DivInc, the nonprofit accelerator focused on fostering diverse startups, has announced the finalists for its third annual Champions of Change Awards.
The virtual event will take place online on March 4th.
DivInc’s 2021 event has a goal to raise $100,000 for its “2021
Social Justice Innovation Program which supports social justice innovators
addressing inequities and disparities caused by institutionalized bias and
racism.”
A committee selected this year’s nominees for the following categories: executive, diversity and inclusion, student, champion, investor, rising star, and nonprofit. There’s also a People’s Choice Award that is accepting nominations.
The event sponsors are Wild Basin Investments LLC, Vela Wood, Downtown Austin Alliance, Capital City Innovation, Baker Botts, RetailMeNot, Indeed, Cirrus Logic, Capital Factory, and Capital Metro. Its community partners include: Huston Tillotson University,BLNDED Media, Notley Ventures, and Narwhal Media Group
An experimental Beta City on the outskirts of Austin with transportation tunnels, autonomous vehicles, robots, flying drones, smart buildings, and all the latest technology applications.
That’s the vision of Joe Lonsdale, an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, who recently moved 8VC, an investment firm, and The Cicero Institute, a public policy think tank, to Austin. He sees the region developing into an even bigger technology hub.
“It’s a big hub,” Lonsdale said. “I think there’s going to be a lot of really cool suburbs. One of my favorite ideas, which I don’t have time to do right now, but I’d love to work on, is to build a new city somewhere around here, nearby, in the next few years. Buy a bunch of land and dig tunnels connecting it to these places.”
There are all sorts of designs he
has sketched up with really cool ideas, Lonsdale said. He made the remarks on
the Ideas to Invoices podcast.
In the coming years, Central Texas is going to evolve into a major hub and it’s going to have a lot more people and a lot more companies in it, Lonsdale said. The challenge is to keep building, create transportation tunnels and make it easy for people to commute from less expensive areas into Austin, he said.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun,”
Lonsdale said.
The Beta City project would rival Neom, the revolutionary $500 billion new city that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is building in the desert bordering the Red Sea. That project is slated to be complete by 2025 and will include drones, robots, artificial rain, holographic teachers, and more, according to plans obtained and reported on by the Wall Street Journal.
Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, Affinity, Esper, is also on the board of The Boring Company, founded by Elon Musk. The Boring Company recently bought a building in Pflugerville, according to the Austin American Statesman. Lonsdale plans to help solve Austin’s transportation problems using technology and tunnels built by The Boring Company.
‘We’re going to dig some tunnels and make sure we fix any kind
of traffic problems,” Lonsdale said.
“It’s one of these things that is great for economic inequality
as well,” Lonsdale said.
It raises equality and economic access for people if it’s done
right, he said. People can live in cheaper areas outside of the city’s core and
easily commute to their jobs, he said.
Lonsdale plans to do that project and the Beta City with a
little help from his friends, which include Musk, who recently moved to Texas. Musk
is staying at the home of one of Lonsdale’s friends. And Lonsdale recently
hosted a dinner with Musk and Michael Dell in which they talked about solving
big, tough engineering problems with technology.
This year Lonsdale moved his family to Austin and announced that
8VC would relocate its headquarters to Austin. He also wrote an Op-Ed in the
WSJ “California, Love It or Leave It” on bad policy decisions that have made
the state “unlivable.”
Restrictions on businesses during the COVID-19 Pandemic, in
particular, frustrated Lonsdale. His biotech ventures were not able to operate
and he wasn’t able to get through to city and state officials to get clearance.
Musk also publicly voiced frustrations with restrictions placed on Tesla
plants. Last summer, Musk announced he would be building the next Gigafactory to
make Tesla trucks in Austin.
Another big investment of Lonsdale’s is in Palantir, a software
company that provides intelligence insights to customers. It recently relocated
its headquarters out of the Bay area and to Denver, Colorado. Palantir has
advanced enterprise software that supports important workflows worldwide, and
half of its business is working for government agencies and the military.
The Bay area has become a lot more expensive to do business,
Lonsdale said. And it’s become very competitive for getting the best talent, he
said. The culture of the best engineers of the Bay area has become somewhat “poisonous,”
Lonsdale said. They are not loyal to their employer and some don’t want to work
on government and defense contracts, he said.
In the podcast, Lonsdale talks
about Wish, the e-commerce app, that just recently went public and that has
provided 8VC with its largest return to date – more than 500 times its
investment.
“Wish has been a very good
investment. There is a very strong team there. And they really proved what you
can do in mobile commerce,” Lonsdale said. “The best venture investments are proving
something newly possible in the world.”
Wish has become one of the top e-commerce companies in the world, Lonsdale said. The Wish app connects about 100 million consumers in the U.S. and Europe to about 600,000 merchants selling low-priced goods. There are about 100 million possible items you can buy, and they have really learned how to gamify mobile commerce, Lonsdale said.
“They are really good at guessing the items you want to buy,” Lonsdale said. The Wish app also partners with mom and pop businesses to send goods to their store and allowing people to pick them up there. That drives foot traffic to the mom-and-pop stores, Lonsdale said.
Austin could be the site of the next Wish or Palantir or big breakout technology startup, according to Lonsdale. Already, six of 8VC’s portfolio companies have relocated from Silicon Valley to Austin.
“Austin is seeing a lot of really
strong startups,” Lonsdale said.
Among them, Lonsdale’s younger brother,
Jon is a co-founder
of Austin-based Ender, a property management software startup founded in 2019,
which has raised $7 million in funding. Ender moved to Austin about a year ago.
Lonsdale expects the trend to continue. He knows many people who
have recently relocated from California to the Austin area, including his dad
who had lived in California for 40 years.
Lonsdale thinks Austin is a great place to raise his family. He and his wife, Tayler, have three young daughters. They like the Austin community and its schools and great quality of life. Lonsdale is also a huge patriot who believes in free speech and the right to bear arms. He likes Texas’ ethos of self-reliance and rugged individualism. He recently received his conceal carry permit. He hasn’t bought a ranch yet, but he did buy a cowboy hat and boots and has two forty-foot flagpoles in front of this house flying giant Texas and American flags – something he says his neighbors in California would have objected to. He’s bullish on Texas and Central Texas, in particular, attracting more technology talent, companies, and founders. And the key is to success is to address traffic, homelessness, inequality, and other issues right away with sound policy decisions to prevent problems that have plagued San Francisco in recent years, Lonsdale said.
For more, listen to the entire podcast, pasted below, or wherever you get your podcasts – available on Google play store, Apple iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Libsyn, and more.
Hypergiant, based in Austin, has brought on board Abidali Neemuchwala, former Wipro CEO, to its executive advisory board.
The addition Neemuchwala, who oversaw $8 billion in revenue and 185,000 at Wipro, is a “vital step in growing Hypergiant into a $1 billion business, according to Ben Lamm, the company’s Co-Founder, and CEO.
“I’ve been so impressed by Abid’s leadership
capacity and ability to take a long-term view of the market,” Lamm said in a
news release. “He’s a proven, transformational leader who believes in the power
of technology to move a company forward and as such, is a core champion of the
Hypergiant business and execution model.”
Neemuchwala is also a board member of Virtusa, the Texas Economic Development Corporation, and the World Affairs Council of DFW.
In September, Hypergiant Industries hired a high-profile executive in the
software industry, Mohammed Farooq, as its new Chief Technology Officer and GM
Products.
“I really wanted Abid to join the company,” Farooq said in a news release. “He has
extensive experience in enterprise technology and in building platforms that
scale to mass adoption.”
Hypergiant plans to provide more information
about its AI Services Integration Platform – called Hyperdrive – later this
month. The platform will help enterprise companies to better manage the over
two hundred and fifty AI services companies and products currently in the
marketplace.
“I’m excited by Hypergiant, Ben Lamm and
Mohammed Farooq’s vision for a new enterprise AI future. The AI SaaS platform
that they are working on is unlike anything I have seen, and I’m thrilled at
the potential to help them bring it to market,” Neemuchwala said in a news
release. “I can easily see its massive market opportunity and potential for
growth.”
Neemuchwala joins leaders like Bill Nye, General Lance W. Lord, USAF (ret), John McKinley, and more who are currently advisors to the high growth startup.
Hypergiant serves clients in space, defense, and critical
infrastructure. It has recent partnerships with the United States Air Force and
Sumitomo in Japan. Founded in 2018, the company has 200 employees with offices
in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.
Private equity firm HGGC, based in Palo Alto, led the investment.
Aceable, founded in 2012, as an online driver’s education site, has since it expanded its offering to provide other state-accredited courses on its digital learning platform. So far, Aceable has created online driver’s education and defensive driving courses, and real estate certification courses.
Aceable plans to use the funding to expand the online courses it
offers, according to a news release.
The company has seen an uptick in demand for online education courses as a result of the global pandemic as unemployed people seek to sharpen their skills or learn new ones.
“Changing or growing your career can create new opportunities to
reach your life goals. Our vision is to make it accessible to anyone to gain a
skill and a certification capable of setting you on the path of a well-paid
career that you love,” Blake Garrett, Founder and CEO of Aceable, said in a
news release. “We see HGGC as a strategic, long-term financial partner that
embraces and accelerates our vision to create unparalleled education
experiences that make it accessible for people to change their lives.”
“We
are big believers in Aceable’s mission and their long track record of success in
developing mobile-first education technology,” John Block, Partner at HGGC,
said in a news release. “Our investment reinforces our confidence in the team
and will allow Aceable to grow to the next level while helping people achieve
the life they want through continuing education.”
To date, Aceable has raised more than $100 million.
“We’ve all been active, as partners in
contributing back, whether it’s monetarily or non-monetarily,” said Venu Shamapant,
co-founder and partner in LiveOak Venture Partners.
Krishna Srinivasan, co-founder and general of LiveOak Venture Partners, has been involved in the Miracle Foundation for 15 years and has served on its board for a decade. Shamapant is active in Austin Speech Labs, which his wife started. He was one of the founding board members there. And he runs the investment committee for the Austin Community Foundation.
“We’ve always done this on an individual basis,”
Shamapant said.
Last year was the first time they decided to organize the LiveOak Gives Program. They wanted to engage the rest of the technology community and bring everyone together to raise even more money for local nonprofit organizations.
“Just as we are investing in local entrepreneurs to build great next-generation companies in this market we also want to invest in amazing, local nonprofits that are helping impact really vulnerable people on a large scale,” said Srinivasan.
“It’s consistent with our core thesis on how
we practice our venture capital business of backing great entrepreneurs with
great companies,” Srinivasan said. LiveOak Venture Partners also backs great
nonprofit organizations locally, he said.
This year, the LiveOak Gives Program is on track to donate more than $200,000 to six organizations. The need is great this holiday season as the Coronavirus pandemic has hit many people in the Austin community extremely hard.
LiveOak Gives Program’s mission to engage Austin’s tech community, including LiveOak Venture Partners’ portfolio companies, to support nonprofit organizations based in Texas that serve the most vulnerable parts of our community.
The LiveOak Gives Program has selected the following six nonprofit organizations to receive at least $30,000 each in funding this year:
CASA of Travis County, a repeat recipient from last year, provides court-appointed volunteer advocates for neglected and abused children in the legal system
Miracle Foundation, a repeat recipient from last year, provides a metrics-driven care model for orphans and vulnerable children to achieve their full potential
The Andy Roddick Foundation is a new recipient and provides learning and enriching opportunities for children especially in underserved neighborhoods to achieve their full potential
Austin Speech Labsis a repeat recipient from last year, provides intensive speech and cognitive therapy for stroke survivors, and conducts active research in speech recovery
JUST is a new recipient that provides microloans and job training to women (mostly minority) entrepreneurs in our community and targets the challenges of capital availability, access, and mentoring at a grassroots level
Meals on Wheels In-home Care Programis also a new recipient and is focused on supporting the elderly age at home with services that have been incredibly challenging to deliver during the pandemic.
Active Capital recently announced it has closed on its second fund worth $25 million.
A year ago, the San Antonio-based venture capital firm raised a
$21.5 million fund.
Both funds are focused on providing seed-stage capital to business to business software as a service companies, known as B2B SaaS companies located outside of Silicon Valley, said Pat Matthews, Founder, and CEO of Active Capital.
Matthews announced the new fund in a string of tweets.
We just finished raising our second fund in the middle of a pandemic. A little more than $25m to continue leading seed rounds for B2B SaaS companies building all over. Proud of our team and thankful for all of our investors and founders.Here is how it went down…
Matthews
knows what it’s like to build a company from idea to exit and he discusses his entrepreneurial
journey on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.
While
a college student at Virginia Tech, Matthews co-founded Webmail.us. He helped
build Webmail.us into a $10 million business which sold to Rackspace in 2007. Then
he spent six-year in executive positions at Rackspace as a Racker. He has
invested in dozens of startups as an angel investor before founding Active
Capital.
In Austin, Active Capital has invested in Pingboard, Servable, Living Security, CloudSnap, ResturnSafe, VideoPeel, and Prosper Ops. And in San Antonio, Active Capital has invested in FunnelAI and SendSpark, and FloatMe.
In its first fund, Active Capital has invested in more than 40 startups and had three exits, Matthews said. As an angel investor, Matthews has also invested in more than 50 startup companies.
For more, listen to the entire podcast, pasted below, or wherever you get your podcasts – available on Google play store, Apple iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Libsyn, and more.
Uhnder, a digital automotive chip maker, announced recently that it has raised $45 million in additional funding.
The
Austin-based startup has raised more than $145 million in funding to date. Its
latest round was led by its newest customer and partner Sensata Technologies.
It also included participation by new and existing investors.
Sensate
plans to use Uhnder’s digital imaging radar chip in mining, agriculture, aerospace
and construction applications.
Uhnder makes digital 4D software-defined imaging radar technology that works better than today’s analog radar technology, according to the company. Uhnder’s technology is used with autonomous vehicles and provides improved resolution and detection capabilities.
“Sensata
is pleased to partner with Uhnder as a customer and strategic investor,” Steven
Beringhause, EVP and CTO of Sensata Technologies, said in a statement. “Our
perception systems will be deployed globally across a range of applications.
It’s exciting to support the evolution to higher performance digital radar,
enabling our customers to deliver increasing levels of safety in their end
applications.”
Uhnder’s
technology allows High Contrast Resolution to detect objects better.
“We are
pleased to see strong investor and market response to our digital radar
product, which will enable our customers to advance mobility to the next
level,” Uhnder CEO, Manju Hegde said in a news release. “With HCR, bicyclists,
children, or pedestrians hidden by a large object such as a truck or an SUV can
be detected early enough for the vehicle to take evasive action.”
“Uhnder’s 4D sensing can quickly detect, track, and generate a digital image of obstacles with precision that hasn’t been seen in the past,” Sven Strohband, Managing Director at Khosla Ventures, lead investor for Series B, said in a news release. “Our investment in Uhnder brings the market increasingly closer to realizing autonomous transportation.”
“The automation of everything, not just vehicles, is upon us,” Ian Ratcliffe, Managing Partner at Sands Capital Ventures, lead investor for Series A, said in a news release. “Uhnder’s ground-breaking digital software-defined radar enables customers to quickly customize their perception stack to the unique features of their application, which I expect will spur a barrage of innovation.”
Uhnder plans to release its flagship product, Voxel, next year.
Despite the Pandemic, Self has seen its customer base rise 250
percent. It has also more than doubled its staff from 50 employees to 115
employees.
Self Financial plans to use the funds raised to serve more
customers.
“Self is addressing a systemic problem of financial inequality in
the right way. It has built the technology while maintaining low operating
costs to be able to offer accessible products and building lasting
relationships with its customers,” Max Motschwiller, general partner at
Meritech, said in a news release. “Meritech invested in Self because it has a
proven and powerful business model, but we believe in the company because it
empowers people to steadfastly achieve their goals and dreams.”
Self provides secured
credit cards to people so they can build their credit history.
CEO James Garvey co-founded Self in 2015 after a time where he
thought he set up his credit cards for automatic payments, yet hadn’t. When he
realized his mistake a few months later his credit score had already fallen
from 750 to 594. The experience gave
him a deeper appreciation of the challenges millions of Americans face in
building and maintaining credit, and so he decided to use his background as a
technologist and entrepreneur to develop a better solution to help people
overcome those obstacles.
“Despite increased adversity, this year we’ve seen demand for our
products increase as people look to get control of their finances where
possible. Fortunately, we also see our customers keeping their commitment to
themselves by sticking to their plans,” Garvey said in a news release. “The
latest infusion of capital from Meritech and our other investors means that
Self can continue its mission to support our customers on their journey to
build credit and savings and be financially healthy.”
DISCO, the legal tech startup, announced Thursday that it has raised an additional $40 million in debt financing from Comerica.
In October, Austin-based DISCO announced it had raised $60 million in equity funding. In total, the company raised $100 million during the fourth quarter, bringing its total funding raised to date to $235 million. That values the company at $785 million.
DISCO recently landed on the 2020
Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and the Forbes Cloud 100. DISCO uses applies
artificial intelligence and cloud computing to help lawyers and legal teams.
DISCO has more than 700
corporations, law firms, and government agencies as customers. Lawyers use its
software “in some of the most important cases in the world, including the opioids
litigation and public investigations into government responses to COVID-19
worldwide,” according to a news release. Its products include the DISCO cloud
technology platform, software products like DISCO Ediscovery and DISCO Case
Builder, and legal services like DISCO Managed Review.
“Legaltech is booming now, and the
industry’s real growth has only just begun,” Kiwi Camara, DISCO’s CEO, said in
a news statement. “Over the next five to 10 years, legaltech will emerge as the
next high growth category creator and category leader for legaltech. Legal
departments and law firms are embracing the power of artificial intelligence to
automate away the parts of the practice of law that don’t require human legal
judgment, freeing great lawyers to do the work that only they can do.”
DISCO plans to use the funds raised
to invest in its AI-powered products. It is also expanding its sales and
marketing efforts in North America and it will expand its international
presence. Its also building its strategic channel program.
“Comerica is thrilled to continue our long-term partnership with the DISCO team through the expansion of our existing financing relationship,” Kevin Urban, Senior Vice President and Group Manager, Comerica Technology & Life Sciences, said in a news release. “DISCO continues to differentiate itself in the market with its products, services, and vision for how technology can transform the legal function.”
The startup, which moved to Austin in 2018 from Houston, has more than 300 employees with offices in Austin and London.
Oracle is moving its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas.
“We recently announced that Oracle is implementing a more
flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate
Headquarters from Redwood Shores, California to Austin, Texas,” according to a
statement from the company.
“We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and
provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work,”
according to Oracle. “Depending on their role, this means that many of our
employees can choose their office location as well as continue to work from
home part time or all the time. In addition, we will continue to support major
hubs for Oracle around the world, including those in the United States such as
Redwood Shores, Austin, Santa Monica, Seattle, Denver, Orlando and Burlington,
among others, and we expect to add other locations over time. By implementing a
more modern approach to work, we expect to further improve our employees’
quality of life and quality of output.”
Bloomberg first reported the news Friday afternoon, which was quickly picked up by numerous news organizations.
Oracle opened a large Austin campus across from Lady Bird Lake called the Oracle Waterfront Campus at 2300 Cloud Way in 2018. The company had built its first 560,000 square foot building that could hold up to 3,000 employees and it started construction on a second 420,000 square foot building that could accommodate another 2,000 employees.
When that campus opened in March of 2018, Oracle Founder and Chairman Larry Ellison attended the ribbon cutting and said the site would employ more than 10,000 employees eventually. Oracle bought 43 acres around its original buildings and nearby apartment buildings for expansion.
Oracle is the latest high-profile tech company to announce that it is making the Lonestar state its home. Earlier this month, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, known as HPE, announced it was making Houston its headquarters, relocating from San Jose. And earlier this week, Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Space X and Tesla, announced he had moved to Texas.
“Oracle is a global technology giant with an already strong presence here in Texas, and we are proud to welcome its headquarters to Austin,” Governor Greg Abbott, said in a statement. “While some states are driving away businesses with high taxes and heavy-handed regulations, we continue to see a tidal wave of companies like Oracle moving to Texas thanks to our friendly business climate, low taxes, and the best workforce in the nation.”
Oracle, founded in 1977, had revenue of $39 billion in its fiscal 2020. It is the second-largest software company in the United States, behind Microsoft.
