Previous speakers on the Silicon Hills News Tech Talk on Clubhouse have included Krishna Srinivasan and Venu Shampant, founding partners of LiveOak Venture Partners, and Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin and Ethernet inventor.
Clubhouse is a popular social audio social network that launched in 2019 and remains an invite-only network that is only available to people with iOS devices. In its latest funding round completed this month, Clubhouse is now valued at $4 billion, according to Bloomberg.
On April 27th, Michelle Breyer, Chief Operating Officer of SKU Accelerator, will be joining the Silicon Hills Tech Talk Club to discuss the success of consumer packaged goods companies in Austin.
Please join the Silicon Hills Tech Talk Club on Clubhouse and follow Laura Lorek to keep informed on future speakers and other special events.
The Series D round came from new and former investors including Weatherford Capital and Accel, according to a news release.
The Zebra saw its revenue increase last year to $79 million, from $37 million in 2019 and it’s on track to hit $150 million this year, according to a news release. The company has also increased its staff to 325 employees, up from 200 employees in 2019. The staff has also pivoted to a fully remote model during the pandemic.
“This investment is going to be used
to grow our team and build our brand. We are accelerating our efforts to make
The Zebra a household name and help educate, empower and advise consumers to
find the best policies for their unique needs, no matter where they are in
their lives,” Keith Melnick, CEO of The Zebra, said in a news statement.
“As one of the earliest investors in
The Zebra, this inflection point in the company’s history is something I’ve
been eagerly anticipating. “Startup” isn’t the right word anymore. The Zebra is
a full-fledged tech company that is taking on – and solving – some of the biggest
challenges in the $638 Billion insurance industry,” Mark Cuban, entrepreneur
and owner of the Dallas Mavericks.
The Zebra did a national advertising campaign last year to increase consumer awareness. The company also added more tools and information for consumers, expanded its home and auto bundling capabilities, and more.
The Zebra’s investors include Accel, Silverton Partners, Ballast Point Ventures, Daher Capital, Floodgate Fund, The Zebra’s CEO Keith Melnick, Weatherford Capital, KDT, and others.
“We’ve been working with The Zebra
since 2017 and the team is hitting their stride. As more of the insurance
market goes digital, anyone who needs insurance will be able to successfully
start their insurance search with us,” John Locke, partner at Accel, said in a
news release.
Phishing, malware, and ransomware are increasingly becoming problematic for businesses as more employees work from remote locations and open them up to attack.
Cybercriminals can disrupt a business
costing it time and money and putting its customers’ data and privacy at risk.
Intrigue, an Austin-based cybersecurity startup, is focused on protecting companies from attacks. On Tuesday, the company announced it has closed on a $2 million seed round led by Austin-based LiveOak Venture Partners. It plans to use the funds on product development of its Attack Surface Management platform. The funds will also foster the developer community around “Intrigue Core, the open-source asset discovery project that serves as the backbone of its enterprise solutions,” according to a news release.
Jonathan Cran founded Intrigue. He is a former principal at Rapid7, Bugcrowd, and Kenna Security, and an architect of multiple leading security technologies, standards, and frameworks. Intrigue focuses on addressing gaps in asset and vulnerability management. It partners with leading security teams to monitor and mitigate key information security risks.
“Intrigue began with the idea that
security teams must be able to scale to enable innovation while also managing
an ever-growing and changing attack surface. To do this well, however, requires
deep visibility of assets and awareness of their exposure to threat actors,” Cran
said in a news release. “In this transitional moment, where technology is
becoming more dynamic and distributed, and in the wake of yet another
unprecedented wave of breaches, we partnered with the team at LiveOak to
quickly bring our solution to market. The founding team at Intrigue has spent
years in the trenches exploring the problem set and building our open core. With
this investment, we are now in a position to expand upon this foundation –
investing in our enterprise solution and partnering deeply with our customers.”
As companies adopt new technologies, they have to stay on top of security threats. Intrigue helps them do that. It maps and secures all Internet-facing assets throughout an organization. As more companies move to provide cloud-based services, SaaS, and mobile products, they can put themselves at a greater risk of vulnerability and attack.
“You can’t secure what you can’t see, and
with increased dynamism of IT environments from agile, cloud, and now
work-from-home, there’s a lot more that security teams are likely unaware
of. Intrigue gives enterprises awareness
of their entire public-facing footprint so they can monitor it and secure it,.”
Creighton Hicks, Principal at LiveOak Venture Partners said in a news release. “LiveOak is super excited about our
partnership with Intrigue. We move
quickly and early when we see this rare combination of rapid customer adoption
and a founding team that defines technical expertise. Intrigue’s ability to
solve a very difficult problem via a simple and usable solution adds a lot of
value to a lot of people and sets it apart from the standard market hype.”
Intrigue, with more than 1,000 customers,
currently maps and monitors more than 120,000 organizations with more than 250
data sources.
Austin-based KdT Ventures announced a new $50 million fund to back early-stage science companies.
This is the company’s second fund. In 2017, KdT closed on a $15 million inaugural fund. The firm made 18 investments with that fund in early-stage science companies including PathAI, 54Gene, Checkerspot, Dyno Therapeutics, Terray, and Solugen.
KdT Ventures’ Fund II will focus on making investments in areas
such as gene and biological circuit fabrication, novel delivery technologies,
biomaterials innovation, and consumer biology. It has already invested in
Elegen, Xilis, STRM, Abridge, Dimension Inx, and Andes.
“We believe that science is entering a golden age. We now have
the source code to the physical world. Computation applied to biology and
chemistry is redefining what’s possible in major industries from chemicals to
agriculture to medicine,” Cain McClary, Founder and Managing Partner of KdT
Ventures said in a news release. “The great investment of our lifetime is in
companies rewriting the physical layer. With Fund II, we will steward the
next-generation of science companies that are dramatically changing how the
world works, from nano to whole earth scales.”
KdT has made investments in 24 seed-stage companies doing work in ground-breaking areas like synthetic biology and gene therapy. KdT, founded in 2017, has offices in Houston and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.
“The KdT team speaks the language of science, making them an
outlier in this area of venture investing,” JD Montgomery of Canterbury
Consulting, a limited partner in KdT’s first and second fund, said in a news
release. “They are passionate about building the science companies of the
future that will tackle some of the significant challenges our world faces in
the next decade and beyond.”
By Laura Kobylecky, Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
This year, like many conferences, South by Southwest
transformed into an online experience and became SXSW Online 2021. As a result,
brands were unable to do their usual level of in-person experiential market
events. However, Wisconsin Cheese made an effort to bring some of their usual
SXSW energy.
At SXSW in 2019, Wisconsin Cheese created a particularly popular
marketing event. They had a room full of cheese at the Austin Convention Center.
Badge holders stood in a fairly long line to get into this event. Inside, there
was a giant cheeseboard that spanned the length of the room. The edges of the
room also had samples of cheese.
At times, a woman in a large dress with a wide skirt that held champagne flutes wandered through the room offering drinks. There were free samples of cheese to take home. There were also commemorative promotional items like postcards, buttons, and stickers. People stood around at small tables eating plates of cheese.
This year at SXSW, Wisconsin offered a virtual cheese experience. People were given the chance to RSVP to “Cheesin’ Around with Nick Offerman at #SXSWisconsin.” Some people were also sent samples of Wisconsin cheese. The Wisconsin Cheese Twitter account says that 2,021 customized boxes were sent out to people at “SXSWisconsin.”
I was sent one of the cheese boxes. It contained smoked Gouda, sharp cheddar, and a block of pungent blue cheese. There was also a Wisconsin Cheese lunchbox, a pint glass, some buttons, and a kazoo. This is the sort of thing you might normally expect from certain promotional marketing events at SXSW.
The event itself occurred over a Zoom call. There were several of these 30-minute sessions scattered throughout the day on Thursday, March 18th. There were a large number of people on my Zoom call. They all seemed cheerful and happy to be there. Some were eating the cheese they had been sent. People were encouraged to use their “Wisconsin Cheese” kazoos to hum a song.
Nick Offerman was summoned to the Zoom call. His overall demeanor was a bit similar to his
popular character on Parks and Rec, Ron Swanson. However, Nick seems a bit
friendlier than Ron. He really liked the bag of cheese curds he was sent and
claimed to have finished half already.
Later, a dairy farmer from Wisconsin joined the Zoom call
and he talked with Offerman about sustainable dairy practices. They discussed
the importance of sustainability in farming. Offerman seemed particularly
interested in the subject.
Later in the Zoom call, there were some celebrity cameos
that included Paul Lieberstein, widely known as “Toby.” The call was concluded with a brief cameo by American
smooth jazz saxophonist, Kenny G. Spirits were high throughout the zoom call. I
would have to say it was one of the most cheerful zoom calls that I’ve been on
recently. Despite the distance,
elaborate marketing stunts were alive and well at SXSW Online 2021.
In the last decade, Metcalfe
has made it his mission to ignite the startup and technology community in
Austin and across Texas in what he often jokes are Austin’s suburbs of San
Antonio, Houston, and Dallas.
But just as the tech scene is red hot in Austin, it’s the end of
an era for Metcalfe.
At the end of the year, Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com, plans to retire from his tenured and endowed professorship at the University of Texas at Austin. For 11 years, Metcalfe has served as Professor of Innovation in the Cockrell School of Engineering and Professor of Entrepreneurship in the McCombs School of Business, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise.
During Metcalfe’s
tenure, Austin has become one of the hottest tech hubs in the world. Google,
Facebook, and Apple have all expanded here. Oracle moved its headquarters to
Austin. So did Zoho. And last summer, Tesla picked Austin for its
$1.1 billion Gigafactory that will make Cybertrucks and other electric vehicles.
In addition to the big tech companies, dozens of startups have
spun out of the University of Texas at Austin and hundreds of others have made
Austin their headquarters. That trend accelerated last year during the Pandemic
as entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and startups moved to Austin from
California and other cities.
Chief among them, Jim
Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, moved to Austin and opened an office
here and has made several investments in startups. In addition, Joe Lonsdale an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, moved 8VC, an investment firm,
and The Cicero Institute, a public policy
think tank, to Austin this summer. And Elon Musk also recently moved to Texas.
“People want to be in Austin because people want to be in
Austin,” Metcalfe said. “That leads to unusual behavior.”
It also has a network effect that tracks with Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. Austin becomes a better place for technology startups to take root and grow as the infrastructure for them expands as well as the talent pool.
“I think the one
negative is the damn city council,” Metcalfe said. “They want Austin to be
weird and that’s off-putting.”
Metcalfe has always
said he wants to make Austin wired, not weird.
For the past two years, Metcalfe has headed up an effort to
promote the use of geothermal energy.
“Geothermal is always listed as “other” as an energy source, but
it has the potential to take it all over,” he said.
In October, Metcalfe will finish up at TexasGeo.org, an organization he co-founded to promote geothermal startups, which was funded by a $1 million U.S. Department of Energy grant.
Metcalfe has also helped launch dozens of student-led startups as part of the Longhorn Startup program. He is teaching Startup Innovation this semester to 18 first-year students. His last class is on May 5th.
Metcalfe is also continuing to award innovation grants to
professors from a fund at the Texas Innovation Center, of which he is the
founding director.
After that, Metcalfe plans to start his 6th 10-year career, which is yet to be determined. Metcalfe’s careers, each roughly spans a decade, including his work at Xerox Palo Alto Research Park where he invented Ethernet on May 22, 1973.
His other careers include founding 3Com, working as a pundit and
publisher for InfoWorld, and serving as a venture capital partner with Polaris
Partners in Boston.
Metcalfe turns 75 on April 7th but “that’s not for me
any kind of triggering date.”
“By 12/21 I will have been at UT Austin for 11 years, which is
too long, time to move on,” Metcalfe said.
Whatever the opposite of Meta is, that’s the direction Metcalfe
plans to explore.
“The default is to stay here in boomtown,” he said. Metcalfe has
a house in West Lake Hills. But he also has a home in Maine, where he spends
his summers with his wife, Robyn. His grown children, Max and Julia, live in
California and have formed a startup, The Working Team.
Asked if he would consider becoming the Mayor of Beta City, the tech
town Lonsdale talked about creating in Texas with Elon Musk, Metcalfe said yes.
“Anything that Elon Musk is involved in, I want to be involved in,” Metcalfe said. “He’s my new hero these days. He’s replaced, Steve Jobs.”
At 2 p.m. on Tuesday, March 23rd, Metcalfe will be the featured speaker on Silicon Hills News’ Tech Talk club on Clubhouse. To hear more about this story, tune in!
The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful, complex, and expensive space telescope ever built.
The $8.8 billion telescope is at the center of the new documentary “The Hunt for Planet B” which had its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The film follows a group of scientists, most of them female, on their quest to find another Earth among the stars.
And last Friday
night, the stars of the show participated in a panel discussion “Cosmic Breakthrough:
Women in the Hunt for Planet B” with the film’s director Nathaniel Kahn.
To kick off the discussion, Kahn asked Natalie Batalha, a professor of astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz who is featured in the movie, if the U.S. is on the verge of detecting life in the cosmos and how does the Webb telescope fit into that.
“Well to answer your first question, I think absolutely we’re on the verge of finding extant life, primarily by looking at extant planets,” said Batalha, who was a science lead on NASA’s Kepler mission, which revealed a staggering diversity of planets beyond the solar system. The James Webb Space Telescope will enable scientists to detect the chemical fingerprints of hundreds of planets, she said. And Trappist-1 is a red star that harbors seven planets, which could contain life, she said.
The whole community is waiting for the James Webb to launch, said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist and a professor of physics and planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has spent her career searching for the first Earth-like exoplanets and signs of life on them.
“I feel
confident that there is life out there,” said Maggie Turnbull, an
astrobiologist with expertise in identifying planetary systems that may be
capable of supporting life. “It’s kind of incomprehensible to me that we would just
have only one planet of what we know are definitely billions of planets at
habitable temperatures throughout our one galaxy that could hold life.”
Turnbull
feels less confident in finding life sometime soon.
“We can
be on the verge of that for an indefinitely long time,” she said.
The James Webb Space Telescope is extremely powerful and will provide insights into the lifecycle of stars. Amy Lo, Deputy Director for Vehicle Engineering on the James Webb Space Telescope for Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, is featured in the movie and oversees the construction of the telescope, which is expected to launch into space in October.
“We’ve only looked for a blink of an eye in cosmic time scales,” said Jill Tarter, known for her work in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). She is the Emeritus Chair for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. Tarter was portrayed by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie “Contact.”
It’s really important to not just focus on the search for the next planet, but to clean up this planet, Tarter said.
“I
think that’s the first challenge,” she said. “Because if we can’t do that, we’re
just going to take our mistakes with us and do it somewhere else.”
The
search for life circles back to earth and helps us understand and sustain life
on earth, Batalha said.
“When
you go out and explore and you think about other worlds and spend all of this
time contemplating all of these other places, you can’t help at the end of the
day but realize how precious life is and to love this planet all the more,” Batalha said.
Everything is interconnected,
Turnbull said.
The ingredients for life are out there, Seager said.
“I think most of us think life is out there,” she said. “It’s just a matter of time.”
South by Southwest Saturday announced the winners of the 13th annual SXSW Pitch event.
It took place on March 17 and 18th as part of the SXSW Online digital experience. Judges chose 8 winners from each of the categories and a “Best In Show” winner, holoride, as well as awarding “Best Bootstrap” to Refiberd, “Best DEI” to Sisu Global Health, and “Best Alternate” to Colorcast.
The
category winners of the 2021 SXSW Pitch event in each category are:
Each of the winners received $1,000, two badges for next year’s SXSW conference, and exposure to investors and others.
“Now
in our 13th year of programming, Pitch continues to showcase the best
technology from around the world, proving our dedication to highlighting
today’s most forward-thinking movers and shakers,” SXSW Pitch event
Producer Chris
Valentine said in a news release. “Adapting to a digital
experience can come with unexpected challenges, but this year’s event was a big
success, and we’re thrilled to recognize each of the winners within this mature
class of startups.”
Among the strong trends showcased at this year’s event were accelerated innovation within the Health, Wearable & Wellbeing, and Future of Work categories, which can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, there was a significant focus on applied artificial intelligence.
When the pandemic hit Texas last year, Favor, H-E-B’s on-demand
delivery service, expanded into 75 new towns and cities in a week at the end of
March, said Jag Bath, the company’s CEO.
“Favor was very quickly able to expand into towns and cities
that had no on-demand delivery services,” Bath said
In comparison, in 2018, Favor expanded to 40 new cities in an entire year, Bath said. He spoke with Tom Foster, editor of Inc Magazine, on a South by Southwest interview titled “Pandemic Pivots: Community-Driven Innovation” which aired on Saturday morning.
The major focus of Favor’s big expansion was to get more service to seniors in Texas, Bath said. The senior support program was launched at the start of the pandemic, he said. The Centers for Disease Control reported that seniors were most at risk to contract Covid-19. H-E-B wanted to come up with a solution to get groceries and essentials to seniors at home, Bath said. H-E-B and Favor couldn’t rely on the latest technology and its app because many seniors didn’t have access to that technology. Instead, H-E-B and Favor had to build a system that seniors could easily use by phone, Bath said.
“You have to really think different,” Bath said. “Our norms when
it came to digital approaches had to be thrown out the window.”
H-E-B had to create a brand-new decentralized call center to allow staff members to take calls from seniors and allow runners to fill those orders and deliver them to their doorstep through contactless methods, Bath said. That system had to be built from scratch, he said.
“We became an essential business overnight at H-E-B and at Favor,” Bath said.
H-E-B’s experience at responding to hurricanes and other emergencies in Texas helped equip the company to prepare for the Pandemic. H-E-B and Favor early on began preparing for the pandemic. The toilet paper shortage took the company by surprise, Bath said. But the company was able to meet the needs of its communities in most other areas except for cleaning supplies, which were in short supply for a long time.
And when the Texas storm hit, H-E-B and Favor once again relied on its emergency preparedness, Bath said. Favor teamed up with restaurants and community partners in Austin, where it is headquartered, to provide almost 3,000 meals to people in need, he said. Food Banks also primarily depend on supermarkets to provide food, so H-E-B moved to give 23 truckloads of food and meals to Texas food banks as soon as it could get back on the roads and more than 20 trailers of water to people, Bath said. H-E-B donated $1 million to Feeding Texas and that is being distributed to 18 food banks across the state, he said.
“We have never seen an impact like this, which was statewide,”
Bath said.
H-E-B has been around for 115 years. Favor has only been around for seven years. Favor was H-E-B’s first acquisition in its history. But both companies focused on community, and that has led to their success, Bath said.
“It’s a people-first approach that has always been the heart of everything we do,” he said.
At its core, Favor is a local logistics company, Bath said. Logistics and operations are at the heart of H-E-B. Then you have this focus on community, and a people-first approach, he said. Combine those things together and you have something magical, he said.
Also, H-E-B and Favor are solely focused on the Texas market and that helps the companies better serve their communities.
“H-E-B is stitched into the fabric of Texas,” Bath said. H-E-B understands the communities it serves and is able to serve the needs of those communities better, he said.
The needs are different from city to city and rural town to
rural town, he said.
Katie Fang, Founder and CEO of SchooLinks, courtesy photo
SchooLinks, a college and career readiness platform, landed $8.3 million in funding last week.
LiveOak Venture Partners led the Series A round with participation from SJF Ventures and Juvo Ventures.
Katie Fang founded SchooLinks in 2014 in Los Angeles and moved the startup to Austin a year later. Forbes selected her as a Forbes 30 under 30 entrepreneur in 2018. Silicon Hills News did this story on the company in 2015.
SchooLinks plans to use the funding to hire more employees,
and on product development and building partnerships, according to a news
release.
SchooLinks works with school districts and guidance counselors to make sure that students choose the right education and career path. SchooLinks’ platform helps schools track various success metrics.
“Changing legislation at the state level and evolving market conditions are putting a spotlight on the school districts’ ability to set their students up for success in the job market regardless of whether they attended a 4-year college or not,” Fang, CEO and Founder said in a news release.
Since its founding, SchooLinks has helped many high school students with graduation plans, FAFSA completion, and post-secondary plans. The platform starts working with students, counselors, and families beginning in the 6th grade. The platform provides career assessments, college and career options, jobs and internship opportunities, financial literacy lessons, scholarship applications, and more.
SchooLink’s customers include the Dallas Independent School
District, Greenville County Schools, and San Antonio Independent School District.
The SchooLink’s platform handles back-office logistics for districts including
individual career and academic plans, course planning, CTE pathway, and more so that counselors can spend more
time with students.
As part of the funding round, LiveOak’s Mason Rathe will be
joining SchooLinks as vice president of finance and operations.
“It struck a chord, as a parent,” said Krishna Srinivasan, founding partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, who will take a board seat as part of the funding. He saw a big need for the services SchooLink offers.
Srinivasan and his wife have three children, two of them have
been admitted to college and another will go through the college application
process. He saw firsthand that students need more guidance associated with
which college program to select and what courses to take in middle school and
high school to prepare them to get into that program.
“Parents struggle with giving them guidance,” he said. A
better technology platform like SchooLinks can guide the students, he said.
“This is a really needed solution to help these kids on
their journeys from middle school through high school graduation,” he said.
School districts, counselors, administrators all agree this
is a great product and SchooLinks makes an administrator’s and a college guidance
counselor’s life easier.
“It is loved by students when they use it,” Srinivasan said.
SchooLinks has also had incredible growth in a short period
of time and is in dozens of school districts in dozens of states, he said.
“The metrics this company has associated with growth are
absolutely incredible,” he said.
And the main reason it is succeeding and accelerating its growth is that it has an exceptional founder in Katie Fang, Srinivasan said.
“The combination of those factors is kind of what drew us to
invest,” he said.
