Tesla is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin.

Elon Musk, Tesla Founder and CEO, made the announcement at Tesla’s 2021 shareholders meeting, which was held in Austin at Tesla Gigafactory under construction in eastern Travis County and broadcast on YouTube. In July of 2020, Musk announced plans for its $1.1 billion Giga factory that will make Cybertrucks, Semi, Model 3, and Model Y electric vehicles. The plant is located on 2,100 acres at SH 130 and Harold Green Road.

“Just to be clear, though, we will continue to expand our activities in California,” Musk said. “This is not a matter of Tesla leaving California. Our intention is to increase output for Fremont and Giga Nevada by 50 percent.”

The site in California is packed and it’s landlocked and it’s tough for employees to afford houses in California, Musk said.

“There is a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area,” he said.

Austin has attracted other large corporate headquarters from California including Oracle and Zoho Corp. And HP recently announced plans to relocate its headquarters to Houston.

The Texas Giga factory has a lot of room for expansion. It is located five minutes from the airport and 15 minutes from downtown, Musk said. Tesla intends to scale the Texas plant even more than its California operations, he said. The plant will make the Cyber Truck and an All-Terrain Vehicle as well, he said.

“We’re going to create an ecological paradise right here on the Colorado River,” he said. “It’s going to be great.”

In the 12 months that ended in September, Tesla has delivered 800,000 vehicles to customers, started new production lines in Shanghai, constructed two new Giga factories on two continents including the one in Austin, said Robyn M. Denholm, chair of the Tesla board. Tesla makes the Model S, Model X, Model 3, Model Y, and Roadster.

And during the last 12 months, Tesla has helped shift the public’s perception of electric vehicles, Denholm said.

“By 2030, Tesla is aiming to sell 20 million electric vehicles per year and deploy 1500 gigawatt-hours of energy storage per year,” Denholm said. “Our mission is clear the automotive sector and the energy sector have to become fully electric.”

Tesla has been hampered by supply chain woes like many manufacturing companies. That means it hasn’t been able to bring new products online, Musk said. Cyber truck production should begin next year, Musk said. And supply shortages should be fixed by 2023, he said.

Production will start in Giga Texas this year, but it will not reach high volume production until next year, Musk said. Tesla’s long-term competitive advantage will be its manufacturing operations, he said.

Over time, all manufacturers will make electric vehicles and eventually will make autonomous vehicles, Musk said.

Tesla is open to licensing its autonomous vehicle technology to other manufacturers because it will make roads safer and save lives, Musk said.

“Our goal really is to make the cars as affordable as possible,” Musk said.

Problems with the supply chain shortages of parts and chip shortages have led to price increases recently, he said. But eventually, the prices will come down, he said.

“We are going to need a lot of batteries,” Musk said. Telsa is telling suppliers as many as they can make, Tesla will take, he said.

Solar and wind-generated electricity and battery storage are key to a sustainable future, Musk said.

Musk said he was in Austin during the blizzard that hit last February. He was staying at a friend’s house with no electricity, no heating, no power, no Internet He said he couldn’t even get to a food store. It went on for several days, he said.

If he had the Tesla Solar + Powerwall, he would have had lights and electricity and if he had Starlink Internet, he would have had Internet too, Musk said.

“If doomsday comes, it could be helpful,” he said.

Tesla has a number of projects in Texas with the energy grid system, including a 100-megawatt energy storage facility in Angleton, Texas, about 40 miles south of Houston in Brazoria County. Tesla is working with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, on other major installations as well, he said. Tesla’s battery technology can regulate energy usage efficiently and store a supply for times of peak demand, he said.

“If there had been Tesla megapacks here during the blizzard, the power would not have gone out,” Musk said.

In addition to energy and the Giga Texas plant, Tesla is launching discount car insurance in Texas next week, Musk said. Telsa currently offers car insurance in California since 2019. It is only available to Tesla owners. Musk said Tesla plans to enter other markets and roll out nationwide next year, but that it’s a cumbersome process getting regulatory approval state by state.

Musk moved to Texas last December after selling his houses in California. His other company, SpaceX, has a rocket factory and launch facility called Starbase near Boca Chica, in South Texas. SpaceX also has a Rocket Development and Test Facility in McGregor, West of Waco. SpaceX recently announced plans to build a $150 million rocket plant at the site, according to the Waco Tribune.

Another Musk venture, The Boring Company, also moved to Austin. The Boring Company is reportedly in talks with the cities of Austin and San Antonio to build a tunnel between the two cities – a stretch that spans about 75 miles and would create an even bigger tech region, according to a report in Auto Week.

In addition to Musk, Billionaire Joe Lonsdale, who is friends with Musk and worked with him at PayPal, moved 8VC to Austin last year and has big plans for developing the central Texas region. And Billionaire Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, also moved here and he has invested in dozens of Austin-based ventures.

FemTech, which includes everything from menstrual products to telehealth services, is an industry that growing rapidly globally.

Austin Startup Week hosted a panel discussion Wednesday with innovators from across the country to talk about telehealth services and the FemTech industry.

Women’s telehealth is bridging the gaps of access, said Shawna Butler, a registered nurse, who introduced the panel.

 “There is a growing awareness of health disparities and of health inequities across all of our health indicators but especially when we start looking at women’s health and women’s healthcare,” she said.

The panel discussion included Dr. Brittany Barreto, host of FemTech Focused podcast, who served as moderator.  The panelists included Sigi Marmorstein, CEO and Founder of BabyLiveAdvice, telehealth consulting services in Los Angeles, Kiki Freedman, Co-founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based Hey Jane, a virtual clinic that offers access to abortion pills and care, and Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, Kindbody’s founding physician and an obstetrician-gynecologist in New York.

The FemTech market is estimated to be valued at $1.2 trillion globally by 2027, according to FemTech Landscape research report, spearheaded by Barreto. And as of July 2021, the report found 657 active women’s health companies globally. And about 20 new companies are added every month. And 80 percent of them are led by women.

And while FemTech deals are getting money, they are not getting enough, according to the data. In the first quarter of 2021, 22 deals in the FemTech category attracted $418 million in investment, but that represents only 3 percent of total digital health funding during the same period, according to S&P.

The Austin Startup Week panel also discussed Texas’ new law, SB 8, that bans abortions at six weeks with few exceptions. The law also includes rewards for people who turn in women who break the law.

A group of Austin-based startup tech leaders have spoken out against the law while big tech companies have remained silent, according to a Bloomberg news article recently. And a movement, Don’t Ban Equality, details the damage the law is doing in attracting and retaining female talent to Texas as well as its overall economic impact.

“Existing restrictions to abortion care as of 2020 in Texas already cost the state over $14 billion annually in economic losses,” according to Don’t Ban Equality. “Even before SB 8, a new report by Oxfam America ranked Texas as the 48^th best state for working women in 2021, making it the fourth-worst in the country.”

Texas is among the states that were already considered to be hostile toward abortion rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute. It reports that in 2021, 90 abortion restrictions have been enacted this year.

But while that is going on, Hey Jane, an online telehealth startup aimed at providing abortion pills and care to women, raised $2.2 million in August. Hey Jane, which launched this year, operates in California, New York and Washington.

Telehealth abortion access was not legal in Texas before SB 8, Freedman said. Regulation needs to change in Texas to make access available, she said.

Kindbody, fertility and family planning clinics with 12 locations nationwide, which does in-person and virtual care, recently raised $62 million in Series C funding, bringing its total capital raised to $122 million.

The market for fertility and family planning services is underserved because the costs have been so high, said Sasan. A lot of obstetrics care can be done through consultations online, Sasan said.

“We really marry virtual and in-person treatments,” she said.

Telehealth is where it is at right now, said Marmorstein, CEO and Founder of BabyLiveAdvice.

Most people have cell phones, and the cost of data has gone down dramatically, making online care more accessible to more people, Marmorstein said.

In 2009, it cost $15 to $16 for a telehealth appointment and now it’s just cents, she said.

“That allows us to do more for less money,” she said.

The COVID-19 pandemic also led to the adoption of telehealth care services among pregnant women and doctors, even more, she said. That is greatly needed, because women often get information from unreliable sources like Facebook, Google, and chat rooms with other women, she said. Telehealth allows them to get better information from doctors, she said.

Telehealth access to abortion became a mainstream option during the COVID-19 pandemic, Freedman with Hey Jane said.

The pandemic unlocked more data on the safety and treatment of telehealth services like abortion treatment, she said. That added to the growing pile of evidence that telemedicine abortion is safe and effective, she said. That data is going to lead to regulatory changes, she said.

The pandemic also highlighted the need for more telehealth services to new moms. There’s a lot of care given to women before they give birth, but very few visits following the birth, Sasan said. The six weeks after giving birth has a lot of risks for women resulting from seizures, bleeding, and postpartum depression, she said. Telehealth gives the doctor access to the patient after birth more often and from their home and that can prevent some major health problems, Sasan said.

In addition, telehealth can address mental health issues for women even better than in-person care and has been going on even longer than medical health, said Marmorstein, with BabyLiveAdvice.

Online postpartum support groups have grown from 40 a month to more than 300 a month and they are all full, Marmorstein said. And it’s not just for women, many men also participate, she said.

Telehealth also evens the playing field to give women access to healthcare, Freedman said.

With telehealth abortion access through Hey Jane,  women no longer have to drive hundreds of miles to get an abortion, she said. Through telemedicine, Hey Jane can give 24-hour support and women can reach out at any hour for help, she said.

There are states with only one maternity ward serving millions of moms creating maternity desserts, said Marmorstein. Because of COVID, the U.S. lost 33,000 OB GYNs who left the field, she said. And the situation is getting even worse, she said. Telemedicine can fills some of those needs, she said.

U.S. Venture Capital is on pace to double from last year’s record levels of $156.2 billion invested in 12,254 deals nationwide, according to Pitchbook-National Venture Capital Association Venture Monitor data.

Already, at the end of the first quarter of 2021, 7,000 companies have raised more than $150 billion in funding.

“2021 is definitely going to be a record year and blow past last year,” said Eric Engineer, venture partner at S3 Ventures. He led an online panel discussion on fundraising with Austin-based VCs during Austin Startup Week on Tuesday afternoon. First, Engineer showed a series of slides highlighting the tremendous deal flow, company relocations, and venture capital coming into Texas and Austin.

Texas is also on pace to surpass its all-time highs in venture capital raised by companies, which topped $6 billion in 2000, at the height of the dot com frenzy, Engineer said. Last year, companies raised $4.8 billion in Texas and so far, this year, they have raised $4.6 billion, of which $2.6 billion has gone to Austin-based companies, he said.

But Kerry Rupp, general partner in True Wealth Ventures, which is raising its second $30 million fund targeted at investing in startups led by women, pointed out that women and people of color are still not seeing an increase in investment.

“Despite the increase in attention to women-led companies, because that’s what we focus on, the data actually shows that it is at an all-time low in terms of the percentage,” Rupp said. For five to ten years, the percentage of overall venture capital women-led founders receive has been around two to three percent, she said. It hit an all-time low of 1.8 percent during the pandemic in 2020 and it is hovering at around 1.9 percent, Rupp said.

“The dollars are growing, but the percentage of women getting funded is not better and that’s even more true for minorities,” she said. “If you are a woman entrepreneur or a minority entrepreneur, it still requires more hustle, strategy, etc.”

Texas is the fourth largest market for venture capital investment nationwide behind Massachusetts,  New York, and California. The bulk of the investment dollars go to the top three markets with Texas getting about 10 percent of it, said Tom Ball, general partner of Next Coast Ventures. That just leaves a lot of room for growth, he said.

“While we are at $4.2 billion, as my real estate friends like to say, we’re still in the very early innings of this,” Ball said.

The rate of ascendancy for Texas seems much greater, compared to the rest of the country, said Krishna Srinivasan, managing partner with LiveOak Venture Partners.

“We get a disproportionate level of attention in the market,” Srinivasan said. It’s led to a migration of capital and talent, he said. LiveOak Venture Partners’ portfolio companies are getting discovered much easier for follow-on financing since Austin is such a hot market, he said.

“The change here is much better compared to many of the other markets,” he said.

In addition to the startups, big tech keeps adding tens of thousands of jobs with the relocation of Oracle’s corporate headquarters to Austin, and HP moved its corporate headquarters to Houston.

Austin has also seen a slew of new projects such as Elon Musk’s new Tesla Cyber truck plant that is expected to employ as many as 10,000 workers. Apple is also finishing up its billion-dollar campus expansion in Austin. Google has announced plans to invest $40 million in Texas this year, according to Engineer’s data on his slides.

And SpaceX is building a manufacturing facility in Austin.

Samsung is also hiring 40,000 people, primarily in Texas and Australian-based Canva, valued at $15 billion, is expanding in Austin.

The rate and pace of everything is accelerating in Austin, said Kip McClanahan, general partner of Silverton Partners.

“Texas, in general, and Austin, in particular, is as wild and wooly as we’ve ever seen,” McClanahan said.

Deal size has also taken a big step-up, moving from an average $8 million funding deal in 2016 and 2017 to $12 million in 2018 through 2020 and jumping up to $21 million in 2021, according to Pitchbook-National Venture Capital Association Venture Monitor data.

In Texas, round size is also expanding especially with Series B funding reaching $37.1 million, up 283 percent from 2017’s $9.7 million. Series A funding rounds have grown to $10.6 million, up 42 percent from 2017’s $7.5 million. And seed-stage funding rounds have grown to $3.3 million in 2021, up 93 percent from $1.7 million in 2017.

In 2021, two locally backed companies have had initial public offerings: Alkami, backed by S3 Ventures and Wild Basin, in April, and Disco, backed by LiveOak Venture Partners,  in July.

In addition, Texas has five startups that have reached unicorn status this year, meaning they are valued at more than $1 billion. They are EverlyWell, The Zebra, Firefly, Axiom Space, and Workrise.

Another Texas trend is there is more local venture capital than ever, Engineer said. Some of the recent firms to move into the Austin market include 8VC, Breyer Capital,  Mithril, Sapphire Ventures, Firebrand, Capstar, Moneta Ventures, CAVU Venture Partners, and Trust Ventures. There is $25 billion worth of assets under investment in the Austin area, according to Engineer’s research.

And it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down, Ball with Next Coast Ventures said. The quality and quantity of deals are high, and the market is competitive, decisions are being made faster and that’s good for entrepreneurs, he said.

COVID slowed things down initially but that didn’t last, said McClanahan with Silverton Partners. Work from home arrangements, Zoom, and telecommuting have led to higher productivity and efficiency with its portfolio companies, he said. They spend less time traveling and more time getting work done, he said.

“We see our portfolio, on the whole, performing significantly better,” he said.

Everyone has become more pragmatic about having disparate teams and not having everyone under the same roof, Srinivasan said. Large companies have demonstrated how they can be successful operating on a remote basis and early-stage companies can do that as well, he said.

The 11^th-annual Austin Startup Week takes place Monday through Thursday this week.

The Monday women in technology event, however, was rescheduled because of outages on the Internet throughout the day, according to event organizers.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the event is primarily taking place online, although some in-person happy hours and other events have been scheduled.

The virtual event is taking place in a venue called Hopin. The event is free to attend but requires registration.

Tuesday morning, Austin Startup week kicks off with Open Coffee from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. at Mozart’s Coffee Roasters. The networking event is being held on Mozart’s open-air deck.

The entrepreneurship 101, product design, AI and data science, new to Austin and fundraising tracks all kick off on Tuesday.

One of the highlights is a panel of local venture capitalists talking about “Texas Startup Fundraising in 2021: A Record-Breaking Year.”  That discussion takes place from 12:30  p.m. to 1:15 p.m. Eleven years ago, Austin companies that closed deals worth a few million dollars made headlines. Now Austin-based startups are regularly closing funding rounds in the tens of millions and some have closed deals worth hundreds of millions.

Another interesting discussion takes place on Tuesday in the New to Austin Track with “Why I Moved My Company to Austin” featuring Brandon Cates, CEO of Ametrine, Amy Sun, Founder of Daylight, Nicole Cardoza, founder and CEO of Reclamation Ventures and John Henry, Co-CEO of LOOP. Joshua Baer, founder and CEO of Capital Factory, is leading the panel.

On Wednesday, the space track, which is new this year, kicks off. So do the marketing and branding, developer, and mental health and wellness tracks.

On Thursday, the IP, sales and biz development, legal, HR, talent and culture and social impact tracks take place.

One thing that is different this year is that Austin Startup Week doesn’t have a traditional startup crawl. The startup crawl has been one of the most popular events where people visit multiple tech startup headquarters during an evening of drinking beer and networking.

Jacqueline Hughes and Joshua Baer started Austin Startup Week in 2011 and Silicon Hills News covered it. The event was much smaller initially and has grown steadily, like Austin, throughout the past decade.

In Austin, a group of engineers has created a solution to the problem of last-mile delivery.

It’s MoToGo, an at-home system for packages.

MoToGo has a vision of a future where the delivery of goods is affordable, simple, secure, equitable, and sustainable, said David Ruth, CEO and Co-Founder of MoToGo, based in Austin.

The system includes a black metal box and a metal railing that affixes to the side of the house and it’s all controlled by a smart mobile phone. The system ensures for safe and secure delivery of a variety of goods including pharmaceuticals, Ruth said.

Ruth along with Roy Stedman, the company’s Chief Technology Officer and Phil Chidester, Chief Solutions Architect, demonstrated the MoToGo system at their booth at the MOVE America conference held at the Palmer Events Center in Austin.

Founded in 2016, MoToGo has seven U.S. patents that have been issued on the hardware and software behind the delivery system.

The business model is evolving, Ruth said. But right now, a subscriber, such as a pharmacy, could have 50 boxes a month and charge its customers for secure delivery of their pharmaceuticals, he said.

The MoToGo system relies on Internet of Things sensors to track the delivery box from store to the consumer and it even records when the box has been opened. It sends notifications to the sender and the receiver at every step, Ruth said. It communicates through cellular networks, he said.

In California, where marijuana is legal, the system could be used for secure delivery of products, since delivery of products required locked boxes, Stedman said.

The company is bootstrapped. The founding team previously worked at Dell and IBM and other technology companies in Austin. Ruth worked for IBM for 31 years before leaving to launch MoToGo.

The Motogo Box

Uploaded by Motogo Systems on 2021-09-19.

A few weeks ago, LOOP, a new car insurance company, launched in Texas.

And now, LOOP has announced it has closed on a $21 million Series A funding round co-led by Foundry Group and 01A, the fund of former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and COO Adam Bain.

The round includes participation from existing investors in Freestyle VC, Blue Fog, Uprising Ventures, and Concrete Rose, and new strategic investment from New Voices Fund and Earn Your Leisure. Rap icon and avid angel investor Nas also participated.

The Series A comes just nine months after LOOP closed on a $3.25 million seed-stage round of funding led by Freestyle VC.

The support of the investors allows LOOP to “fiercely accelerate our growth” and expand its mission, John Henry, Co-Founder and Co-CEO said in a news release.

“We are building a completely modern architected insurance company, “ Carey Anne Nadeau, Co-Founder and CO-CEO said in a news release.

LOOP moved to Austin earlier this year. They have more than 30 employees and plan to be at more than 100 in the next six months and 1,000 within a year, according to a previous interview with Henry.

LOOP, a public benefit corp., known as a B-Corp., doesn’t use credit scores, occupation or education in its underwriting. Instead, the company measures how users drive, paired with crash, weather, and traffic data.

“The result has been more equitable and competitive pricing for millennials, renters, and immigrants who are often burdened by student loans and consumer debt and are disadvantaged by legacy models,” according to a news release.

This financing makes it one of the largest Series A rounds raised by a female founder or founder of color. LOOP plans to expand its coverage to an additional 10 states over the next 12 months.

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