Next Coast Ventures, an Austin-based venture capital firm, announced this week that it has hired Jonathan Kaplan as its chief operating officer.

“I’ve known Jonathan for nearly a decade here in Austin and have seen how his diligence and focus on operations have been game changing for entrepreneurs and companies,” Thomas Ball, co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures, said in a news release. “We are building out a firm for the long term and have been very thoughtful about creating an infrastructure that best serves our mission, our investors and our portfolio. We believe that Jonathan will be a highly accretive addition and we look forward to leveraging his extensive scaling expertise from an administrative perspective to grow NCV.”

Kaplan previously worked as chief legal officer and general counsel at RetailMeNot, which Harland Clarke acquired for $630 million.

Kaplan has also worked at leading international law firms based in California and Austin including DLA Piper and Latham & Watkins.

Kaplan has a law degree from the University of California, Davis, where he was the editor in chief of the UC Davis Law Review, and an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“I was drawn to the opportunity to join Next Coast Ventures because of its differentiated commitment to supporting entrepreneurs in markets throughout the United States and the quality of the firm’s investments to date,” Kaplan said in a news statement. “I am delighted to join Next Coast Ventures, and I look forward to working with Michael, Thomas and the talented team to evolve the firm’s operational infrastructure to benefit entrepreneurs, portfolio companies, investors and our communities.”

Kaplan will be in charge of all operations of the firm.

“Since day one, our mission has been to provide our portfolio with the best resources in the industry and Jonathan’s addition to the team is a prime example of that,” Michael Smerklo, co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures, said in a news release. “As entrepreneurs ourselves, we understand how immensely additive operational and legal expertise are to a company and its leadership as they scale, and we know Jonathan’s experience and hands-on approach are going to be an invaluable tool for our portfolio as they ramp up their growth.”

Hypergiant Industries, which is focused on creating new products using artificial intelligence for businesses, announced Friday that it has hired two key senior executives in Austin.

Mark Arnold, who previously worked as vice president of corporate development for Forcepoint, has joined Hypergiant as its vice president of corporate development.

And Marc Katz, who previously served as in-house counsel at Dropoff, is joining Hypergiant as Deputy General Counsel.

“We’re adding executives to our ranks who share our vision, and are passionate about our work,” Ben Lamm, CEO of Hypergiant Industries, said in a news release. “Mark and Marc are both extremely experienced in their respective backgrounds and bring a wealth of knowledge, creativity and savvy to Hypergiant and its business divisions.”

In this new role, Arnold will support the Chief Global Strategy and Legal Officer on mergers and acquisitions across the portfolio, including the recently formed Hypergiant Ventures. In addition to Forcepoint, he has also worked at Symantec, Wrightspeed and Cisco Systems. Arnold holds a BS and an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Marc Katz joins the team as Deputy Legal Counsel supporting Hypergiant Industries. In addition to Dropoff, Katz previously worked at Newgistics, CareerBuilder and Jenner & Block. A UT Austin graduate, he received his law degree from the University of Illinois.

Hypergiant also recently hired Will Griffin as its vice president of ethics and diversity. To date, Hypergiant has 186 employees and offices in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and Washington, D.C.

OJO Labs, which uses artificial intelligence to help people buy homes, announced recently it has hired two top real estate executives.

Austin-based OJO Labs has hired Chris Heller, former CEO of Keller Williams, the largest residential real estate brokerage in the world, and most recently CEO of mellohome, as its Chief Real Estate Officer.

In addition, the company hired Karen Starns, who most recently led brand and customer experience at Amazon for Echo, Alexa, FireTV, Kindle, and the portfolio of Amazon smart home devices, as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer.   

“Karen and Chris are uniquely equipped to bring OJO to consumers in a natural and delightful way while enabling realtors, loan officers, and other service professionals to act as superheroes for their customers,” John Berkowitz, OJO Labs’ CEO said in a news release. “Hiring these two leaders is the perfect demonstration that due to the technology and strategy of OJO there doesn’t have to be a choice between obsessively serving consumers and helping the real estate industry thrive.”   

“What really makes OJO stand out is its leadership, team, and capability to execute on its vision,” Heller said in a news release. “OJO was the first company to come into the Real Estate industry and drive the innovation of an AI assistant for the benefit of consumers and agents alike. Since meeting the OJO team several years ago, I have seen them combine vision, operational excellence, creativity, and extremely talented leadership to bring an important and valuable product to market.”

Starns will develop scaled channels to continue to rapidly grow OJO’s user base while building a brand that consumers trust.

“We have an exciting marketing challenge of educating and introducing consumers to a technology that solves real problems by meeting them where they are and redefining how they search for, buy, and sell a home,” Starns said in a news release. “What ignited my enthusiasm about OJO was the organization’s empathy for customers and their authentic and differentiated approach to the real estate industry. Boiling it down, I am a brand marketer at heart, and the best and highest impact roles I’ve held have been centered on building a brand that people love and can’t live without. That’s what we intend to do with OJO.”   

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TalentGuard, a career and talent management software startup, announced this week it has raised $4 million.

The Austin-based startup plans to use the funding for global sales and marketing expansion and product development.

LiveOak Venture Partners of Austin led the Series B funding round. Previously, the company raised $3.5 million from angels and other investors, according to a CrunchBase story.

Linda Ginac founded TalentGuard in 2010. The company has more than 80 customers including Fortune 500 companies including Campbells, Bose, Mitsubishi Chemicals and Applied Materials.

TalentGuard’s cloud-based software helps companies retain workers. The platform gives managers deep insights into the skill sets of its employees. It also uses machine learning to help employees manage their careers. It shows employees where they are within their organizations and recommends career paths.

 “We are excited to have LiveOak Venture Partners as our lead investor. They’ve provided us with expert advice and guidance over the past few years, so it was a natural next step to partner with them as investors,” Ginac, CEO and Founder of TalentGuard said in a news release. “They have a strong track record as enterprise software and technology investors, experience with global SaaS businesses, and closely align with our values. This partnership with LiveOak will help us to enhance our talent management platform, accelerate growth in international markets and expand our team.”

“We’ve tracked TalentGuard over the years and have been blown away by their incredible grit and tenacity to create a comprehensive talent management platform and by their success with numerous blue-chip F500 companies,” stated Krishna Srinivasan, founding Partner at LiveOak.

As part of the funding deal, TalenGuard adds former Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron, Horizon Bank Chairman and former CFO of Dell James M, Schneider, and Srinivasan to its board of directors.

New Knowledge, a Cybersecurity firm, announced on Tuesday that it has received $3 million in additional funding.

BuildGroup and Lux Capital provided the funding.

Last August, New Knowledge announced it had raised $11 million in funding, led by GGV Capital. To date, the company has raised $18 million and it has 50 employees.

New Knowledge plans to use the funding to enterprise platform later this year. The software platform helps companies detect, monitor and mitigate social media manipulation.

“We are excited to partner with BuildGroup with this investment,” New Knowledge Founder and CEO Jonathon Morgan said in a news release. “We’re ready to scale our platform and bring our information integrity capabilities to a wider enterprise audience. It’s crucial for modern businesses to understand the authenticity of conversations that impact their brand and their customers, and identify the online groups that are trying to undermine their brand integrity. New Knowledge is proud to work with companies that share our vision for a more authentic internet.”

BuildGroup, based in Austin, invests in business to business startups that use data science and cloud services to radically alter existing industries. Rackspace’s former CEO Lanham Napier and other former Rackspace executives founded BuildGroup.

“New Knowledge is precisely the type of company with a modern business model that we look to partner with,” BuildGroup CEO Lanham Napier said in a news release. “Their technology offers insight into how a brand is being discussed and potentially manipulated online, and we think provides the next generation of tools for companies to manage their brands and customer networks. Jonathon and his team are in precisely the right position to scale aggressively and have a major market impact.”

New Knowledge, founded in 2015, was one of the first organizations to identify Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election.

TurnKey Vacation Rentals, one of the nation’s largest vacation rental management companies, recently announced it has secured $48 million in funding.

The Austin-based startup plans to use the funds “to fuel market expansion and the development of new vacation rental offerings and technologies for individual owners and small property managers,” according to a news release. Altos Ventures, a current investor, led the funding round with participation from existing investors Adams Street Partners, Greenspring Associates and Harmony Partners.

To date, TurnKey has raised $120 million since its founding in 2013.

“This investment in TurnKey highlights our deepening conviction that technology is the key to driving quality and efficiency in vacation rental management,” Anthony Lee, Managing Director at Altos Ventures, said in a news statement.

“This is our largest funding round ever and the third time our current investors have led the effort,” TurnKey Chairman and CEO John Banczak said in a news release. “TurnKey will hit the million-guest milestone this year, delivering industry-leading hospitality on the most sophisticated technology platform in the business.”

Banczak and T.J. Clark founded Turnkey in 2013, pioneered a new model for full-service vacation rental management.

Along with the funding announcement, TurnKey also announced that Clark will now serve as President and Chief Development Officer, Banczak will continue as Chairman and will also serve as CEO, and CFO Jen Ford will also assume the role of Chief Commercial Officer.

Correction: the headline previously misstated the amount raised.

TrustRadius, a platform for software reviews, announced Tuesday that it has received $12.5 million in additional funding.

The Austin-based company has raised $25 million since its founding in 2012.

Next Coast Ventures led the Series C funding round with participation from returning investors the Mayfield Fund and LiveOak Ventures.

TrustRadius plans to use the funds to hire key employees with a focus on sales and engineering. TrustRadius, with 59 employees, “plans to double in size through 2020 as the company grows recurring revenue by 223% and more than triple its customer base,” according to a news release.

“I founded TrustRadius because I experienced first hand the consequences of making the wrong technology selection, and witnessed how difficult it was for our team to conduct effective due diligence with resources like analyst reports and vendor-driven references and case studies,” Vinay Bhagat, founder and chief executive officer of TrustRadius said in a news release.

TrustRadius has created a platform where customers leave reviews of software products they purchase. Its customers include LogMein, TIBCO, and Solarwinds.

“Reviews are hosted both on TrustRadius and are syndicated to vendors’ own sales and marketing channels to improve conversion and accelerate purchase,” according to a news release.

“Enterprise software is a nearly half a trillion-dollar industry with high-quality, trusted reviews becoming one of the most effective tools for capturing market share, and NCV’s market research with major players in the software industry confirmed TrustRadius has the highest caliber reviews in the industry,” Thomas Ball, co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures who will be joining TrustRadius’ board as part of the firm’s investment, said in a news release.

A real estate tech startup, Homeward announced on Monday that it has raised $25 million in funding.

That includes $4 million in equity funding and $21 million of debt funding.

Austin-based LiveOak Venture Partners led the equity funding and Genesis Capital and Keystone Bank provided the debt funding.

“Founding team members of Opcity, ApartmentList, and a few other real estate tech startups also participated in the round,” according to a news release.

Homeward has created a product called The Homeward Way that allows its customers to make all-cash offers to secure their next home before selling their existing home. The company plans to use the funds raised to further develop that product along with other expansion plans.

 “The current process of home buying is backwards,” Tim Heyl, founder and CEO at Homeward, said in a news release. “Buyers have to sell their existing home and then rush to find a new one. We remove this uncertainty by letting buyers use our cash to secure their next home first. Then they can take their time and sell their existing home for its full market value.”

Heyl, a real estate professional, founded Homeward in 2018. The company operates in Texas, Georgia and Colorado.

“The Homeward Way gives homebuyers credit for their home equity up front, and lets them make an all-cash offer to secure their next home using the company’s funds. Homeward customers also receive a floor price guarantee on their existing home in case they’re unable to sell it for its full market value,” according to a news release.

Homeward charges a fixed 1.90 percent of the purchase price.

“We partner with exceptional entrepreneurs who are looking to transform large established industries. We recognized early on after meeting with Tim, given his incredible domain expertise and accomplishments and our experience as the first institutional investor in Opcity and Ojo Labs, that Homeward has real potential to disrupt the real estate market by empowering the consumer,” Krishna Srinivasan, Founding Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, said in a news release.

By LAURA LOREK, Publisher of Silicon Hills News

HOUSTON – The astronauts get all the glory, but hundreds of thousands of people worked behind the scenes to put the first men on the Moon.

“It took around 400,000 people to land humankind on the Moon from engineers to computer programmers to the people who sewed airtight space suits,” said Astronaut Mike Collins, who along with Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, flew the Apollo 11 Mission to the Moon. He made that statement in a Google video.

Last week, a group of engineers from IBM met at the Gilruth Center at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston to talk about the work they did on helping to make the Apollo 11 mission to the moon a success. IBM had more than 4,000 people working on the Apollo 11 mission, said John E. Kelly, executive vice president of IBM.

They were all working on a national goal set by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961, to land on the moon and return safely to earth. Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin accomplished that by safely landing on the moon, 50 years ago on July 20^th.

 “It’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong said as he stepped foot on the moon.

At that historic moment, Homer Ahr, former IBM computer programmer, was at the dynamics console in the Mission Operations Control Room, known as MOCR, in Building 30 at the Manned Spacecraft Center, later renamed the Johnson Space Center. That room, under the control of NASA’s Gene Kranz, a former fighter pilot, served as the nerve center for the Apollo 11 mission.

Ahr watched the second by second real-time processing of the data for Armstrong’s descent piloting the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle.

The last-minute and 45 seconds became fairly-tense as Armstrong flew above the surface of the moon looking for a place to land the Eagle, Ahr said.

“I remember praying at a minute and thirty seconds,” he said. “Dear Lord, just tell him to put it down, just put it down. And a few seconds later he put it down.”

On his descent to the moon, two alarms sounded that almost led NASA to tell Armstrong to abort the mission. Both signaled the computer was overloaded with data and couldn’t process it all. Kranz gave the astronauts the go-ahead to land despite the alarms. But that wasn’t the only problem the astronauts had to deal with on descent.

“At about 600 feet, noticing Eagle’s computer was taking them down into a boulder-strewn area near West Crater, Armstrong took over manual control of the descent,” according to NASA. “He pitched Eagle to a more vertical orientation, which slowed the descent, and decided to overfly the rough area and look for smoother terrain to land on.”

During that time, the Eagle almost ran out of fuel. At about 100 feet, a fuel warning light came on, that meant Armstrong only had 90 seconds left of hover time, according to NASA.

With less than a minute of fuel left, Armstrong found a place to land in the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon and shut down the spacecraft announcing back to NASA the historic words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

“The truth is if anyone in the world was going to land on the moon, it was Neil Armstrong,” Ahr said. “During some of the training, using a lunar module simulator at Ellington Air Force Base, up the road here, the trainer crashed.”

On May 6, 1968, Armstrong narrowly escaped with his life after the simulated lunar landing research vehicle he was flying at Ellington Air Force Base malfunctioned, according to NASA. Armstrong lost control of the vehicle because of a loss of helium pressure, according to an accident investigation by NASA. Armstrong ejected from the vehicle 200 feet from the ground and the vehicle crashed and burned on impact. Armstrong parachuted to safety and wasn’t injured.

“The vehicle’s instrumentation did not provide adequate warning about the adverse situation,” according to NASA. They corrected the problems for the eventual Eagle landing.

“He held on to the bitter end,” Ahr said. “So, we knew he was going to hold on till the bitter end. He was not going to get that close to the landing and not land.”

IBM’s computers played a major role in the Apollo 11 mission. They were the most powerful computers in the world at the time, said Kelly, executive vice president of IBM. And to see how much computing power has advanced in 50 years, today a smartphone has more processing power than the entire mission control operations that landed men on the moon.

“The biggest risk was not that the technology wasn’t up to it, we did everything we could in terms of the quality of our code, the accuracy, and precision of our code, the performance of our code, we trained for months to do this,” Ahr said. “What I was worried about as the biggest risk was me screwing up. Because we had to put in a lot of inputs into the computer and if you messed them up you had to redo them and redoing them took time.”

During training simulations, NASA almost didn’t make the go-no-go call during descent because Ahr had messed up.

“But that was what training was for,” he said.

The engineers were doing things between man and machine that had never been done before, Kelly said.

“We didn’t know we could fail,” said Sadie Stanley, former IBM Radar Programmer; one of the few women programmers at the time.

The Apollo missions built upon themselves and each one provided lessons and information to improve for the next one, said Dave Proctor, former IBM engineer who coded the lunar descent maneuver model. They also built on intelligence learned from NASA’s Mercury and Gemini missions before the Apollo program, he said.

“I thought the risk was in the descent and ascent, the rest of it we had done before, we had several training missions, 8 9, 10, we had gone into orbit around the moon before,” Proctor said. “The new part was descending and ascending, these parts we had never done before, but it worked out really well even though it was a little close on the landing.”

Everyone working on the Apollo 11 mission was scared, but they just focused on doing the best job they could to get through that phase and then onto the next phase, said Phil Pollacia, former IBMer who managed the preflight trajectory.

“At some point in time, we just had to say, we didn’t know we couldn’t do it, so we just did,” Pollacia said. “And one step after another step made it happen. And sure enough at the end of the mission, we all took a deep breath and relaxed.”

“Until the next mission,” Stanley said.

Tommy Steele joined IBM right out of college at the Huntsville Marshall Space Flight Center and he became the lead engineer on the instrument unit for NASA’s Saturn V, a three-stage liquid-propellant expendable rocket developed for the Apollo program to take humans to the Moon.

Most of the people working on the Apollo 11 mission were in their 20s and a lot of them were kids right out of college, Steele said.

“All of this stuff we were working on, there weren’t any bad ideas,” Steele said. “Even a raw recruit out of college got to work on important things.”

“No one had ever attempted an engineering project like this,” Steele said. NASA did an outstanding job of getting the mission accomplished and working with all the companies working on it, he said.

“We never flew a mission that didn’t have something go wrong,” Steele said. “The key was to be able to accomplish the mission in spite of that.”

Today, Steele, who retired from IBM in 1992, lives in Round Rock and is part of the “Round Rock Gang” a group of former engineers and staff that worked on the Apollo, Space Shuttle and Skylab missions. They get together to reminisce about the work they did and how much has changed. Today, NASA astronauts hitch a ride to the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with Russian Cosmonauts. At the time of the Apollo 11 Mission, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were in a Cold War and that kind of collaboration seemed impossible, Steele said. For a young engineer right out of college, it was the most exciting project in the world to work on.

Apollo 11: The Untold Story Of the IBM Team Behind the Moon Landing

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“Everything about the space program was embryonic and it was pretty exciting stuff,” Steele said. “There were so many people who dedicated their every thought for six or seven years toward getting this done. They did things that have never been done before. And they did it without worrying about who got credit.”

Steele also thinks the U.S. will get to Mars, but it will first have to have a better understanding of how space occupancy and long-flight space missions work.

“Mankind’s’ thirst for the next frontier – it never changes,” Steele said.

Editor’s note: while we have you here, please consider supporting Silicon Hills News, an independent technology news outlet that brings readers like you fascinating stories like this. Become a patron of Silicon Hills News today.

Austin-based Everlywell, a healthcare testing platform, received $50 million early-stage investment in April, making it Austin’s top venture deal for the second quarter.

Flosports, a sports media startup, claimed the number two spot with $47 million in expansion-stage financing, followed by Lung Therapeutics with $36 million, Arrive Logistics with $25 million and Elligio Health Research with $20 million, according to the PwC/CB Insights MoneyTree report.

Others in the top 10 included Aunt Bertha with $16 million, Coder with $11.4 million, KERV with $11 million, Atmosphere with $10 million and SubjectWell with $10 million.

Overall, Austin’s venture capital investments dropped 52 percent from the first quarter of 2019 to $337 million in the second quarter of 2019, according to the MoneyTree report.

But the number of deals in Austin rose slightly to 41 deals, compared to 39 in the first quarter.

The big decline in Austin’s investment dollars during the second quarter signals a return to normalcy following a few big deals that got done in the Austin area for the first quarter, said John Cummins, partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, based in Austin.

The Austin-Round Rock area have been experiencing record investment levels for the past several quarters just like the national VC industry, Cummins said.

The Austin-Round Rock area ranked seventh nationally in the top ten most active markets for VC investments by deal activity for the second quarter. San Jose-San Francisco topped the list, followed by New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver. The Austin-Round Rock area didn’t make the top 10 markets for dollars invested.

Overall, Texas companies received $687 million in venture capital in the second quarter of 2019, according to the MoneyTree Report.

Deals statewide rose slightly with 72 reported for the second quarter of 2019, compared to for the same quarter a year ago.

Nationally, California led VC investments in the second quarter with 576 deals worth $16.2 billion, followed by New York’s 203 deals worth $3.8 billion and Massachusetts with 112 deals and $2.2 billion invested. Texas ranked seventh.

Nationally, venture capital investment rose almost 10 percent in the second quarter to $28.7 billion in 1,409 deals, up three percent, compared to the first quarter of 2019, according to the MoneyTree report.

“At the 2019 halfway point, US VC funding shows no signs of slowing: At the end of Q2, US VC funding was at $55B, well above the mid-point for 2018 ($48B), which ultimately saw a near-record $116B raised (compared to the record $120B in 2000),” according to the report. “$100M mega-rounds drive funding higher: Driving the trend toward bigger deals, US companies raised a record quarterly number of $100M+ VC rounds in Q2, with 64 mega-rounds accounting for nearly half of all funding raised.”

Another trend that is continuing is a decline in seed-stage funding

“After rebounding last quarter, seed activity dropped below levels last seen in Q1 ’14.,” according to the report.