Veros Systems announced Monday that it has received $8 million in Series A venture financing.
Chevron Technology Ventures led the deal with additional investment from Austin Ventures and LiveOak Venture Partners.
Veros, which makes control center software called Veros ForeSight that monitors industrial operations, has been testing its software system for several years at multiple Chevron sites.
The company is also presenting at the Chevron-Oiltech Investment Network today in Houston.
Veros, based in Austin, received $1.5 million last year from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.
Tommy Knight and Alex Parlos founded Veros System in College States and licensed the rights to commercial the technology from Texas A&M University.
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Startup Grind San Antonio features an interview with Bob Metcalfe Tuesday at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio.
Metcalfe has had five careers so far and currently serves as professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Internet Society also inducted Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, and Robert Taylor, an alumnus of the University of Texas and the first project manager of the ARPAnet, into its Internet Hall of Fame on August 3rd.
The Internet Hall of Fame, established in 2012, recognizes trailblazers who have contributed significantly to the creation and expansion of the Internet.
Other inductees have included Vinton Cerf, Mitchell Baker and Al Gore.
Metcalfe and Taylor were both named Pioneers, for their contributions to the Internet’s early design and development.
“Metcalfe and Taylor also worked together at Xerox PARC from 1972-1975, when Metcalfe created the Ethernet,” according to the University of Texas. “Both have received the National Medal of Technology (Taylor in 1999; Metcalfe in 2003) and have been named museum fellows by the Computer History Museum (Metcalfe in 2008; Taylor in 2013), among many other awards and recognitions.”
South by Southwest is best known for its annual “spring break for techies” festival in March.
But SXSW also produces SXSW Eco, which takes place Oct. 7 through Oct 9th at the Austin Convention Center.
The Austin Technology Incubator and Austin Energy are partners in producing the event.
This year SXSW Eco features Startup Central with programming focused on entrepreneurship and investment in greentech, cleanweb and social impact. Startup Central includes panels, professional development opportunities and networking events.
One of the highlights of Startup Central is the Startup Showcase, which takes place on Oct. 8th from 9:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. It is an investor pitch competition featuring 25 startup finalists selected from applications worldwide. The companies will compete in front of VCs, investors and judges in three categories: Cleanweb, Greentech and Social Impact.
The finalists in the Cleanweb category include: Bandwagon, Fluitec Wind, Growing Energy Labs (GELI), Shoal Market, Used Cardboard Boxes, WaterSmart Software.
Social Impact: Beyonic, Librii, Portapure, Sseko, Team Rubicon, VOZ Apparel
Greentech: 1Energy Systems, AdBm, Blue River Technology, California Safe Soil (CSS), Microbiotecnologia Aplicada Dos Rios (MBTA2R), New Sky Energy, Rentricity, SecureWaters, SmarterShade, Sunamp Limited, Sylvatex, Zagster, GreenWizard
SXSW Eco also features Ignite, by SURGE Accelerator, from noon until 2:00 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 7th, featuring mini-meetings with startup representatives, investors and strategic partners. And Startup Springboard, presented by J.M. Ornstein also takes place on Monday from 3:15 to 5:30 p.m. The exhibition showcases 16 top early stage cleantech and social impact companies from around the world. Those companies include: Ecoscape Solutions, Effortless Energy, Halfsies, The Hometown Revival, Mapdwell, Maya Bamboo, Meshify, Optimal Eco, Repetual, SegUrWay, Sembraire, Agrarian Freedom Project, Stony Creek Colors, SynShark.
To register for Startup Central and Ignite visit SXSW Eco.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Ronald Miller, vice president of marketing and Luke Kyohere, president and CEO of Beyonic
That $30 billion goes to armed guards and armored trucks, currency exchanges and even helicopter drops to rural farmers and all that money could be used to lift 42 million more people out of poverty. The non-profits use cash because it’s the only currency that translates across countries and payer systems.
Ironically, in the countries where this cash goes, more than 80 percent of the rural population uses smart phones to buy goods and services. But the mobile and payment networks are so disjointed, it would very difficult for any organization to use them. That’s where Beyonic comes in. Beyonic is a cloud-based platform that lets payers use mobile networks for payments. Right now, Beyonic is working in Uganda, Kyohere’s native country, and Kenya. But the founders have in mind expanding globally as well as becoming the payer system of choice for governments and other enterprises currently relying on cash.
“In rural areas where people don’t have credit cards, these mobile wallets have become a big part of life,” said Ronald Miller, vice president of marketing and public relations for Beyonic. The phones they’re using are the old Nokia ones that went out of fashion years ago in the U.S. “But the organizations doing work in East Africa are not able to aid beneficiaries on mobile wallets because there are three or four different telephone companies and it’s difficult for an employer or aid organization to integrate with all the different mobile phone companies. So they go to the bank and pull out a bag of cash, bring it back to the office and their employees go on these field trips to take it to the beneficiaries. There’s extra cost and extra work that’s involved, and also extra risk.”
Making a Difference
“What I wanted,” Kyohere said, “was the idea of a payment system that was a branded product. It was beyond integrated circuits, more than just technology. This can actually help people achieve impact.”
The first impact, of course, would be freeing up the money now used in overhead to actually provide services, microloans and other benefits to more than 40 million people—roughly the entire population of Sudan–who are not now receiving that help. But another benefit is that receiving money via smartphones would give people an opportunity to keep better track of their money and help them achieve more financial understanding and independence.
“I think this is a no-brainer for African non-profits because it will greatly ease the operations of cash disbursal and, save money, and greatly cut down on potential for fraud, a huge issue with petty cash disbursement,” said Boris Bulayev executive director of Educate! an organization that trains leaders and entrepreneurs in Africa. Beyonic is working on cash distribution systems for the organization which is scaling from 54 schools to 200. “The biggest challenge to scaling in a place like Uganda is the distribution challenges. Beyonic provides a one-stop solution to solving the problem for distribution of cash as we scale.”
Building Beyonic
Kyohere has been refining the platform during the past six years. He got his degree in electrical engineering from Makerere University in Uganda and worked for several years in software and Internet companies in New York and Uganda before becoming senior software developer for a Danish company that handled online and microcredit services. His most recent jobs were in Uganda, working for mobile online financial companies. That’s where he got the idea for Beyonic.
He met his cofounders, vice president of operations Dan Kleinbaum and Miller at the McCombs School of Business where he got his Master’s in Technology Commercialization. The company now operates out of Austin Technology Incubator and has been racking up awards:
- They finished 2nd in the Global Venture Labs competition.
- First in the SXSW Longhorn Startup Showcase Pitch contest.
- First in the IBM Global Entrepreneur Pitch Competition.
“I think Luke is brilliant and has built a really relevant product in a market he really understands,” said Bulayev. “He has also found two partners who complement him perfectly. I joked after we first met how stereotypically Luke, Ronald and Dan played in their roles. I think teams like that are rare to put together, especially in East Africa, where there is a clear talent shortage. I feel like you can feel when a startup has the package – innovative product with massive scale potential and a well-rounded team to execute it – and I truly believe Beyonic has it all. ”
Dan Lowden, mentor, serial entrepreneur and currently vice president of business development at startup BRiGGO, said his main suggestions to the team were tips to tell their story more clearly, looking from the perspective of an investor.
“They’re so close to it they think the story resonates with everyone, but potential investors and partners may not get it,” Lowden said. Otherwise, the team has done a lot of due diligence, including having good discussions with potential partners to understand what has to be done to solve the problem. They’ve started good pilot programs; and they’re listening.
“They’re seizing on an opportunity to really help people, which I love,” Lowden said. “They’re trying to reduce the burden and improve efficiency and they do it incredibly well and elegantly.”
Beyonic allows for scheduled and repeat payments, authorization and access controls, multiple signoffs, reporting and analytics and other security and convenience features. At present the company is just focused on getting investment and expanding into countries like India and Pakistan. But they know that there are companies in the same space, like Visa, who might be acquirers down the road.
Bulayev acknowledges that the challenge ahead is to get non-profit organizations to migrate their systems as well as dealing with the charges mobile payments providers take for transactions. But, he said, the Beyonic system “is really easy to test…I really think they just need to execute.”
Rackspace has just launched programs for information technology professionals looking for training on OpenStack.
The San Antonio-based company founded OpenStack, the standard open-source operating system for cloud computing.
Now Rackspace has launched an online training course and four new classroom-based courses for OpenStack. It has also established a training partner program with New Horizons Computer Learning Centers, Skyline Advanced Technology Services and Intelligent Cloud Technologies to teach the OpenStack Fundamentals training course, said Tony Campbell, director of training and certification for OpenStack at Rackspace.
“The goal is to help us expand our reach,” Campbell said.
To date, Rackspace has trained more than 500 people and about 1,200 have gone through its programs, Campbell said. Rackspace has seven full time trainers.
The online course will be available in October and will teach OpenStack fundamentals to anyone interested in taking the course, Campbell said.
In addition, Rackspace has added four new public and private classroom-based training courses to its current training offering. Those classes include OpenStack Network, Building Cloudy Apps, Security in the Cloud and Hadoop on OpenStack.
Rackspace is expanding the training programs in response to demand, Campbell said. Millions of jobs are being created for experts in cloud technology, he said. And the popularity of OpenStack is growing. The software operating system turned three this summer and now has more than 10,000 contributors, more than 1,000 code authors and more than 1 million lines of code and more than 200 companies in 120 countries use OpenStack.
The classroom-based courses cost between $2,500 and $3,500 and are available as a public class or a private class, Campbell said. Training.Rackspace.com has a list of all the classes Rackspace offers.
Pricing for the online course has not yet been released, Campbell said. The course allows students to complete the work at their own pace and they have six months to complete it.
“The beauty of on demand online courses is gives control to the student,” Campbell said. “They are able to go at their own pace with online learning. They can go on their own path.”
All of the students completing the courses get certificates, Campbell said.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
TeXchange Panel on the State of Austin Tech
But it wasn’t definitive. And the discussion goes on. The question of whether Austin would ever catch up with Silicon Valley opened a TeXchange panel discussion about the state of Austin’s Tech scene Tuesday night. Panelist Morgan Flager, a partner at Silverton Partners, who grew up in Silicon Valley pointed out a fundamental difference between the two places: that being “laid back” is not considered a virtue in Silicon Valley.
There is a “gross stereotype that doesn’t apply to every entrepreneur in Austin,” Flager said, “that they have a more realistic objective for what they want to do with companies.” In Austin, he said, an entrepreneur who can sell a company for $150 million and walk away with 10 percent of that figures he has done well and made all the money he needs to move on and become an angel investor or start another company. In the Valley, a lot of people have sold companies for $150 million. “They want to push themselves and achieve a bigger outcome….I want to go to $1 billion. That motivates a behavior that does drive Silicon Valley.”
Of course, it helps that there are 40 VCs for every one in Austin, so there’s more competition for deals. But Baer pointed out that Austin is a town with a “bootstrap first mentality. You’re kind of expected to go do something on your own first, be able to build something and get in front of somebody and get some customers. We’re very revenue focused and we’re not focused on spending a lot of money…so those are two things that set us apart from Silicon Valley.” He also, he said, doesn’t believe the conventional wisdom that says companies who become billion dollar companies were aiming for that goal all along.
Morgan Flager, a partner at Silverton Partners
Panelist Brett Hurt pointed out that with the taxes and cost of living in the Valley “You have to hit the ball out the park to afford housing” which adds to the pressure to succeed. In addition, he said, Silicon Valley has numerous events like the TeXchange event, where entrepreneurs have access to top players like the panelists, as well as Rick Timmins of the Central Texas Angel Network, Kevin Callahan of Map My Fitness and Kevin Dasch of Mass Relevance—who moderated the panel. There is an abundance of mentorship. That’s beginning to be the case in Austin, he said. But one thing that would make a huge difference is if companies in Austin would stop selling to companies in California and would instead scale them to a size that would grow Austin’s economy. By not selling Bazaarvoice when he was offered $25 million early in the game, but instead holding on to it until it was worth more than $700 million, he also managed to create an environment where nearly 20 other entrepreneurs could learn how to run a company and spin off into their own ventures.
Hurt revisited this theme several times during the evening, but capitulated when Baer pointed out that, while he agrees with Hurt’s premise, he thinks entrepreneurs only tend to sell early the first time. Hurt sold his first company much earlier, Baer said. “When you’re a first time entrepreneur, that first check looks really exciting. My first company wasn’t a huge exit. But after that my whole life changed. For a lot of them, the money they get from their first company, that’s their security. That lets them go long.”
Too many incubators?
The next question was about whether there was an overabundance of incubators now in Austin. Most of the panelists agreed that the need for mentorship for local startups made the increase in incubators—including the recently added Techstars incubator—a positive development.
“It just depends on what expectations they have,” Flager said. “There is an overpopulation of companies coming out of incubators and not all of them are going to get series A funding. The growth of companies in incubators is going to give more investors an incentive to come here. There’s a better class of people to talk to.”
Baer countered that he didn’t see any awesome companies not getting funded. “There are some not-quite-right companies that are getting funded,” he said. “But I don’t see any companies that should be getting funded that aren’t getting funded.”
The panelists then discussed the role of UT in fostering entrepreneurship. They all agreed that UT has incredible programs for entrepreneurs. But, said Hurt who is serving as Entrepreneur in Residence with Laura Kilcrease at the McCombs School of Business, many of the programs are siloed. When he tweeted that he would be available for consultation one night, he said, the group of students who came were a mix, business students, engineering students, communication students. All those skill sets are needed to start a successful company. But rarely do the schools teaching those skills interact regarding startups.
At schools like Stanford and MIT, Flager said, students either drop out or immediately after graduation jump into a startup because they want to “be at the next badass startup.” That kind of entrepreneurial fervor is created by the ecosystem and Austin isn’t there yet.
After the panel discussion, the room of more than 100 people broke into groups to come up with more questions for the panel. Among them was the question whether it takes a different personality to grow a company to $50 million than it does to take a company from $50 million on.
Hurt said he felt like a founder selling a company because he or she couldn’t figure out how to scale it was, in some ways “the ultimate sign of selfishness. That person should get out of the way and hire someone who can play a different role. If the business prospects aren’t there, fine. Sell.” But if they are, he said, they should do whatever it takes to grow the company. In his case, he hired a CEO coach to help him figure out how to scale Bazaarvoice, rather than sell.
TeXchange is a community of startup founders, business executives, and investors who meet to exchange ideas, and share experiences.
Mu Sigma, a global data analytics company, announced Thursday plans to open an Analytics Center in Austin with 300 employees.
The Chicago-based company reports the center will have 300 “decision scientists” plus support staff. It will have a “Delivery Center, Customer Lab and Innovations Lab.” The center will open in October and will complement Mu Sigma’s operation center with 2,500 employees in Bangalore, India.
Krishna Rupanagunta will run the Delivery Center and Customer Lab and Zubin Dowlaty will run the Austin Innovation Lab.
Mu Sigma has already hired more than 30 math, science and engineering graduates from Georgia Tech, University of Texas, University of Chicago, Purdue and Rutgers and other universities.
“Our client base is growing swiftly all over the world, and having a large analytics center in the U.S. will help us better serve clients who need rapid turnaround on their analytics projects,” Dhiraj Rajaram, founder and CEO of Mu Sigma said in a news release. “With decision scientists in both Austin and Bangalore, we’ll essentially have 24-hour coverage for clients.”
Mu Sigma selected Austin, “often touted as the Silicon Valley of the South” because of its educated workforce, culture of innovation, education system, “vibrant outdoor environment and affordability, which are all attractive to the decision scientists the company is planning to recruit.”
The Mu Sigma Analytics Center is located at 2222 Rio Grande Street.
Photo courtesy of Cinegif
The investors included the Baylor Angel Network and the Houston Angel Network and its Halo Fund.
Cinegif plans to use the funding on sales and marketing for its cloud-based Graphics Interchange Format, known as GIF, marketing platform. The company sells primarily to marketers, advertisers and agencies.
Graham McFarland founded the company and serves as its CEO. He previously founded ExpressDigital and PhotoReflect. Here’s a post SHN did on the company last year.
Since then the company has created a Do It Yourself Platform that allows anyone to create GIFs easily. Cinegif recently partnered with Pulsepoint to market the service and T3Media to create a GIF stock image library. Cinegif’s partners also include HP, which featured Cinegif’s technology at tradeshow and festival booths this fall.
“Today’s average online attention span is only 10 seconds, and getting noticed is becoming increasingly important,” McFarland said in a news release. “Animated GIFs add motion to messages and are as engaging as a video but as simple to use as a still image, making them the perfect medium for digital marketing.”
By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Allison Stevens, founder of PrepDish. Photo courtesy of PrepDish.
Allison Stevens founded PrepDish. She trained in the culinary arts at Johnson & Wales University and is gluten intolerant herself. The startup sells weekly gluten-free meal plans which can be downloaded from PrepDish.com. Each do-it-yourself plan has a recipe for four dinners, one breakfast, one snack, and one dessert and contains a grocery list of the ingredients needed. A few plans also contain salad recipes. The recipes are simple enough that a whole week of meals can be prepared in two to three hours, even for those less experienced in the kitchen.
Each meal plan costs $25 and there are currently 12 different plans to choose from on the site. One new plan is added each month.
Steven financed PrepDish.com through her personal chef business and uses the same recipes she prepares at home and for her clients. Since the startup launched last January, customers have downloaded about 750 plans.
Chris Anderson interviewing Elon Musk at SXSW Interactive 2013, photo courtesy of SXSW
The two-week long SXSW conference in March was the largest ever. The conference expanded into new venues and had an even greater economic impact, according to a study by Greyhill Advisors.
The conference has grown in popularity in the past several years and has become a popular place for creative professionals to meet, network and share ideas.
“SXSW continues to be a truly remarkable event for Austin,” Austin Chamber President Michael Rollins said in a news release. “This festival not only brings the world’s attention to Austin’s strengths in community, creativity and commerce, but also provides opportunities to spotlight and support our small businesses which work tirelessly to prepare for – and engage with – the festival’s record-setting attendance of over 155,000. Every year we see more quantitative and qualitative benefits from SXSW, and are thrilled to see what the future holds.”
More than 41,700 people attended SXSW events in 2013 and the number of platinum all-access badgeholders grew by 60 percent. SXSW is “the single most profitable event” for Austin’s hospitality industry. Here’s a few statistics from the report on its impact:
• 9 days of industry conferences, a 4-day trade show, a 6-night music festival featuring more than 2,200 bands, and a 9-day film festival with more than 400 screenings.
• In 2013, SXSW directly booked 13,000 individual hotel reservations totaling 56,000-plus room nights—a 10 percent increase over 2012. Fueled by limited capacity and an overall increase in spending by registrants the average nightly hotel rate jumped 20 percent to nearly $255.
• At nearly 155,000, the total number of 2013 SXSW Conference and Festival participants (defined as any individual who attended at least one SXSW activity) exceeded all previous records.
• SXSW’s popular free-to-the-public consumer events, including the 3-night Auditorium Shores concert series, the 2-day Digital Creatives Job Market, 4-day Flatstock poster art show, 1-day Edu Future Plans Fair, 3-day Music Gear Expo and the 3-day SXSW Gaming Expo, attracted an additional 150,000 participants.
