever show up with a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, raggedy hair and some piercings. Don’t go like that. As much as we’re trying to change the idea that it’s okay, to investors you seem like, ‘You shouldn’t do anything with him.’”

But despite all this information and the large amount of resources available to the class, the startup community on campus is “a little underground,” said Margaret Efthim of Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency, another organization for student entrepreneurs.

According to Efthim, though, that community is growing every year, and Longhorn Startup serves a big portion of it.

Vasikaran added that the enthusiasm is there — it just comes to down to publicizing what’s being offered.

“If more students were aware of the resources that programs like Longhorn Startup program and Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency are able to provide, I feel like more students would be involved in this community and more startups would probably be formed at UT,” Vasikaran said.

The serious work for Longhorn Startup, and the students who are still interested in the “underground community,” will start in the spring semester. A handful of nascent companies from the fall seminar advance, and the students behind them will receive credit hours and ample personal time with Baer and community mentors to flesh out their ideas.

Tao, who is behind the dry cleaning app, is already building his case.

“Today we had order number 13,” Tao said. “And order 13 is pretty neat because it was a repeat customer.”

On its website, Longhorn Startup has an extensive list of past companies that have crystallized with help from the class. Cerebri, a creation from this last spring, is focusing on rebuilding how call centers function and recently won $100,000 through a competition. Many others from the first few semesters still maintain social media pages and websites, and the class’s yearly demo day dependably generates local press coverage.

So even though the attendance is still relatively small, Longhorn Startup appears to have struck a chord with more than a few students and the larger Austin tech ecosystem. Dell, the computing magnate who famously found success after a premature exit from UT, has even come to speak to the class.

“You don’t have to drop out of college [to build a successful startup],” Efthim said. “Being at UT gives you some huge advantages.”

Editor’s note: Graham Dickie is a student at the University of Texas at Austin. He wrote this story for Professor Rosental Alves’ Entrepreneurial Journalism class. It is reprinted here with permission.

Oracle Tuesday announced plans to build a 560,000-square-foot campus and parking development on 27 acres on the waterfront of Austin’s Lady Bird Lake.

In addition, Oracle is buying an adjacent 295-unit apartment building for employees to live and “to support a work-life balance.” The campus located in the Lakeshore Development area will be focused on Oracle’s cloud expansion.

Oracle also announced plans to expand its local workforce by 50 percent during the next few years. The company declined to disclose how many employees it currently has in Austin. The Austin Chamber of Commerce reports Oracle has between 1,000 and 2,000 employees in Austin. The new jobs will be in Oracle Direct, its cloud sales organization. The company plans to hire a lot of recent university graduates and technical people early in their career.

“There are several reasons we picked Austin. It has a very vibrant technology community,” said Scott Armour, senior vice president of Oracle Direct. “It provides us the ability to acquire and retain the talent we need. I also think if you look at Austin it’s very well placed with universities in the area.”

The campus combined with company owned housing is a unique setting for Oracle, which is based in Redwood City, Calif. It will be designed with a special focus on the needs of millennials, Armour said.

Oracle, founded in 1977, has 130,000 employees worldwide. The company operates ten facilities in Texas and has a data center in Austin. Oracle has 400,000 customers across 145 countries. For fiscal 2015, Oracle reported total revenue of $38.2 billion and net income of $9.9 billion. Oracle sells software, Cloud computing infrastructure, hardware and services.

Last week, Oracle announced its acquisition of StackEngine, a year old Austin-based startup focused on cloud computing. All of the employees of StackEngine will join Oracle, the company announced. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“What Oracle is doing in Austin reinforces what I’m talking about when I say that great cities do big things, especially in the technology sector,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said in a news release. “With this significant investment, Oracle demonstrates that it believes in Austin and its future, and it’s serious about creating fantastic job opportunities in our community. I look forward to working with major employers like Oracle to tackle our biggest challenges, including Mobility and Affordability.”

“We’re positioning the State of Texas to become a home for innovation and technology,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a news release. “Thanks to our skilled workforce, combined with our low-tax and low-regulation environment, one of the largest tech companies in the world has chosen to expand in Austin. As Governor, I will continue to pursue policies that invite the expansion and relocation of tech companies to Texas.”

Julie Huls, the president of the Austin Technology Council, confirmed she is leaving the nonprofit organization in the first quarter of next year.

“I’m super proud of what we have built together,” Huls said. “I’m totally confident the organization will continue to expand, support and strengthen Austin’s technology industry.”

Huls has led the Austin Technology Council for the past six years. During that time, the organization has expanded its membership and grown its revenues and assets. And it recently moved into new headquarters at 301 Congress.

Huls doesn’t have any plans to announce for her next move. She plans to stay in Austin. The organization wanted to wait to announce the leadership change until they found a new president, but word leaked out early. ATC has organized a search committee to find a new president and it may hire an outside search firm, Huls said.

“Now is a great time for a new leader,” Huls said. “The fundamental pillars are in place.”

Huls compared the experience of running the ATC for the past six years similar to the demands of running a startup.

The ATC, founded in 1992 as the Austin Software Council, operates as an independent nonprofit 501-C6 organization. It also runs the ATC Foundation, a separate 501-C3 organization.

The ATC reported revenues of $584,774 for fiscal year 2013, compared to revenues of $319,235 in 2012, according to its latest 990-tax report filing. The organization also had net assets of $102,266 in 2013, compared to $46,331 a year earlier.

A year ago, ATC formed the Austin Technology Partnership with the City of Austin. It has an annual budget of $775,000 with the city contributing $294,500 and the rest of the money coming from the private sector.

ATC has three full time employees and four interns from the MBA program at St. Edward’s University. Austin’s tech industry has an annual regional economic impact of $21.5 billion and supports 26 percent of the area’s jobs.

The ATC has 280 companies as members representing 1,600 executives and more than 60,000 employees in the Austin area.