Outbox, which digitizes postal mail and delivers it to a costumer’s computer, phone or iPad, just completed its Series A round of financing for $5 million.
The Austin-based company previously raised $2.5 million in angel funding.
The funds will allow the company to expand its operations in San Francisco and to hire more people, according to the company’s blog post.
Mike Maples at Floodgate led the round. Peter Thiel and Brian Singerman at Founders Fund, Correlation VC, TDF Ventures, WTI, Expansion VC, Joel Peterson Capital and Emerge DE also invested in the round.
And more than 80 AngelList investors participated in the financing.
The company recently introduced a new Android app and has processed more than 150,000 pieces of mail so far. The service is available in Austin and San Francisco.
Evan Baehr and Will Davis, Harvard classmates, founded Outbox in 2011.
Every day Outbox’s employees, decked out in bright red Under Armour shirts, drive their white Outbox Prius cars to pick up customers mail. They then open the mail and scan each piece into a highly secure website. Customers can then access their mail and decide which items they want hard copies of to keep. Those items are delivered every Friday to the customers.
Outbox charges $4.99 a month for the service. Customers only need to send a picture of their mailbox key to Outbox to get started. Outbox then scans the key and creates a copy of it using a 3-D printer.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

It’s a dubious distinction to be among Austin’s best kept secrets, but that pretty much describes St. Edward’s University’s entrepreneurship undergraduate program. As Tony Alvarado, interim chair of the program expressed when he came on at St. Ed’s in 2010: “Wow this is an amazing place! Does anybody know we exist?”
St. Ed’s Bachelor of Business Administration in Entrepreneurship started with a 2003 grant from the Kauffman Foundation, Alvarado said. The program is small, only 70 students in 2013, and clearly lacks the resources of behemoth McCombs at the University of Texas. The entrepreneurship program at St. Ed’s is more likely to focus on new uses for existing or emerging technology than on creating new technology. It’s only beginning to build relationships with incubators and accelerators such as Capital Factory and Tech Ranch.
But it has its own advantages. One is that, with classes so small, teachers and business people who come in to be mentors can connect more intimately with individual students and their projects.
“To be an entrepreneur you have to know your risk tolerance and what motivates you,” Alvarado said. “This entrepreneurial journey is fraught with traps. Your mindset has to be calibrated to take that journey. Because the program is so small, our classes are about 15-to-20 students, we have good contact with our students and we’re able to assess where they need a little bit of tweaking, support, encouragement.”

Focused on Service

And the second, but possibly most important aspect of St. Edward’s program is that it’s part of a school whose mission of service fosters a lot of community support among local business owners. Founded by the Catholic Order of the Holy Cross but with a non-denominational orientation, St. Edward’s provides financial aid for more than 60 percent of its students, many of whom come from homes in the lower economic brackets both in the U.S. and abroad. The university also strongly supports international studies and global perspectives, making study abroad accessible, and encouraging community service and volunteerism.
In fact, one program available to entrepreneurial students is to accompany MBA students on trips to campuses abroad where St. Ed’s has relationships to consult with businesses. That might include helping with micro-lending programs in Honduras or creating a marketing and business plan for a woman who owns a winery in France. The school also provides consulting for Austin business owners who have going concerns but no educational background in business.
“Someone here on South Congress might have a taqueria and they are able to hit the big time but have no idea how to scale this. Here comes our entrepreneurship program,” Alvarado said. “We encourage our students to reach out to this community in South Austin and start talking to local entrepreneurs. Observe what’s happening around St. Edwards….. We’re very well positioned to get our courses and students into these eco systems.”
Fred Schmidt, principal of Bullseye Business Development, co-founder of Portalarium and co-founder of Wild About Music Galleries, is an advisor for St. Ed’s School of Management and Business. He’s also the father of a recent grad from the MBA program.
“(Service) is woven into the student body,” Schmidt said. “With the amount of scholarships they issue…you’ve got everything from very wealthy children from the Middle East, to my son, to children who have never been out of Costa Rica and they’re here getting an education. So the focus is not in how much money they’re going to make or how important they’re going to be but whether they’re going to do something in the world that makes it a better place.”
In addition to numerous core business courses, the program has a “mission” segment that covers topics such as “the human experience, ethics and science in perspective.”

Quietly and Humbly

“Some things do have right answers,” Alvarado said. “You have to learn those competencies. But once we take care of those basics, they need to understand there’s a whole world out there with no right answers but huge problems….. What really excites me about entrepreneurship is that it’s the first major where you’ve got to know everything: accounting, finance, human resources, communications, technology…and you’ve got to be a team player because you’re not going to be good at all those things.”
One of the program’s star students is Hunter McLaughlin, who will graduate from the program in December. He started out as a computer science major, switched to finance, then started a clothing company to test out an idea and decided he was hooked on entrepreneurship. He’s already helping to run two companies.
McLaughlin is president of Basanty, a social portfolio system for primary schools where students can do all their work online. The company operates out of Capital Factory and has seven employees.
“You start off in kindergarten and when you apply to college you have this entire portfolio” that can be used is applying for scholarship, for example.
But he’s also founder of Brew Cupid, which mails coffee to customers’ homes on a regular basis. Capital Factory is one of their customers.
“We’ve been around for about five months and we just became profitable about three weeks ago,” McLaughlin said. “We started with, like $400, so we ran it really lean, I guess.”
McLaughlin didn’t notice any particular lack of resources at St. Ed’s because “I was already doing things on my own. But you have really, really tight-knit relationships. You share ideas, bounce things off each other. The network is really good as well. But fundingwise, there are no resources.”
Perhaps, as Schmidt said, that’s because St. Ed’s program is only beginning to emerge on the radar.
“Everybody knows about McCombs School and UT, but St. Ed’s and the Acton School of Entrepreneurship are sort of lost in the shadow of the giant, longhorn 40 acres. There are amazing students (at St. Ed’s). Certainly those who I have interfaced with are good kids with good heads on their shoulders. They have practical skills and come out immediately productive for any employer. They have enough core knowledge to come into the entrepreneurial world with a good foundation.
“But it’s still a best-kept secret. If you’re walking south on the west side of Brazos just above 7th Street and look down through the portico to the balcony at the Driskill Hotel, you can see all the way to the SEU hill on South Congress. The balcony frames St. Ed’s in its columns. It’s been there forever, quietly and humbly going on about its amazing work.”

Got a great idea for the next big thing?
Then South by Southwest’s PanelPicker might be a great place to vet your idea. Every year, SXSW puts together a portion of its popular annual conference from its PanelPicker process. That involves people submitting ideas, other voting on their favorite ideas and the SXSW folks selecting the programs for 2014.
“SXSW Interactive is positioned at the forefront of creativity, so the more inventive the idea, the better.”
The PanelPicker is for programming for the Music, Film, Interactive and EDU conference activities that takes place March 3 – 16th next year in Austin.
The PanelPicker system will be accepting proposals today through July 26th. Then community voting begins on August 19th and continues through Sept. 6th.
The first round of confirmed programming for all three conferences will be released on Monday, October 14, 2013.
“The PanelPicker interface is a natural extension of the creative intermingling that takes place during the festival itself,” Roland Swenson, SXSW’s Managing Director, said in a news statement “We are excited that we can provide a forum for new ideas to debut and flourish year-round.”

RideScout, an Austin-based startup that has created a transportation app, now offers access to car2go.
RideScout’s app is currently available for iPhones and provides aggregated information on public, private and social transportation options and recommends a “best ride” based on cost and time.
Now car2go members can reserve a vehicle using the RideScout app. The app also allows people to sign up for the car2go service.
“Our hope is that RideScout will help teach people who don’t even know about car2go yet and how accessible and easy to use the car2go service is,” RideScout CEO and Founder Joseph Kopser said in a news statement.
“RideScout is like car2go super-sized“ said Austin car2go member Ytzel McDaniel. “I can see public
transit, taxis, pedicabs, ridesharing and now car2go too. The cool thing is that RideScout gives a car2go trip cost estimate – something the car2go app doesn’t even do yet.”
The full integration of car2go into the RideScout App will allow RideScout, currently in beta, to quickly build relationships with car2go members in Washington DC, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Miami and other U.S. car2go cities, Kopser said.

Austin-based Food on the Table, a meal planning app, has partnered with the Mom365 app to provide recipes and more.
Together, the two companies have launched Mom365 Meals, a comprehensive Mom365-branded mobile and website app for busy new moms.
“Food on the Table has been a leader in its category with the highest user rating in iTunes (currently 5 stars) and engagement metrics that rival top mobile shopping apps like eBay and Amazon,” according to the company. “With Food on the Table’s new platform licensing program, digital publishers can offer their users the industry’s most powerful platform served up under their own brand.”
“Mom365’s highly engaged community is a perfect fit for our service,” Manuel Rosso, founder and CEO of Food on the Table said in a news statement. “They offer the most complete set of content and services for moms. We’re delighted to work with such a strong and quickly growing partner.”

BitAngels, a network that invests in early-stage Bitcoin and cryptocurrency startups, has invested $100,000 in BlueSeed, an offshore Bitcoin incubator.
The venture is based offshore in international waters in the Silicon Valley area so it’s not subject to U.S. regulators.
“Bitcoin is a digital currency which allows anonymous and instant peer-to-peer payments,” according to the Better Business Bureau. It estimates more than $1.3 billion worth of bitcoins are currently in circulation.
Four individual BitAngels each invested $25,000.
“The beauty of the BitAngels model is that we can rapidly evaluate and fund opportunities with global resources, distributed due-diligence databases and deep-pocket angels anxious to expand the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency infrastructure,” BitAngels co-founder and Executive Director David A. Johnston said in a news release.
BitAngels has more than 120 members and $17.7 million in capital to invest in Bitcoin startups.
Johnson of Austin founded the company along with SocialRadius CEO and Marketwire founder Michael Terpin of Las Vegas and four additional founding board members: Gyft CEO Vinny Lingham, Memory Dealers CEO and “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver, Tradehill CEO Jered Kenna, and angel investor Sam Onat Yilmaz.

Austin-based Silverback Enterprise Group announced Thursday the purchase of Noetix Corp., which makes business intelligence and data analytics software.
Noetix, based in Redmond, Wash, has more than 1,500 customers for its software products.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We are excited to welcome Noetix to the Silverback family of companies,” Jack McDonald, Chairman and CEO of Silverback Enterprise Group said in a news statement. “Business intelligence, analytics, and performance management is a $13+ billion growing market1, driven by the ‘Big Data’ explosion of structured and unstructured data. Noetix’s product suite and patented metadata technology provide a powerful platform for addressing this growing market opportunity.”
“Partnering with Silverback will give us access to the resources we need to achieve the rapid growth we envision for Noetix,” Doug Moore, President of Noetix, said in a news statement. “Noetix customers and partners will benefit from this extremely positive next step for our business, which will improve our ability to deliver even more innovative BI products.”

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Iraq war veteran Gary Walters lost his lower leg in an improvised explosive device explosion outside Baghdad in 2006. He now wears a prosthesis. Walters likes to stay active, but simply mowing his lawn can cause so much sweat buildup in his prosthesis that it quickly becomes un-wearable – causing his limb to slide around and get friction blisters.
“If you get a good blister you might be out of your leg for a day or two. If that doesn’t heal and becomes a real sore, you might be out of your leg for a week or two,” said Walters.
It’s a common problem for amputees but also an unsolved one, and the only solution Gary’s Prosthetist could suggest was to “put deodorant on the limb” to try and keep it dry.
As a University of Texas at San Antonio undergraduate engineering student, Walters later pitched this problem in his capstone design class. Fellow engineers Austin Darius, Jake Montez, and David Schultz tackled the problem head on. Their solution – now named the Aquilonix prosthetic cooling system – is a prosthetic component that keeps an amputee’s limb dry even while active. The device is now the central product of new San Antonio medical startup Leto Solutions.
The team, Leto Solutions, went on to win UTSA’s $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition. The biannual competition is held by the Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship – or CITE. In the CITE program that precedes the competition, business students and engineering students come together to market a product – in this case the Aquilonix system — and form a viable business model as company.
For the competition, Walter’s engineering team was joined by business majors Nam Do, Eric Michael Garza, Enrique Medrano and Justin Stultz. In the program, the students did market research, created a business plan, and presented the product to a board of judges. Becky S. Ariana, who specializes in bringing medical technology from the conceptual prototype stage to the market, mentored the group.
Now hired as the startup’s CEO, Ariana says that Leto Solutions is not just a business venture; it’s a personal mission for everyone involved.
“This product spoke to all of us because it’s a necessity for amputees,” said Ariana. “Almost everyone on the team had contact with someone in their life who was also an amputee.”
UTSA graduate Justin Stultz, who led the Leto Solutions business team, has both a cousin and a neighbor who use prosthetics and suffer from heat buildup — giving Stultz firsthand experience of the struggles they face.
“Once they have this freedom and then due to a secondary infection caused by heat and sweat buildup they have to go without the prosthetic for three and four days…it just puts a complication in their life that doesn’t need to be there,” said Stultz. “It’s 2013 and we have the technology to do this. It’s just a matter of getting it done.”
The buildup of heat and sweat can cause more than just discomfort and pain for amputees, however. Diabetic amputees can contract gangrene leading to additional limb loss and even death.
When heat and sweat buildup inside a prosthetic joint, it causes skin breakdown, friction blisters, and open sores. For diabetic patients who have trouble healing, these sores can become infected by bacteria and then develop gangrene. As the flesh starts to decay, it must be further amputated. If the gangrene gets into the blood stream, the diabetic may become septic and possibly die.
The Aquilonix prosthetic cooling system helps prevent these problems by keeping the limb from sweating in the first place, which means the user will no longer slide around and become blistered. The system uses special thermoelectric disks that, when subjected to electricity, actually pull heat from one side of the disk material to the other and away from the limb. A second component then dissipates the heat with a small fan. The system can be turned on and off at will from a control switch on the prosthetic and runs on a rechargeable lithium polymer battery. The battery life is only two to three hours, but it can be easily charged at home in a similar manner to a mobile phone. Incorporating the system to an existing prosthetic only adds 2 pounds. According to Walters, the system is complex enough to self-regulate the heat removal – meaning users will never have to worry about over-cooling their limb. While Leto Solutions is still perfecting their system, any additional changes will be mostly of an aesthetic nature.
In the product’s first official test, where Walters actually wore the prototype on a treadmill for a ten minute walk, the limb stayed completely dry the entire time – even while Walters was drenched in sweat.
“We were actually surprised it worked as well as it did,” said Walters.
For Walters in particular, the prosthetic cooling system presents not only an exciting business venture, but increased personal freedom in many daily activities – from working in the yard to going to the park with his daughter.
“After about an hour we’ve got to go home because I’m sweaty and the limb is starting to slip and slide around,” said Walters. “With the system on, I’ll be able to go play with her as long as I want.”
As a new medical startup, Leto Solutions is still taking its first steps to becoming a company. The startup is currently filing its articles of incorporation and the provisional patents on its new technology. It will soon file the cooling system with the Food and Drug Administration as a Class 1 Exempt Medical Device. According to CEO Ariana, the company will need to go through three rounds of funding and should be profitable by their third year of operation.
Five of the eight students are moving forward with the company. Walters will be the startup’s new operations manager, Stultz with be the regional sales manager, and engineering graduate David Shultz will be the engineering and science manager. The other two members of the engineering team will be unpaid consultants until the startup can afford to bring them on. As the winners of the CITE competition, Leto Solutions will have additional resources available such as legal services from Cox Smith, free office space for a year at the San Antonio Technology Center, and funding from additional sponsors.
The business plan for Leto Solutions will be to sell the Aquilonix cooling system to Prosthetists, who build prosthetics out of multiple components based on each patient’s needs. According to the startup’s market research, there are approximately 800,000 below knee amputees in U.S. and around 300,000 prostheses sockets made per year – virtually all of which can incorporate the cooling system. Leto Solutions will be contracting with Coastal Life Technologies, a local company, for the manufacturing and packaging of their system. The predicted price point for the Aquilonix system is $650.
Leto solutions plans to begin their beta testing as soon as possible and will also apply for insurance and Medicare reimbursement so patients will not have to pay out of pocket. The startup plans to partner with the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio for their initial testing and will partner with other Veterans Affairs medical centers across the country to do a 2-arm comparative clinical study.
According to Walters, the whole situation for Leto Solutions was extremely fortunate – from their access to San Antonio Veterans Affairs offices to their mentor who has done this kind of work before.
“Our entire situation was so fortuitous,” said Walters. “We end up with a mentor who – this is what she’s done for the last 40 years. We’re in San Antonio which is a heavy biomedical and highly innovative city and we are doing an innovative and biomedical product. So everything dovetailed perfectly.”

Civitas Learning has received $8.75 million in funding with Emergence Capital Partners leading the funding round joined by returning investors Austin Ventures, First Round Capital and Floodgate.
New investors include Felicis Ventures and New Markets Venture Partners.
The funds will allow Civitas Learning to expand its predictive analytics platform and software program and to hire more staff.
The Austin-based company helps students stay in college and graduate on time by helping them develop a course plan and other support systems. Already, six colleges and universities are using the company’s program. Those institutions include Austin Community College, DeVry, Strayer University, University of Central Florida, University of Maryland University College, and Valencia College.
“Students come to higher education with big dreams,” Charles Thornburgh, CEO and founder of Civitas Learning said in a news statement. “Today, far too many leave with debt and no degree. We are catalyzing a community of institutions to learn together with the best of big data – a cutting-edge analytics platform, front-line focused software applications, and insight and inquiry – to give all students the opportunity to learn well and finish strong.”