Taking the pain out of moving is a problem that Bellhops seeks to solve in the quickly evolving on-demand economy.

The Chattanooga, Tenn.-based startup launched into the Austin market a few years ago and now has more than 65 contractors, University of Texas at Austin students, who work part-time to move people around Austin.

Bellhops currently operates in more than 100 cities nationwide. Cameron Doody and Stephen Valhos launched the company in 2013. Its sweet spot is using an online platform and mobile apps to allow people to easily book a moving team. It also uses strong, young college students as its on-demand workforce. They can pick and choose from the jobs listed on the platform to adjust the work to their schedule.

Last November, Bellhops closed on a $6.5 million Series A round of funding, which has allowed the company to expand in its most productive markets.

The moving industry appears ripe for disruption. It’s composed mostly of small businesses with about 48 percent of the industry made up of companies with fewer than five employees, according to the American Moving & Storage Association.

And the market is large. An estimated 12 percent of the population moves every year, according to the association. College markets are particularly mobile with students moving in and out every semester.

The Bellhops job appeals to college students because it provides a lot of flexibility and real world job skills, said Zach Toth, Bellhops Austin city manager.

For example, a lot of the students use the ratings from their Bellhops jobs to get their first jobs in their chosen fields after graduation, Toth said. Bellhops provides a customer rating system that gives feedback to the movers. Those customer ratings can demonstrate a whole range of desirable skills to future employers including good customer service, problem solving skills and the ability to prioritize tasks, Toth said.

Bellhops also pays $15 an hour to a move-in Capitan and $13 an hour to a Wingman plus tips, Toth said.

Bellhop Chris Pringle, a UT student, needed a job with a lot of flexibility and good pay. He works about three to five jobs a week.

“I absolutely love the experience,” Pringle said. “ Coming into it, I had no idea that the moving industry is one that is old and outdated. All of my customers are excited to see young college guys come to help them out with such positive attitudes. It truly makes for an awesome experience on both sides of the transaction.”

Hector Hernandez, the top Bellhops mover in the country, truly loves the work. He works four times a week during the school year but in the summer, he worked as much as possible with up to five jobs a day, six days a week.

“I get the chance, each move to help someone on one of the hardest days of the year,” Hernandez said. “Since this is a very personal job, because I am handling people’s belongings, a certain type of trust comes with the job and I am able to make a lot of great connections.”

Robin James recently hired Bellhops to help with a move. She heard about them through the University of Texas Parents Association.

“I’m a total girly girl and I needed help unloading my son’s stuff in Austin at his new apartment,” James said.

James was impressed with the service. Her Bellhops were fast and friendly, she said. And she said she would use them again.

“Because it was so easy to make an appointment, they were reliable and able to accommodate us with no issues when we arrived earlier than expected,” she said.

In its continued expansion across the country, Austin-based Favor announced this week it has launched in Washington, D.C.

Favor is now available in 14 cities nationwide and in Canada.

For the launch, the company is offering its first time customers in D.C. free delivery using the promo code “District.” The company employs errand runners which will fetch anything from “burritos to iPhone chargers, in under an hour.” Favor has apps for both iPhone and Android smartphones.

“With the city’s rapidly expanding tech industry and thriving cultural scene, we know that residents keep a busy schedule — and we look forward to helping make their lives that little bit easier,” Jag Bath, Chief Executive Officer and President of Favor, said in a news release.

Favor, founded in 2013, has received $16.9 million in venture funding to date. With its latest investment of $13 million received in March, the company is continuing its expansion into new cities.

InforcePro, a life insurance technology platform, announced Tuesday that it has closed a $4 million venture capital round.

To date, the Austin-based startup, with 25 employees, has raised more than $5 million. It launched its platform in 2014. Its software now monitors more than two million life insurance policies.

Cameron Jacox and Karan Kanodia founded the company.

“This financing will help enable us to grow our team by roughly 400% over the next 24 months to more effectively capitalize on the booming demand for our insurance policy monitoring software, allowing us to help more than 600 million global policyholders’ identify contract options, performance changes, and suitability” Jacox said in a news release.

Austin-based LiveOak Venture Partners made the investment.

“LiveOak’s investment will help InforcePRO capitalize on the global demand for their solutions, and accelerate the company’s pace of product innovation,” Venu Shamapant, general partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, said in a news release.

Civitas Learning announced Monday that Warburg Pincus is leading an investment of up to $60 million in the company.

The Austin-based startup, founded in 2011, has created analytic software and services for universities. The goal is to help the universities better engage with students and lead to higher graduation rates.

Civitas Learning plans to use the funds to expand its data and analytics platform’s capabilities and for strategic acquisitions and international expansion.

Civitas Learning started out with just six colleges and universities and has since expanded to more than 850 campuses worldwide and it reaches more than 2.7 million students. That company provides universities with a suite of apps that help advisors reach students, faculty improve engagement and students plan their courses and program.

“We intend to help fuel an ecosystem of educational innovation,” Charles Thornburgh, Founder and CEO of Civitas Learning, said in news statement. “Already, our partner institutions are making unprecedented breakthroughs for students by using rigorous data science to improve the student experience. With this investment, we’re going to be able to improve and accelerate both learning and student outcomes for our partner institutions.”

“Civitas Learning is truly a pioneer in the field of using applied data analytics to improve student outcomes,” Adarsh Sarma, Managing Director at Warburg Pincus said in a news statement. “We have been impressed with the team’s vision of dramatically improving student outcomes by developing an education analytics system. We look forward to partnering with the management team and existing investors as the company builds on its excellent track record.”

In addition to Warburg Pincus, other investors include Emergence Capital Partners, Austin Ventures, Rethink Education, SJF Ventures and Gera Venture Capital.

Civitas Learning has previously raised $28.9 million in venture funding, including $16.2 million in a Series C round in January, according to its CrunchBase profile.

Applications for Techstars Austin are open, said Amos Schwartzfarb, its new managing director.

The Techstars program is accepting applications Sept. 18th through Nov. 18th. The next class kicks off Feb. 15th and runs three months.

Schwartzfarb is looking for ten to 12 companies for this next cohort. They can come from anywhere in the world and be in any industry.

So what exactly is Schwartzfarb looking for in this next class? Business to consumer or business to business companies are encouraged to apply, he said. With the consumer companies, Schwartzfarb wants to see there’s potential for traction.

“If they have a small, active user base and they can show they can grow it,” Schwartzfarb said.

With the business-to-business companies, he’s less worried about the traction. He just wants to see that they are solving a problem that needs to be solved. Or that they are tackling a problem that has already been solved in a manual way and they’re using technology to make it more efficient, he said.

The Techstars accelerator program is highly selective. But the companies that get in receive $20,000 in an equity investment and an option on $100,000 note. They also go through a disciplined program that helps take them to their next milestone, Schwartzfarb said. They also get tapped into an experienced mentor network, he said. And they become members of a tight-knit global accelerator, investor and mentor group, he said.

Austin-based infinite io announced it has completed $3.4 million in funding led by Chicago Ventures.

“We are very excited to be building a world-class enterprise software company here in Austin, Texas, where there is a wealth of talent to support our growth plans,” Mark Cree, CEO of infinite io, said in a news release. “The new funding will be used to address the needs of our growing customer base and to support our go-to-market partners.”

infinte io, founded in 2014, makes a network controller that allows companies to migrate inactive data to low cost public or private cloud storage. The company reports its technology can save companies on cloud storage costs by as much as 80 percent while providing easier access to the data.

“Our controllers are the first to allow IT managers to seamlessly integrate new storage technologies, such as cloud storage and flash memory, into existing environments with no changes to applications, storage systems, network file paths, file systems or the user experience,” according to infinite io.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Richard Nelli, President, CloudVault Health, delivering the keynote speech at the Austin Technology Council’s healthcare event.

Filtering and crunching big data into smaller and more consumable pieces providing valuable insights for clients is a huge emerging industry in Austin and nationwide. That’s the big takeaway from the Austin Technology Council’s conference Emerging Austin: Healthcare Tech at the AT&T Conference Center Thursday.

The Dell Medical School at UT sees an opportunity to build a new healthcare system from the ground up, said Mini Kahlon, vice president of strategy and partnerships at Dell Medical School. The school is accepting applications for its first class of students. The inaugural class kicks off in 2016.

The new school is operating like a startup. It is hiring people who thrive in chaos and like disruption to tackle the tough problems that exist in the healthcare industry today, Kahlon said.

“Do you thrive on flux and chaos and noise or not?” Kahlon said. “If you thrive on it, you’d be a good match. If you don’t, given what we’re doing, it’s not going to work.”

Healthcare is a big business. Ten years ago, healthcare was the largest or second largest industry in five states, said Richard Nelli, president of CloudVault Health. He delivered the keynote address at the conference.

Today, healthcare is the largest or second largest industry in all but four states, Nelli said.

It’s also a business bogged down in bureaucracy and slow to change and adapt to the digital age, Nelli said. But that is starting to change, he said.

“We’re on the leading edge of a transformation in healthcare,” Nelli said.

On a slide, Nellie showed the audience a magazine advertisement from the 1950s that proclaimed more cardiologists smoke Camel cigarettes than any other brand. He said doctors today know the data tells a different story.

Data today is providing greater insights for patients, doctors and hospitals to make better choices, improve quality care and save money, Nelli said.

“The consumer has become much more of an engaged consumer in this whole equation” Nelli said.

The healthcare treatments, methods and protocols used today that provide the best outcomes at the lowest costs are really a function of data, Nelli said. Today, it’s like Moneyball, statistical analysis used for baseball, is being adopted by hospitals with data scientists and information technology experts mashing up data to get the best results, he said.

“Data is driving a lot of this transformation,” Nelli said.

One thing Nelli wanted people to takeaway from his talk is to not make healthcare data analysis too complicated.

“Healthcare is so screwed up you really don’t have to do a lot to add a lot of value,” Nelli said.

He gave the example of a group of elderly women who lived in a high-rise apartment complex that kept getting re-admitted to the hospital by ambulance. It turns out that the women ran out of their prescriptions and because they lived in a high-rise they had difficulty getting them refilled. As a result they ended up back in the hospital. The hospital hired a Jimmy Johns deliveryman to run the prescriptions to the women and they saved a huge amount of money in hospital costs, Nelli said.

“It doesn’t have to be rocket-science,” he said.

With all the data flowing through the healthcare system, data breaches have become a big problem, Nelli said. Forty percent of all data breaches in the world that occurred last year happened in the healthcare industry, he said.

Healthcare data is worth ten times as much on the black-market as what a credit card number is worth, Nelli said. That’s because the healthcare information is accurate, detailed and it’s generally updated every year, he said.

The industry needs to work more on cyber security of healthcare records, Nelli said.

Last year, $11 billion of Medicare fraud took place with stolen data, Nelli said. A high profile hospital also got hacked recently and its electronic prescription system got breached, Nelli said. The hackers sent fake e-prescriptions to drug stores and then went and picked up the drugs, he said.

In Austin, an emerging area of startup activity is in the medical technology and healthcare area, said Mellie Price, founder and CEO of SoftMatch.

In fact, one third of Capital Factory’s new startups are in the medical field.

Price spoke Thursday at the Austin Technology Council’s Emerging Austin: Healthcare Tech summit at the AT&T Education and Conference Center. About 150 people attended the event.

Overall, the deal flow and venture funds in Austin still greatly lag Silicon Valley in all of areas of technology, Price said. Austin attracts $600 million annually in venture capital to invest in about 150 deals, said Price. That compares to Silicon Valley’s $24 billion in venture capital annually for 1,500 deals.

With the new Dell Medical School, the opportunities for Austin to excel as a center for medical technology startups is great, Price said. But the community has to support the effort and continue to rally around those seeking to make change, she said.

To showcase some of the talent already working on big ideas here, ATC hosted an Austin Showcase panel, which Price moderated. The panel featured Bryan “Buzz” White, founder and CEO of BlueHub Health, Richard Sayles, Founder of Sapling, Senem Guney, founder and CEO of NarrativeDX , Sriram Vishwanath, president of Accordion Health and Patti Rogers, founder and CEO of Rallyhood.

White created BlueHub Health after a life-threatening medical issue arose with his wife and White couldn’t find a previous medical record with information on it that he needed. So he created BlueHub Health that allows patients to keep track of all of their medical records online in one place.

“Imagine never having to fill out a clipboard at a doctor’s office again,” White said.

BlueHub Health says it costs less than $1 and takes less than one minute to retrieve medical records from its system, compared to an industry average of seven minutes at a cost of $7 for traditional medical record keeping system.

Sapling is tackling the problem of keeping patient records safe when they are transferred to a law firm, said Richard Sayles, its founder.

“You need software that does exactly what you want it to do,” Sayles said. “Sapling builds flexible, intuitive software.”

Sapling is working with Norton Rose Fulbright’s healthcare group to provide data and security to medical records sent to its lawyers. Sapling created a system that acts as a virtual private cloud for clients and provides them with their own data space. None of the medical records get mixed up. The software creates a separate space for each client and it’s scalable, Sayles said.

The software keeps the law firm in compliance with federal healthcare privacy laws, Sayles said.

NarrativeDX is a platform that provides patient experience data to a hospital. It takes data from a variety of sources including surveys, phone transcriptions, social media records and uses its natural language processing software to provide feedback to hospitals, said Senem Guney, its founder and CEO.

“Improving patient experience is a top priority across the spectrum,” she said.

Hospitals get reimbursed at higher rates for providing quality care, Guney said. So it’s important for them to improve their performance based on patient feedback.

For example, one hospital got low rankings for nurse communication, Guney said. NarrativeDX’s data digging and analysis figured out why. It turns out that on cold nights the hospital ran out of blankets and the nurses told the patients they didn’t have any more blankets. The patients wrote poor communication in the survey because they didn’t have a place for no blankets. The hospital restocked blankets and improved its rating.