While working on a startup in the San Francisco Bay area, Nick Soman realized he was paying more for health insurance every month than rent.

And in the Bay area rents are sky-high.

“I remember thinking that was brutal,” Soman said.

That experience eventually led him to found Decent, which offers affordable health insurance options for 1099 contractors, entrepreneurs, and freelancers. Soman is a serial entrepreneur. He sold his first company, Reveal to Napster, and he has worked to build the Kindle at Amazon and the growth team at Gusto, a payroll and benefits startup.

Decent moved to Austin about a year ago to partner with the Texas Freelance Association. And this month, Decent announced it has closed on a $10 million round of funding. The funding will allow the company to expand statewide in Texas and offer plans for individuals as well as small businesses, Soman said. To date, Decent, founded in 2018, has raised $18 million.

Decent offers health plans that are 30 percent cheaper by working with independent direct primary care doctors and its partners include AXA, HCA Healthcare, Medlion, Hint, and Costco Health Solutions, Soman said.

And it might seem like a tough time to run a healthcare insurance startup during a pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic has affected Decent’s business, but instead of claims rising, it has seen them drop as people put off elective procedures, Soman said. Decent does cover COVID-19 testing and it has seen an uptick in expenses related to that, he said.

Overall, the pandemic has been really humanizing, Soman said. Decent’s staff of 30 are all working from home and meet up online in Zoom calls, he said. Before the pandemic struck, Decent worked out of The Riveter, a coworking space in downtown Austin. It closed its offices permanently in late May. Next year, Decent will look for new offices when it’s safe to return to the workplace, Soman said.

For now, Decent is focused on solving a big problem that affects millions: providing affordable healthcare coverage, Soman said. Decent is in business as much for the impact it can have for people as it is in building a big business, he said.

And that stems from his experience in the healthcare industry. He is the only one in his family who is not a doctor. He grew up hearing from his parents, who are family practice doctors, about the importance of focusing on patient care. They would complain about how their counterparts on the insurance side didn’t value their patients as they did, Soman said. He created Decent to put people first.

About 90 percent of companies with 1,000 or more employees have embraced this thing called self-funding health insurance, Soman said. Those companies bear risk themselves, he said. They also buy something called re-insurance in case a bunch of people get sick, he said. But because they are big organizations, they are able to save 30 percent on health insurance, he said.

Soman recognized that self-employed people didn’t get those advantages. And that is a huge problem, he said. Decent works to bring the self-funded model for healthcare insurance downstream to individuals and small business, he said.

“It’s difficult to do what we’re doing because we are working with the small businesses and the independents that are sort of getting the short end of the stick,” Soman said.

There have been people who have tried to serve the market by cutting corners, Soman said.  But Decent doesn’t do that, he said. And Decent doesn’t ask about a person’s healthcare background, he said.

Soman wants healthcare to work for everyone regardless of past problems. He knows how important healthcare can be when a person needs it. During his second year in business school, Soman spent four months in intensive care and another six in rehab after he got Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which paralyzed his nervous system. He recovered, but that experience gave him great empathy for individuals with existing conditions.

“Forgoing health insurance is like sitting atop of a ticking financial time bomb,” Soman said in a news statement. “Affordable, comprehensive health insurance helps to safeguard the future for small businesses and their employees. Decent is working to make sure that all businesses can afford to do that.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of companies are taking stock of the data they have on hand and sorting it out to their economic advantage.

It’s kind of like how homeowners are doing renovation projects and people are cleaning out closets and organizing their stuff.

So too are companies.

And that, in part, has spurred increased demand for Austin-based data.world’s software. The company, a Certified B-Corp, provides enterprise data cataloging and data mining tools.

“People are trying to navigate through the most trying time they’ve had since the great depression,” said Brett Hurt, the company’s CEO and Co-founder. The ability to access data quickly for insights and decision making can lead to a competitive advantage, he said.

“We turn our customers into data heroes,” Hurt said. data.world can transform a company into a data-driven culture by providing it a catalog of its data assets kind of like a library card catalog system.

data.world on Tuesday announced it has closed a $26 million round of financing led by the Tech Pioneers Fund. That brings data.world’s funding to date to $71.3 million since its launch in 2016.

data.world initially sought to raise $10 million, but its round was 260 percent oversubscribed, Hurt said. And three of its investors are customers of data.world including the Associated Press, Prologis, and Workday. Hurt raised 70 percent of the funding from his house on online conference calls during the pandemic lockdown.

One of Austin’s newest VC firms, Breyer Capital, led by Jim Breyer, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, wrote one of the last checks into the round, Hurt said. Prologis Ventures also participated along with Alumni Ventures Group. Existing investors Shasta Ventures, OurCrowd, and Workday Ventures also participated along with angel investors Arthur Patterson, Lincoln Brown, and Cotter Cunningham.

With the funds raised, data.world plans to invest in product development and hire additional employees for sales, marketing, customer service, and engineering roles, Hurt said. The company has 75 employees currently with 10 open positions right now, he said. It has added several employees since the COVID-19 pandemic began that Hurt has only met virtually.

data.world has built a collaborative data resource that is used by researchers, journalists, universities, companies, and others. In addition, data.world sells a cloud-native enterprise data catalog that allows companies to more effectively harness their data as a competitive advantage, Hurt said.  Its customers include the Associated Press, Prologis, WPP, and Wunderman Thompson Data.

“We rely on data.world to help our analysts and business leaders make data-driven decisions about real estate investments and global supply chain opportunities,” Luke Slotwinski, vice president of data and analytics at Prologis said in a news release. “data.world’s intuitive interface and powerful technology, including their knowledge graph, makes data discovery and exploration more accessible and immediately actionable to our business. Having deployed data.world’s solution, we have seen firsthand its impact as a data multiplier and are pleased to invest in its latest funding round via Prologis Ventures. We are thrilled to be a data.world customer and business partner.”

Data.world also has several strategic partnerships and product integrations with AWS, Snowflake, Semantic Web Company, MANTA, and others. It has more than 60 integrations, Hurt said. data.world’s knowledge graph software now has 16 patents and the company continues to improve its software as a service product with more than 1,000 new releases in the last year.

Also, data.world launched the Coronavirus Data Resource Hub, a free and open data catalog for COVID-19 research.

By CHAD SWIATECKI, Freelance Contributor to Silicon Hills News

It makes sense that the Austin financial technology startup Episode Six would make the Asian Pacific region a high priority as the company sought to pick up customers for its software platform that lets financial institutions build custom payment and other solutions.

After all, while New York and London are still two of the world’s top financial powerhouses, there’s no denying how quickly centers such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo have emerged over the past two decades to make up a thriving region that is another center to help money move around the globe.

John Mitchell, the company’s Co-Founder, and CEO said Episode Six’s pursuit of Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks makes it important to play in all of the world’s financial hubs. A recent move into Copenhagen earlier this summer as a tech provider for the fintech startup ARYZE lays the groundwork for the announcement of a New York-based customer expected to come later this month.

The most significant recent news for Episode Six was the closing of a $7 million Series A funding round that included HSBC, Mastercard, and SBI Investment Co., Ltd. among the participating investors. That round closed in July and will give the company the capital it needs to expand its sales, support, and engineering teams to prepare for a planned growth phase that Mitchell said will prove the scalability of the company’s tech. It expects to have 45 employees by the end of the year with more hiring planned for 2021, although Mitchell said the uncertainties caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have kept company executives from stating a target headcount.

Founded in July of 2015, Episode Six develops software for financial services firms, e-commerce companies, and other companies that issue payment products. Customers can license Episode Six’s software to create new digital products.

“We witnessed a lot of change, from the consumer demand standpoint to what companies were putting out to digitization,” Mitchell said by phone recently. “We realized that one of the biggest constraints to being able to innovate was the technology around payments had become unimaginative, particularly around payments. Everything was old, dated, inflexible, hard to work with, and because of that, creating new programs, products, and methods of transferring value was quite difficult.

“We came together to solve those issues and created Episode Six based on that idea, and we created a technology and software platform that enables businesses that have some sort of payment initiatives, ranging from financial institutions to big tech to fintech, to be able to take our software, integrate it into their payments ecosystem and then, through hundreds of APIs, build out programs that they need to meet the needs of their customers.”

The new business with ARYZE will use Episode Six technology to help the Danish company create its Digital Cash product that is intended to be a replacement for existing currencies that will be easier and cheaper to move for payment processing. ARYZE, which is also raising $15 million to fund the launch, sees a $2 trillion market for improving digital payments.

Mitchell said Episode Six’s software platform is needed by large banks and other institutions that are hampered by moldering technologies that often don’t work together elegantly, creating inefficiencies and making it difficult to improve their processes. He said the disruptions caused by the pandemic have created more demand for flexible and innovative payment technology as consumers and businesses move away from physical currency.

“Financial institutions are sitting on multiple systems and layers of legacy systems that are tied together to work and that their book of business relies on, and to untangle that, add to it or change it is a big initiative that takes resources and time,” he said. “There has to be a catalyst and push to get people to move to where they need to go.”

The company doesn’t disclose its revenue or profitability information. Chief Financial Officer and Co-Founder Chermaine Hu said she expects it will triple its current revenue in the next 12 to 24 months.

Anticipating that the company will prove the scalability of its platform with its new hires, Mitchell said Episode Six executives will work on a Series B funding round early next year.

The pandemic has spurred demand for Trashbots, which makes a hands-on robotics platform aimed at the K-12 market.

“The K-12 market, as a whole, is more important now than ever,” said Rohit Srinivasan, Co-Founder of Trashbots. “Especially as schools are trying to figure out how they are going to teach in a post COVID world.”

Trashbots provides a really unique way for schools to do hands-on STEM and robotics education from the safety of a student’s own home, he said.

“That is what makes us more relevant now than ever,” he said. “Schools are buying our product and shipping it to their students’ home and conducting robotics classes over Zoom.”

And it’s not just schools, Rohit said. Parents are also buying Trashbot’s products, he said.

The Austin-based startup recently completed the Sputnik accelerator, which provided its initial investment round of $100,000. Trashbots is working to complete its $500,000 seed-stage round and has signed on Trinidadian DJ and entrepreneur Christopher Leacock, also known as Jillionaire, founder of Silicon Labs, Nav Sooch; Austin Ventures founder, Joe Aragona; and founder of Yodle and OJO Labs, John Berkowitz.

Trashbots plans to use the funding to expand its supply chains and inventory and on marketing and hiring two or three additional employees.  The company has four employees right now and has several contract employees as well.

Trashbots is also able to run a really lean company and tap into talent pools at the university level by providing students with hands-on experience working on a robotics startup, Rohit Srinivasan said.

In Austin, Rohit Srinivasan and his brother Sidharth Srinivasan founded Trashbots in the spring of 2016 along with Paul Austin, a former NI executive. The Srinivasan brothers were still in high school at the time. Today, Rohit is a junior studying engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and Sidharth has graduated from Westlake High School and deferred his acceptance to Stanford for a year to work on Trashbots full time.

The Sputnik Accelerator program allowed Trashbots to kick the business in high gear and scale the business, Rohit Srinivasan said. It also introduced them to their current COO Chris Strzok, who lives in Wisconsin and has a background in STEM education.

Trashbots sells its products nationally to schools and to individuals through its website. It’s seen a huge uptick in demand since the pandemic, Sidharth Srinivasan said. And right now, schools are seeking products that provide an alternative to screen time for students, he said.

“They need other ways to keep their students engaged that is not staring at a screen,” Sidharth Srinivasan said.

Trashbots has been a good solution to that, he said.

“We’re poised to see a lot of growth over the next year or so,” Rohit Srinivasan said.

Trashbots sells a Trashbots Kit for $100 or a 10 pack for $1,000. It also provides courses for free on its website to program the robot.

Students have made fishing rods, ball kickers, construction machines, and even a robot that makes music with the kits, Rohit Srinivasan said.

“The possibilities of what you can do with this one kit is limitless,” he said.

Sana Benefits, the startup disrupting the healthcare insurance industry by providing coverage for small businesses at a discount, announced Wednesday that it has closed on $20.8 million in funding.

To date, Sana, founded in 2017 by Will Young and Nathan Hackley, has raised $27.1 million.

The latest round of funding came from existing investors, said Young, Co-Founder and CEO of Sana Benefits. Talks about raising the Series A round started late last year, he said. Gigafund led the round with participation from Trust Ventures and mark vc.

“I think what’s really exciting about raising the money is, for one, it’s a validation that we are actually making progress against our mission to make quality healthcare more accessible, understandable and affordable,” Young said. “We are able to raise money because we delivered results against that.”

Sana has also expanded its sales outside of Texas and is now available in the state of Kentucky and plans to launch in Illinois in the fourth quarter of this year, Young said.

The pandemic has not slowed its business, Young said. The demand for affordable healthcare plans for businesses continues, he said. Sana Benefits’ membership has grown 10X in the past year.

Sana Benefits provides an alternative to big insurance providers like Aetna, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, United Healthcare, Cigna and Humana. It competes with them by providing insurance that is, on average, 30 percent cheaper, Young said. Sana’s platform covers health, vision, dental, telemedicine and maternity, in addition to benefits like ClassPass.

Sana moved to Austin from San Francisco in 2018 and has expanded dramatically. At the start of the year, Sana had 37 employees, and today it has 80, Young said. And the healthcare insurance technology startup continues to hire in the areas of sales, marketing, operations and engineering, he said. It might double again in size by next year, he said.

“As we scale, we have to grow the team,” Young said.

Sana’s headquarters at Manchaca and Slaughter Lane in South Austin are vacant right now. The company’s workers are all performing their jobs remotely. And Young said he doesn’t know when they will return to the office.

“We won’t require people to go back to the office for a long time,” he said.

In a lot of ways, Sana was better prepared than most startups to have its employees work virtually, Young said. Hackley, Sana’s co-founder, has been working remotely from Ohio since the company started. And Sana has grown, in part, by tapping into talent pools outside of top-tier cities, Young said.  

And Young and his wife recently had their first child. Working remotely with a baby has given him a lot of empathy for parents juggling work and home responsibilities during a pandemic, he said.

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

A few weeks ago, Michelle McKown celebrated her return to a workspace at Central Austin’s Vessel Coworking with a cheerful Instagram story post. “Back at @Vesselcoworking and it feels so good!” she posted, “Don’t @ me! It’s lunchtime & I can’t eat through a mask!”

McKown, like perhaps thousands of others in Austin who were regulars at more than 60 coworking spaces before the COVID-19 pandemic, vacated the premises in March. She’d been a loyal customer since last August, using the space to study and write papers as a returning student studying to be a therapist.

Returning after five months without ever having canceled her membership, McKown says she decided to come back because she felt Vessel’s owners were approaching the issue of customer safety thoughtfully, and because she sorely missed the social interaction. She also needed separation between her home and work life.

“School started back up and I’m going insane at home,” McKown said over a video call from her tabletop at Vessel. “I can’t work at home. Some people thrive doing it, but I can’t.”

So she returned, joining about 10 others who are spaced apart physically and temporally at the coworking space throughout the week. “They made changes to the A/C system to make it safer. They have sanitizers all over the building,” McKown said. The business also had facemasks printed with the Vessel Coworking logo on them. “They made me feel like, OK, this is being done well and I feel safe coming back to this.”

Closings

Six months into the pandemic, some Austin coworking spaces are finding that freelancers and entrepreneurs as well as large businesses with nomad employees are slowly dipping their toes back into coworking. A comeback of sorts for coworking may be on the horizon, despite ongoing COVID-19 infections in Texas.

But the coworking businesses that survive, and perhaps thrive, after this pandemic period, will be rising amid the ashes of some others that didn’t make it through.  Austin has seen months of empty downtown offices and closings of several coworking spaces such as Orange Coworking and The Riveter, which is shifting its business away from coworking and which closed work locations in several cities including Austin.

In the case of Orange, which had initially planned to return after a temporary shutdown, the economics of the situation turned the closing permanent. Founder Dean Siracusa said longtime members canceled memberships and some members were forced to work from home by companies who had been paying some or all of their Orange membership fees.

A Hail Mary Facebook and LinkedIn ad campaign to attract new members in May was unsuccessful. “We stopped the campaign when it both, 1, was not working and, 2, was attracting some backlash from the general public about safety,” Siracusa said in an email. An attempt to negotiate a reduced-rent lease with building owner H-E-B also didn’t work out, he said. “We liquidated all of the supplies and furniture and closed up. And that’s basically the whole thing.”

One of Austin’s most high-profile coworking spaces and startup incubators, Capital Factory, has all but given up on the idea of a shared collaborative space for entrepreneurs, at least in-person ones, for the foreseeable future.

“Coworking is dead until COVID passes,” Capital Factory founder and CEO Joshua Baer declared in an August 16 blog post at Austin Startups.  The founder says Capital Factory is pushing virtual-first events and meetings, particularly for anything involving larger groups. Not everyone will adapt to working from home, or being away from a home office, he said in the post, but added, “I believe that a double-digit percentage of people will never go back to working in the office.”

Signs of life

Some people never left and, surprisingly, some Austin coworking spaces never actually shut down amid the pandemic.

David Perez, the founder and president of Lumen Insurance Technologies, is one of the die-hard coworking devotees who continued to work outside the home even in March and April.

He works out of Galvanize in downtown Austin and goes there every day, 9 to 5, for three really great reasons. They are ages six, three, and 18 months.

“It’s bad,” Perez jokes, “it’s really hard to get anything done in the house.” The Galvanize space is attractive as a place to work “because of the stillness and the quiet amid the chaos from home and kids being there. Now, I had a place I could go and actually work in peace and quiet.”

It’s been even quieter since March, “A ghost town,” Perez says, but he’s continued to get work done at Galvanize, checking his mail and engaging in some socially distanced networking and conversation when others are in the space. “Sometimes it’s just friends, sometimes it’s potential business or investment opportunities,” he said.

Perez is the kind of customer that has kept some coworking businesses going, along with small-business loans and the generosity of businesses and membership holders who’ve kept paying fees even when they aren’t using a space.

That’s been the case at Vessel, where owners Steven and Beth Knapp have been taken aback by the support they’ve received through the pandemic to keep the doors open at the business, which opened in 2015.

“I can’t describe the generosity we felt from that,” Beth Knapp said. “We weren’t holding anyone to a contract or any membership commitment over their head. If someone said, ‘I need out,’ we let them out.”

A small handful of regulars continued to work out of Vessel in the spring and Steven continued to go to the space every day, scaling down big breakfasts to a few Nervous Charlie’s bagels. They continued in their role of dinner party or backyard barbecue hosts making the space comfortable and friendly for their clients and helping them make connections with others.

The numbers of those using Vessel have slowly crept up; Beth and Steven say their clients have been respectful of spacing, wear masks in common areas and throughout the For the City center where Vessel is housed, and that there’ve been no incidents of COVID infections among those who patronize Vessel.

“Nothing has changed other than that I just think overall everyone’s awareness of how they should be as a community,” Steven Knapp said.

That doesn’t mean the couple hasn’t agonized over how best to protect their customers and to make a safe space for working. They’ve tried to make thoughtful decisions and to solicit feedback from customers as the pandemic’s parameters have continued to change, Beth Knapp said. “I feel like definitely people would judge us and have something to say on how we’ve handled this along the way. We haven’t been sure how to navigate it.”

A future coworking boom

One thing that businesspeople like Joshua Baer, coworking owners like the Knapps and coworking experts agree on is that post-COVID, whatever work looks like, it will be boom times for coworking spaces providing safe, productive places to work.

Already Vessel is seeing an uptick in requests for accommodations for small teams and for usage of a second off-site space they own that’s set up for all-day conferences. Coworking spaces with private offices and plenty of room to spread out will be in high demand as working from home becomes unsustainable long-term and businesses hedge on bringing workers back to home offices, says one long-time coworking entrepreneur.

Liz Elam, the former owner of Austin’s Link Coworking and creator of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC), says COVID-19 is weeding out businesses that were already in danger before the pandemic and paving the way for a big step forward in the industry.

“Those that do survive have a fantastic opportunity on the other side of COVID,” Elam said. Working from home, she says, sounds great at first, but is a haven for distractions, can exacerbate depression among singles and is typically not subsidized by businesses.

“If you are taking space in somebody’s private home, you should have to pay for their internet. You should give them an ergonomic desk. You should give them a chair and you should pay them for a portion of your house that they’re utilizing,” Elam said.

Short of that, she said, businesses will likely ask employees to utilize a mix of work-from-home and safe coworking spaces, especially ones that cut down on commuting distances. “It’s really good for suburban and rural coworking,” she said. “So like Cedar Park, Pflugerville, Georgetown, San Marcos are great places to have coworking spaces right now because that’s where people live.”

A few new coworking spaces are trying to anticipate these shifts, including Firmspace, which has opened a flagship space in Google’s downtown Austin office building, and Common Desk, which continues to expand its locations throughout Texas and in other parts of the country.

Elam says that these businesses have a mission to put people at ease about their safety concerns if they want to stay in business. That could mean upgrading air systems, changing floor plans and adding private offices, investing in lots of wipes and hand sanitizer, and most importantly, making sure their marketing is up to date.

“They need to put it on their website, they need to make it front and center,” she said, “they need to change their photos to show social distancing.”

The Knapps say they are optimistic that Vessel Coworking, which they took over three years ago, will thrive in the new normal. They think coworking spaces still fit a huge need in Austin.

“People still want to be part of the community,” Steven Knapp said, “they still want to work amongst people.

“Certainly I think people are just tired of being at home,” he said.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct Michelle McKown’s name.

The National Science Foundation on Wednesday announced the selection of the University of Texas at Austin to lead the NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning.

UT is spearheading one of five NSF AI Institutes nationwide and each one will receive $20 million in funding.

The UT NSF AI Institute for Foundations and Machine Learning will focus on major theoretical challenges in artificial intelligence including creating new algorithms, neural networks, and robotics.

“Many of the world’s greatest problems and challenges can be solved with the assistance of artificial intelligence, and it’s only fitting, given UT’s history of accomplishment in this area along with the booming tech sector in Austin, that this new NSF Institute be housed right here on the Forty Acres,” UT Austin interim President Jay Hartzell said in a news release.

Partners for the UT institute include the City of Austin, Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, and Dell Technologies. And UT will collaborate with researchers at the University of Washington, Wichita State University, and Microsoft Research.

Overall, the AI industry is booming with more than $191 billion in revenue by 2024, growing at a rate of 37 percent annually, according to Market Research Engine. Austin has a strong foothold in the industry with companies like SparkCognition, CognitiveScale Hypergiant Industries, Cerebri AI, OJO Labs, REX, and others.

UT Austin has also created the new Machine Learning Laboratory, which will house the AI Institute and serve as a place for data scientists, mathematicians, roboticists, engineers, and ethicists to collaborate. Tech entrepreneurs and UT Alumni Zaib and Amir Husain donated to the Machine Learning Lab.

The UT NSF AI Institute will be led by Adam Klivans, a UT computer science professor. He will also direct the Machine Learning Laboratory along with Alex Dimakis, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer engineering.

“Machine learning can be used to predict which of thousands of recently formulated drugs might be most effective as a COVID-19 therapeutic, bypassing exhaustive laboratory trial and error,” Klivans said in a news release. “Modern datasets, however, are often diffuse or noisy and tend to confound current techniques. Our AI institute will dig deep into the foundations of machine learning so that new AI systems will be robust to these challenges.”

UT is also creating a new Masters Degree program in AI and plans to create additional AI programming geared to high school students and working professionals.

In addition to UT, the NSF’s other AI Institutes include:

1.  NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, led by a team at the University of Oklahoma, Norman
2. NSF AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming, led by a team at the University of Colorado, Boulder
3. NSF AI Institute for Molecular Discovery, Synthetic Strategy, and Manufacturing (or the NSF Molecule Maker Lab), led by a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
4. NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, led by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The United States Department of Agriculture also announced two AI-focused institutes that will receive $40 million in funding over the next five years. They are the USDA-NIFA AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems, led by a team at the University of California, Davis, and the USDA-NIFA AI Institute for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability, led by a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.