The Justice Department sued Google last week for alleged monopolistic practices and violating antitrust laws.

The Justice Department along with eleven state Attorneys General, including Texas, filed the civil antitrust lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit seeks to restrain “Google from unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices, and to remedy the effects of this conduct,” according to the lawsuit.

The other states suing are Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina.

 “As with its historic antitrust actions against AT&T in 1974 and Microsoft in 1998, the Department is again enforcing the Sherman Act to restore the role of competition and open the door to the next wave of innovation—this time in vital digital markets,” Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen said in a news release.

Google has a big and growing presence in Austin. It has had in office in Austin since 2007. It opened its downtown headquarters in a skyrise in the Second Street District a couple of years ago. Google has more than 1,100 employees working across Android, G Suite, Google Play, Cloud, staffing and recruiting, people operations, finance, and marketing in Austin. It also has a data center near Dallas.

In a blog post, Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs at Google, called the Department of Justice’s lawsuit “deeply flawed.”

“People use Google because they choose to, not because they’re forced to, or because they can’t find alternatives,” according to Walker. “This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers. To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use”

The lawsuit alleges Google entered into exclusionary agreements with other tech companies to make it the dominant search engine with the intent to block its rivals. Google also receives about $40 billion annually from advertisers placing ads on its search engine. Google’s scale and its exclusive relationships make it difficult for others to compete against it, according to the lawsuit.

“Google’s practices are anticompetitive under long-established antitrust law,” according to the lawsuit.

“Our agreements with Apple and other device makers and carriers are no different from the agreements that many other companies have traditionally used to distribute software,” Walker wrote. “Other search engines, including Microsoft’s Bing, compete with us for these agreements. And our agreements have passed repeated antitrust reviews.”

The Department of Justice lawsuit also references a similar monopoly busting lawsuit brought against Microsoft nearly 20 years ago in the case of the U.S. vs. Microsoft.

“Back then, Google claimed Microsoft’s practices were anticompetitive, and yet, now, Google deploys the same playbook to sustain its own monopolies,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also alleges Google learned lessons from the Microsoft lawsuit on what words to avoid when discussing its business. Its executives told employees “what language to use (and not use) in emails because “Words matter. Especially in antitrust law.” In particular, Google employees were instructed to avoid using terms such as “bundle,” “tie,” “crush,” “kill,” “hurt,” or “block” competition, and to avoid observing that Google has “market power” in any market,” according to the lawsuit.

“For the sake of American consumers, advertisers, and all companies now reliant on the internet economy, the time has come to stop Google’s anticompetitive conduct and restore competition,” according to the lawsuit.

“We understand that with our success comes scrutiny, but we stand by our position. American antitrust law is designed to promote innovation and help consumers, not tilt the playing field in favor of particular competitors or make it harder for people to get the services they want,” Walker wrote. “We’re confident that a court will conclude that this suit doesn’t square with either the facts or the law.”

Want to take to the open road in an RV, but don’t want to plunk down all the money to buy one?

That’s the problem RVshare solves. The Austin-based company hooks RV owners up with people who want to rent them.

And while the pandemic has punished a lot of businesses, it has been a boon to RVshare, which has more than 100,000 RVs listed on its platform. And it has managed more than two million days booked so far.

That landed RVshare $100 million in venture capital funding led by KKR with participation from existing investors Tritium Partners. The company plans to use the funds raised to expand its business. To date, the company, founded in 2013, has raised $150 million.

RVshare competes with  Outdoorsy, another Austin-based company that created a peer to peer RV rental marketplace. It has raised $75.1 million to date.

“At RVshare, our mission is to expand the definition of travel, providing a unique, seamless experience that will allow travelers to build lifelong memories with loved ones,” RVshare’s CEO Jon Gray said in a news release. “I am very proud of our employees and thankful to our customers for helping build RVshare into the market leader it is today – and we are only at the beginning of where our business can go. This financing and the support of KKR’s global platform positions us well to invest in future growth and provide the best experience for our owners and renters.”

“We are thrilled to work together with RVshare to build on the success they have achieved to date as a market leader in an important yet underserved category of travel,” Jake Heller, Co-head of KKR’s Technology Growth team in the Americas, said in a news release. “Jon and team have proven they can deliver explosive growth with impressive capital efficiency and we look forward to leveraging KKR’s global experience and network in mobility, travel and technology to help unlock new opportunities for RVshare.”

 RVshare has seen a surge in RV rentals this spring and summer as families take to the road for a getaway. The company has seen the momentum continue going into the fall with bookings up 123 percent over the same time last year.

Kerry Rupp, a general partner of True Wealth Ventures in Austin, is one of the featured speakers at the 2020 Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit, which kicks off on Sunday.

The event is being held online from October 18^th through October 21^st. (Full disclosure – the Greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce, that puts on the event is an advertising partner with Silicon Hills News).

In addition, the speaker lineup also includes LeMia Jenkins, Pinterest’s global head of communications.  Jenkins will be joined in conversation by Yasmin El Baily – Pinterest’s Merchant Growth Lead – in the company’s fireside chat.

“This conversation with Pinterest alludes to the accelerating importance of social media in connecting consumers to products and recognizes NWA as the hub for retail tech and e-commerce,” says Graham Cobb, President & CEO of the Greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce.

Other featured speakers include YouTube creator James Hobson, better known as the Hacksmith.

The former mechanical engineer is well known for taking fictional concepts and objects from movies, video games & comics, and making functional prototypes. Every week, he inspires nearly 10 Million followers to pursue careers and passions in STEAM fields by documenting his creations and builds on his YouTube channel. Since 2015, Hobson has accumulated nearly a billion views on his channel.

Hobson left his former engineering career to pursue his passion as an inventor in 2015. He is a graduate of Conestoga College in Ontario – where he received his Bachelor of Engineering. He is also a former student of the Technical University of Brunswick, Germany.

The Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, Northwest Arkansas Council, and Walmart.

In 2017, Alex Levine found himself working on a 12-inch laptop at a client’s office in New Jersey and he wanted a better setup like the big monitors at his home office.

“For me, one thing that I found that was a big hole in my travel lifestyle was I couldn’t bring my beautiful home office setup with me while on the road,” said Levine, a technology consultant with Accenture at that time.

On the plane flight home, he dreamed up the idea for Xebec Tri-Screen, a device that attaches two more screens to almost any laptop without requiring software or adhesives. Levine, a University of Texas at Austin engineering graduate, put together the original version in AutoCAD and printed a prototype using his 3-D printer at home. He tried it out on some old laptops, and it worked.

Levine brought the device to work the next week and all of his co-workers liked it. That’s when he shared it with his longtime friend and UT alumn, Trevor Russo who was a New York-based consultant. They studied the shift to remote work and decided to form Xebec to launch the product into the marketplace.

“Over the last five years, there had been a 40 percent increase in remote workers, and that stat was only expected to continue to climb as time went on,” Levine said. “We saw this great opportunity in a quickly growing market.”

Xebec’s first product is its $399 Xebec Tri-Screen triple-screen device, but it plans a whole range of products designed to bring the comforts of an ergonomic office to digital nomads.

In 2019, Levine left his full-time job to focus solely on the company which they named Xebec, a three-masted Mediterranean sailing ship. It fit the company because, with its product, digital nomads can go exploring and work from anywhere, Levine said. But the name actually came about because Russo remembered it from a childhood spelling bee growing up in Lakeway, Levine said. Both of them grew up in the Austin area. Levine is from Bee Cave.

Today, the company, Xebec, which is a member of Capital Factory’s accelerator program, has reached a milestone of $2.3 million in sales in six months, selling out of 5,500 units of its flagship product, the Xebec Tri-Screen.

“With this pandemic, it has been just an incredible spike, a vertical shift, which I can’t even quantify in the number of remote workers we’ve seen not only in the U.S. but across the world,” Levine said.

Levine’s product born out of necessity has met the needs of a lot of other nomadic workers. But Xebec still had to overcome a lot of challenges to get its product to market during a pandemic.

In late January, Levine feared the worst because its engineers are based in Hong Kong and its factory is in Shenzhen in Southeastern China. The COVID-19 pandemic shut the plant down. And Xebec planned to launch at South by Southwest and that was canceled.

“We had to get ready for the pandemic before everyone else because it hit us so soon,” Levine said. “After the Chinese New Year, we had no idea if our factory was ever going to open up again. We were really in the dark.”

Xebec was in a holding pattern from January until April and luckily its plant opened up and it received its products from China. During that time, Xebec also pivoted to launch an e-commerce site online. The company has even expanded during these difficult times. Xebec has hired five additional employees in the last five months. It now has seven full-time workers and it opened a new warehouse in Austin.

Now, Xebec has the right product at the right time, Levine said. The company also has three patents pending on its product, he said. It has raised less than $50,000 from friends and family and is bootstrapping its operations, Levine said.

Xebec expects demand to continue to grow as International Data Corporation reports remote workers will make up 60 percent of the workforce by 2024.

“We launched this product, and this company as a whole, during a really tough year for everybody after years and years of preparation from a very organic point of solving a problem that we had,” Levine said.

And while it was initially pretty daunting, Levine is excited about how everything has turned out.

“We allow our Xebec users to free themselves from this traditional workspace and to allow them to live the best version of themselves,” he said. “I’m really hoping the work-life balance that comes from all of this can be the silver lining of what’s happened.”

DISCO, which makes software for the legal industry, announced this week that it has raised $60 million in additional funding.

The startup, which moved to Austin in 2018 from Houston, has raised $195 million to date.

Georgian Partners led the latest round of funding. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, LiveOak Venture Partners, and The Stephens Group all participated, and new investor Breyer Capital also invested.

DISCO makes products and provides services for the cloud-based investigation and litigation marketplace, which is projected to exceed $20 billion by 2024, according to a news release. DISCO has created a platform for lawyers to use artificial intelligence, cloud computing for compliance, disputes, and investigations.

“We are building the enterprise software system of record for the legal function. Every major company has a legal department and spends money on legal services, but there is very little software built to help legal professionals do their work,” DISCO Founder and Chief Executive Officer Kiwi Camara said in a news release. “We want to change that. Legal is a critical business function just like sales or marketing or finance. We believe that software can transform the legal function just as it has transformed every other business function. DISCO is positioned to build for legal the kind of horizontal platform that Salesforce built for sales.”

DISCO plans to use the funding to hire more employees for sales and marketing and to expand its presence in internationally with a focus on Europe and Asia. It also plans to expand its strategic channel program.

And DISCO will continue to invest in its cloud technology platform, software products like DISCO Ediscovery and DISCO Case Builder, and legal services like its AI-powered DISCO Managed Review offering.

The pandemic has accelerated the move to cloud computing for legal departments and law firms, according to DISCO.

“In an emerging space like legal technology, real-world solutions require both world-class technology and first-rate professional services. DISCO delivers both,” said Tyson Baber, Lead Investor at Georgian. “DISCO’s investment in engineering and development of their proprietary platform, coupled with their incredible team, makes them well-positioned to help legal teams embrace the future.”

‍DISCO currently has more than 300 employees with offices in Austin and London.

OJO Labs has acquired Digs, a Chicago-based personal finance app that lets people save for a down payment on a home, manage the equity in their home, and monitor their credit score.

It’s OJO’s fourth acquisition since launching in 2015. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With the acquisition of Digs, OJO Labs expands into the financial technology market and it strengthens the company’s real estate platform that lets people buy and sell homes.

Now with OJO, people can do everything from saving for a down payment to finding a home loan.

“Through our relationships with millions of consumers and their trusted providers, we know that financial readiness is one of the biggest sticking points. We also know that once people buy a home the financial challenges shift from readiness to management,” Charles Myslinksky, Chief Product Officer of OJO Labs, said in a news statement. “The acquisition of Digs enables us to provide that much-needed, personalized guidance during the buying process and seamlessly transition the consumer to managing their home as an asset..”

Digs, founded in 2018 by Chad Johnson, Joseph Ahern and Pat McLoughlin, raised an undisclosed amount of funding, according to Crunchbase.

“Our mission is to help consumers reach their goal of homeownership and continue to build wealth,” said Pat McLoughlin, co-founder and CEO of Digs. “Access to financial resources is limited and often generalized, leaving many aspiring and current homeowners without guidance. This is a massive problem and OJO Labs recognizes it. They are the perfect company to help us achieve our mission at scale.”

To date, OJO Labs has raised $138.5 million and Digs is its fourth acquisition. In June, OJO Labs acquired Movoto, a real estate search site. And last October, OJO Labs acquired Austin-based RealSavvy to create an even bigger platform for real estate brokers, agents, and teams and the customers they serve. And in 2018, OJO Labs merged with real estate data giant, WolfNet Technologies, based in St. Paul, Minn. 

Preparing to buy a home requires savings, credit monitoring, and more and Digs helps people meet those needs, according to OJO Labs. It is particularly helpful to Black and LatinX consumers who report financial readiness as the top barrier to homeownership, according to OJO Labs research.

“We recognize that the decision to buy a home is one of the most significant decisions in life,” John Berkowitz, CEO, and Co-Founder of OJO Labs, said in a news release. “Yet many people are treated unfairly along the journey, and not everyone has access to the same resources. “Solving for inequity in home buying is a massive undertaking, and we firmly believe everyone deserves a place to call home, build wealth, and live out their dreams. This acquisition marks the first step of many to level the playing field by meeting people where they are, providing clarity and guidance at just the right time, and helping eliminate barriers that stall progress.”

By OMAR L. GALLAGA, Freelance Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Jane Ko, the Austin food and lifestyle blogger, needs a break.

Ko built her “A Taste of Koko” brand on her website, Instagram and an Austin guide book to she self-published last year, working for 10 straight years to evolve from one of the city’s many bloggers to a one-woman influencer business.

As many in Central Texas were hunkered down during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ko continued to post video reports on social media, crusading to help Central Texas restaurants from financial dire straits. But she was in the same situation many creative workers based in Austin were feeling in March through May of 2020: she lost many of the work contracts that pay her bills and when South by Southwest was canceled, found herself without a huge amount of work she’d been expecting.

“I lost all my projects,” she said, “I had no idea what was gonna happen. But then, over a series of about 72 hours, I had hundreds of restaurant owners, business owners, and most importantly, service industry workers reach out to me over email, phone calls, texts, direct messages, they flooded me.”

For days, Ko says, she agonized over stories of businesses in jeopardy and work lost, donating hundreds of dollars to GoFundMe campaigns, despite her own precarious finances.

Then, she got to work. Ko teamed up with Chelsea McCullough-Hughes, owner of lifestyle PR and digital media firm MYLK Collective to create Hundred for Hospitality, a relief effort for service industry workers in Austin and Houston. Ko built a website for the campaign, which raised $15,000 and serviced 100 meals per day over 40 days with the help of restaurants and donors in both cities.

In addition, Ko built Hire a Creative, an online matchmaking service for experienced artists, designers, event coordinators, and others to find freelance work.

As all that was happening, she was one of the first Austin restaurant bloggers to venture into the COVID landscape of slow reopenings. In her Instagram Stories, Ko, wearing a facemask, helped guide diners to safe options for eating before many restaurants were opening dining rooms or even outside dining areas.

As restaurants in Texas struggled with how to safely continue their businesses, she visited takeout stands and food trucks to help drum up businesses, particularly for Asian restaurants that were being avoided by some diners early in the pandemic. For that, she says, she was harassed on social media and made the target of abusive comments and direct messages. “I had people who had followed me for years suddenly say, ‘How dare you encourage takeout! If I order takeout and I get COVID, I’m going to sue you. You are so tone-deaf.’ They wanted me to just stay in the house and do nothing.”

In 2020, Ko has done far less traveling than she did in past years, and she has started to outsource some of the work that she used to do herself. She now has a CPA to handle bookkeeping and a talent agency fielding promotional calls. But the bulk of her work, from shooting and editing photos and videos, to attending restaurant events and writing, remains in her own hands.

Ko says she’s now ready to take more time for herself after 10 years of nonstop work, putting out her own content as well as partnership posts with brands including IKEA, Target, KitchenAid, AT&T, and PayPal. She got out of a bad relationship in the summer, Ko says, and for the first time since she began A Taste of Koko in 2010, she’s ready to take some personal time. But she acknowledges that even when she’s not working on “A Taste of Koko,” she’s very likely to take on other projects, such as a recent pop-up restaurant event she co-organized at 101 By Teahaus, or working with BEAM, an angel investment network from Women@Austin. 2020, Ko says, has taught her to embrace her own ability to do great work under pressure.

“I’ve really been pushed to my limits,” Ko said, “and I think it just comes from me doing this for so long and having resilience I didn’t realize I had.”

The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce has announced its A-List award winners for 2020.

The A-List winners were revealed during a three-part online series hosted by the Chamber and SXSW on October 7^th and 8^th.

On Wednesday, the Chamber announced its Spotlight Award winners: Daniel Barnes, founder and CEO of Treaty Oak Distilling, Angell Tsang, Founder and CEO of Tso Chinese Delivery and Roman Gonzalez, Founder and CEO of Gardenio.

In addition, the Chamber named its winners for tech innovation, companies with 11 to 50 employees: Compass, Rocket Dollar, Future/Proof and Skygrid.

On Thursday, the Chamber gave out its awards for tech innovation, companies with 51 to 199 employees: The Helper Bees, ActivTrak, AlertMedia, Literati, and Dosh.

And the Chamber reported tech and innovation award winners for companies with 1 to 10 employees: The Etho, Measure, Texas Innovation Center, Biomedical Music Solutions, and Laundris Corp.

Also, the Chamber revealed A Cloud Guru as the winner of the Ace in the Hole award and Double A Labs as the winner of the Top Tech Team award.

The Chamber also hosted online panel discussions with startup founders and entrepreneurial leaders in Austin. Kendra Scott gave the keynote address to kick off the event.

Three Austin-based startups received a total of $200,000 in cash awards from Google for Startups’s Black Founders Fund.

The Austin startups are Laundris Corp., Tankee and Varuna Tech.

Google announced Tuesday that 76 startups led by black founders received a total of $5 million nationwide.

In addition to the money, the startup founders also receive technical resources, mentorship and more through Google for Startups programming. Google first announced the Black Founders Fund in June as part of its company-wide racial equality commitments.

“We are committed to helping Black founders who have been deeply impacted by COVID-19 and who are disproportionately locked out of access to the funding they need to succeed,” Jewel Burks Solomon, Head of Google for Startups US, said in a news statement. “By combining cash awards with Google for Startups mentorship and programming, we hope to help create a more level playing field for these founders, who are building amazing companies and making an impact on their communities.”

Laundris Corporation, a digital linen inventory and assert platform for hotels, hospitals and other businesses. Don Ward founded the company in 2017 and serves as its CEO. He was named one of 30 U.S. black founders to watch in 2021 by Google. The company operates a smart factory in Manor and has patents pending on its technology.

 “The Google for Startups Black Founders Fund will have a considerable impact on the growth of Laundris Corporation” Ward said in a statement.  “This capital and support comes at a critical time and will be used to add resources (technical, sales, and operations) that will enable our team to scale in Austin and beyond.”

Tankee is a media company founded by Gerald Youngblood. He created an on-demand mobile entertainment platform for gaming content for kids and their parents. The company, founded in 2017, is a member of Capital Factory, a Google for Startups partner.

“Tankee will build on the 700 percent growth experienced since the COVID-19 lockdown with support from the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund,” Youngblood, Founder of Tankee, said in a news release. “This capital and support comes at a time when many parents need safe, high-quality, family-friendly entertainment and will be used to launch our redesigned Tankee.com website, extend distribution on mobile and Connected TV platforms, and increase our portfolio of Tankee Original shows.”

Varuna Tech Inc,  is a software platform that helps cities measure and analyze water quality that Seyi Fabode after his son faced health issues from drinking contaminated tap water. The company has contracts in New Jersey and Louisiana. It is also a member of Capital Factory.

“The Google for Startups Black Founders Fund is coming at a critical and important time for Varuna,” said Fabode, cofounder, CEO, said in a statement. “We have a few critical deployments of our water quality monitoring, insights, and analytics platform. The funding will enable us to add the required resources, especially as water quality issues are gaining more importance across the U.S.”

In addition to the three companies from Austin, Google also awarded four companies in the Dallas area a total of $300,000.

Funding Black startup founders fuels generational change

Across the U.S., incredible Black founders building promising startups are consistently locked out of access to capital that is critical to growing their businesses. The Google for Startups Black Founders Fund will provide hands-on support and up to $100,000 each in non-dilutive funding to inspiring Black startup founders across the country.

Correction: Headline updated with the correct award amount of $200,000

The 10^th Annual Austin Startup Week is in full swing with lots of panels and virtual networking at the virtual venue Hopin.

And tonight the first Austin Startup Crawl will take place virtually using a platform called Sococo from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

“Each startup will have their own room where you can chat with the founders and employees face to face from the comfort of your couch,” according to an email.

The startups participating include Black Swift Technologies, Ellodee, Tankee, Parasanti, Shep Travel, Choose Health, Decent, Vesta eCommerce, Opslock, Team Topia, Gembah, EQO, Union, HOPZERO, Liquibase, Localeur, Waldo Photos, TaxTaker, Revealix, Juuk, Workify, Valen Energy, SchooLinks, ReturnSafe Inc, Maidbot, Big Wheelbarrow, Cratejoy, Petal, Splashmetrics, Fathom5, ZipcodeXpress Inc., and Ruckit.

More than 1,000 people have signed up to participate in the Austin Startup Week online events with sessions on entrepreneurship, consumer packaged goods, COVID-19 innovation, funding, pivoting, mental health and so much more. In addition, there is virtual networking between events where people are matched for one on one meetings with each other.

Capital Factory also released a video on Monday on Austin’s State of Entrepreneurship quoting key players in the Austin technology industry about how they are faring during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Austin Startup Week is free, but registration is required. All of the sessions are being held virtually so it is possible to join from anywhere.

State of Entrepreneurship | Austin Startup Week 2020

Interested in a general Capital Factory overview?: Check out one of our monthly AMA events or reach out to our Sales Coordinator, Nelson Tao, at nelsontao@capitalfactory.com to learn more about being a member at Capital Factory. ————————————————————————- About Capital Factory: Capital Factory is the center of gravity for entrepreneurs in Texas, the number one startup state in the U.S.