By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

The Founder Institute opened in Austin a little over a year ago and has already graduated three classes and helped dozens of entrepreneurs.

Martin Martinez, managing director, joined with fellow directors Elisa Sepulveda and Paul O’Brien to launch Founder Institute Austin.

They thought Austin needed more founders and they wanted to provide them with a jumpstart on their entrepreneurial journey, Martinez said. The program, which lasts four months and provides information on how to start and scale a company, takes place at Galvanize, which is a sponsor.

“We do this because we believe in this,” Martinez said.

Founder Institute is a global organization with the mission of teaching entrepreneurs how to succeed. At the event, Martinez recognized the mentors and guest speakers that helped the entrepreneurs throughout the process.

On Thursday night, six founders graduated from the program’s third cohort during a special event at the Native Hostel. For the latest session, Founder Institute Austin received 91 applications of which 52 were accepted and 24 enrolled and six made it all the way through, Martinez said.

Martinez also announced Founder Institute is branching out statewide and is accepting applications now for its Houston program which will kick off this Spring.

The graduation event featured a keynote talk from Austin Serial Entrepreneur Brett Hurt, founder of Data.World.

Hurt kicked off his talk by reading Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” quote.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

“This is what entrepreneurship is,” Hurt said.

Hurt, who grew up in Austin, has been an entrepreneur since the age of 24. He started programming at age seven. And he credits his mom who bought him a computer at seven for encouraging his interests in programming. He grew up with movies like Revenge of the Nerds and Weird Science.

“Growing up that way I got picked on a lot,” Hurt said.

His mom deflected the criticism from teachers and relatives and encouraged Hurt to pursue his passion of programming.

Hurt founded BazaarVoice in Austin and took the company public. And before that he founded Coremetrics, a web analytics and digital marketing company. Other ventures included an online MBA community and then a sports nutrition online startup. He is now on his sixth venture, Data.World, a public benefit corporation focused on building the platform for data sharing. He has also invested in 62 startups and 19 venture capital funds.

It’s way easier to go to work for an existing company like IBM, Dell, Oracle, Google or Facebook, Hurt said. It takes persistence and dedication to pursue entrepreneurship and it’s not an easy path, Hurt said.

“It feels like a unicorn without a horn,” Hurt said.

That’s a nod to the book his daughter, Rachel, 13, wrote. It’s called Guardians of the Forest, for children ages 6-14, about a unicorn, friendship. self-discovery and happiness. Unicorn illustrations from the book provided the backdrop slides for Hurt’s talk.

Data.World is now three years old and has become the world’s largest collaborative community for data sharing, Hurt said.

“We’re hiring like crazy,” Hurt said.

Entrepreneurship can have a ripple effect throughout a community, Hurt said. Ex-employees of BazaarVoice have gone on to found 42 companies, Hurt said.

He concluded his talk by wishing the best of success to Founder Institute Austin graduates.

Martinez, Sepulveda and O’Brien with the Founder Institute Austin then awarded graduation certificates to each of its founders. The following is a brief description of each venture:

Prowess Project – founded by Ashley Connell. The startup is an online marketplace of fractional employees. It finds educated and skilled employees and certifies them in project facilitation. It works with moms with MBAs who have left the workforce to raise a family. It then matches them to companies looking for help.

ISAJI Technologies – co-founded by Baba Nureni Yusuf. The Houston-based startup addresses the problem of out of stock items for retailers. It has created ItemSensor as a retail inventory tracking technology to help reduce out of stock items. It’s in pilot projects right now, Yusuf said.

A Mana Project – founded by Gina Morales. The project is looking to bring Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, known as STEM, resources to young children of the world. It is currently in product development. Morales is the founder of Austin STEM Academy, a STEM pre-school.

Bearable -founded by Harini Bhamidiapati. The startup provides a gamified app for chronically ill patients to improve their fitness and lifestyle. They plan to collaborate with doctors, hospitals on the app. She has two pilots in the works focused on lupus and chronic pain.

Innerwork – founded by Jonathan Aird. The startup created a fitness app for mental health. It helps people establish healthy daily habits that will bring happiness.

Check – founded by Michael Odiare. The Dallas-based startup is modernizing traffic stops. One of the leading causes of death for law enforcement is during a traffic stop. It’s also the cause of many deaths of unarmed motorists. He came up with the app after he was pulled over for having a missing front license plate and found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. He did 40 ride alongs with police officers to understand the problems of traffic stops. His app for law enforcement and motorists can initiate better communication during a traffic stop. It’s like Facetime for a traffic stop, Odiare said.

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Imagine a nickel-sized device implanted in the brain to help treat chronic and severe mental disorders like schizophrenia, which affect how a person thinks, feels and behaves.

It’s not science fiction but a real device that is being developed in Austin.

The medical device is the brainchild of Paradromics, a pioneering startup developing a “modem for the brain.” And it recently moved its operations, staffed with 24 employees, many with PhDs, from San Jose, California to Austin.

“We are creating an implantable device that exchanges data between a brain and a computer,” said Matt Angle, Paradromics’ Founder and CEO.

With Paradromics’ technology, a lot of medical problems can be reframed as data problems,  Angle said. For example, a person who is blind does not have visual data coming into the brain, he said. Paradromics’ neuro-prosthetic device uses ultra-high broadband communication links with the brain with the goal of restoring lost functionality like eyesight.

Angle began working on Paradromics core technology while doing post-graduate work at Stanford University. He previously received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Carnegie Mellon University and his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

While at Stanford, Angle studied and developed neural recording technologies and he and his collaborators invented a new, powerful way of interfacing with the brain. He founded Paradromics three years ago to take his device to market. And since then, Paradromics has raised $7 million in funding from Venture Capital firms and received an $18 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Paradromics’ device is currently in preclinical development. It expects to enter human clinical trials in 2021 or 2022, Angle said. Before it becomes available to all patients, it must undergo the rigorous process of Food and Drug Administration approval, and the company anticipates that path should take four to seven years.

Eventually, Paradromics’ technology could potentially help with treating diseases like ALS which is a progressive neurodegenerative disease or addiction, and related mental illness disrupting a massive $100 billion pharmaceutical industry.

For ALS patients, Paradromics’ device would restore the person’s ability to communicate through recording data from parts of the brain and transmitting it, thus allowing a person to type at the speed of thought or even to speak.

That kind of big thinking and tackling of huge problems led the Wall Street Journal in January to name Paradromics as one of a handful of companies developing the next big thing in technology akin to changing everyone’s life like the smartphone. Magic Leap, a company with an Austin-based research and development lab, also made the list.

“Everyone appreciates the technology we’re building,” Angle said. Paradromics is essentially pioneering a new industry in Austin. It left Silicon Valley for the Silicon Hills because Austin has smart people and it is way cheaper to operate here and it’s a great place to live and it has an innovative culture.

 “A large part is the quality of life,” Angle said. “Austin has a lot of the things the Bay area has to offer, but for a fraction of the price.”

Austin has talented people and great universities like the University of Texas, Texas A&M. It also has a good startup ecosystem and good technical talent. And the cost of living is much lower. Getting high quality employees to work on a startup is much easier in Austin with lower housing prices than Silicon Valley.

“People basically come from all over the world to work with us,” Angle said. “The mission really resonates with people. We are working with a team of people that care about this.”

“There are no downsides to Austin,” Angle said. Except maybe traffic on Mopac as the company is headquartered in the Arboretum area.

Paradromics’ data come in the form of recording neural activity. Its system can harvest 30 Gigabytes per second of data

“It’s a really interesting time to be alive,”, Angle says. Delivering data as medicine will be the century’s next great leap in healthcare.

Other startups working on neuro implants include Neuralink, a company that is supported by Elon Musk. Based in San Francisco, the company is “developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers,” according to its website.

The tremendous advances in computing power, speed, and size have made it possible for Paradromics to do its research and development. It’s the beneficiary of Moore’s Law which states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months.

On one side, Paradromics’ nickel-sized device, the Neural Input-Output Bus, called NIOB, looks like a hairbrush with about 50,000 microwires that is modular, allowing for recording and stimulating up to 1 million neurons. The current state of the art in brain-machine interfaces (The Utah Array) records from approximately 100 neurons. The Utah Array is a neural prosthetic from Blackrock Microsystems, based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“Everything that we do outside of the body is just turn key engineering,” Angle said.

On the software side, Paradromics is using machine learning algorithms that were invented by other companies and other academic groups for the kinds of things Facebook and Google use them for.

“We can happily adapt those tools and use them for our own purposes,” Angle said.

The same machine learning that allows people to recognize pictures of cats on the Internet, can be deployed by Paradromics to provide data to the brain. Eventually Paradromics technology will allow doctors to restore brain functions for people suffering from schizophrenia.

“It’s not today but it will definitely be happening sooner than you’d think,” Angle said.

And Paradromics goal is to work with payers or insurance companies, healthcare providers and Medicaid to make sure people can get the device and that they don’t have to pay huge sums of money out of pocket.

“For us to win, it has to be a device that can be reimbursed through insurance,” Angle said. Like how being prescribed a cochlear implant or pacemaker works today.

A team at Paradromics takes ethics very seriously and is working on an ethical statement about how the technology can be used, according to a company spokesman. It expects to publish that statement in the next few months on their website, he said.

Silicon Hills News’ 2019 Austin Tech Calendar Party took place on January 24th at Opcity in Austin.

At the party, Silicon Hills News gave away a desktop or wall calendar to 175 guests. To order additional calendars please visit our Eventbrite form for our lunch and learn event on February 24th. You don’t have to attend the event to buy a calendar. Silicon Hills News will deliver it to you. But everyone attending gets a desktop calendar.

This is the fifth time Silicon Hills News’ has created a tech calendar shining a spotlight on Austin’s most innovative startups and technology advocates. The event honored the following 2019 calendar subjects:

January: Rocket Dollar 

February: Hypergiant: Ben Lamm, John Fremont and
Will Womble, co-founders of Hypergiant, Photo by John Davidson

March: Strangeworks: David Cardona, William Hurley, Justin Youens, Co-founders of Strangeworks

April:  Female Founders: Laurie Felker Jones, Heather Wan, Adrianna Cantu, Alex Porter, Leah Cohen, Tarica Navarro, Angela Hein, Sherry Shamrock and Lav Chintapalli

May: Mark Phillip, Founder of Are You Watching This?

June: Madhu Basu, Founder Unnanu

July: Smarter Sorting Team

August: Sherry Shamrock  Founder and CEO of FIT 2 CHEER, Adrianna Cantu, Co-founder & CEO of Revealix, Tarica Navarro, founder of Kinn Home, and Lav Chintapalli, Founder of Alcye & Pathway Power and Alex Porter, co-founder of Underminer Studios.

September: Sean Spector, CEO and Co-founder Dropoff

October: Nathan Hackley and Will Young, Co-founders of Sana Benefits

November:   Ben Rubenstein and Michael Lam, Co-founders of Opcity

December: OwnLocal: Lloyd Armbrust and Jason Novek, Co-Founders of OwnLocal

SHN2019AustinTechCalendarPartyRecap

A recap from Silicon Hills News’ 2019 Austin Tech Calendar Party at Opcity.

Egan Nelson and Silicon Hills Lawyer and Swyft sponsored the food: appetizers from Mama Fu’s Asian House.

Entertainment sponsors included PythonTek,, Justworks, Chastain Partners.

Drink Sponsors included Lumen Insurance Technologies and Active Capital.

And a big thank you to our host and venue sponsor: Opcity.

Other sponsors included Tito’s Handmade Vodka, 512 Tequila, Shade Tree Lemonade.

The event featured entertainment by Adam Lazoya, the Travelling Pianist, and Scott Andrew James, the Typewriter Poet.

Silicon Hills News 2019 Austin Tech Startups Calendar

Austin-based startups featured in the 2019 Austin Tech Calendar produced by Silicon Hills News

It’s no secret that driving in Austin, especially for downtown workers, has become one of the biggest aggravations about working or living in the city.

Austin ranked 14^th among the most congested cities in the U.S. in 2017 with commuters spending 11 percent of their driving time in congestion, according to a study last year by INRIX, a global transportation research institute. That translates to 43 peak hours spent in traffic congestion in 2017.

But Cirrus Logic and some other Austin-based companies have taken measures to make the commute easier for their employees and they are being recognized for it.

Cirrus Logic is among a select group of U.S. companies named to the 2019 Best Workplaces for Commuters list by the Center for Urban Transportation Research.  Cirrus and the others earned the honor by offering alternative ways to get to work besides driving to employees. Other Austin companies on the list include Athena Health, Car2Go, Google, IBM, Merck & Company, Silicon Labs, Texas Mutual Insurance Co, the Thrival Company, University Federal Credit Union and Whole Foods.

 “We’re really excited to be recognized as a Best Workplace for Commuters,” said Jo-Dee Benson, vice president and chief culture officer at Cirrus Logic.

About 20 percent of Cirrus Logic’s 800 employees use the alternative transportation options on a regular basis, she said.

Cirrus Logic moved from the Westlake area in 2012 to its downtown headquarters. To ease the burden of the commute for its workers, Cirrus Logic designed a “suite” of transportation alternatives, Benson said.

One of the moves Cirrus made was to set up a network of private Wi-Fi enabled “park and ride” shuttles. It operates a morning and afternoon Orange Line for employees in South Austin and a Green Line for those in North Austin. A third shuttle, the Blue Line operates throughout the day downtown and transports employees between the company’s offices and Capital Metro downtown train station and bus stops.

Other transporation benefits at Cirrus include:

• 100 percent employee expense reimbursement for Cap Metro passes, whether bus or train.
• Bike lockers, free bi-annual bicycle repair service and locker rooms with showers to promote a bike-friendly commute culture. The company was also a founding sponsor of Austin B-Cycle.
• Support for electric vehicles through onsite charging stations.
• Promoting a safer, enhanced downtown urban trail network as a major corporate sponsor of the Shoal Creek Conservancy and with financial contributions to the Austin Trail Foundation, for projects such as the Boardwalk installation along Lady Bird Lake and renovations to Vic Mathias Auditorium Shores.

Cirrus Logic is also a member of Movability Austin, which focuses on transportation solutions for Austin. The City of Austin also made the Best Workplace for Commuters list. In Texas, the only government agencies or cities to make the list were from Austin and San Antonio with the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization. Other Austin agencies included Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Downtown Austin Alliance and Travis County.

Austin-based RigUp announced it has raised $60 million in funding.

The company, founded in 2014 as an online marketplace for services and labor for the energy industry, has raised $123.8 million in funding to date. Founders Fund, based in San Francisco, led the Series C funding round with participation from existing investors Quantum Energy Partners, Global Reserve Group, and Bedrock Capital .

RigUp plans to use the money for product development.

“We’re preparing to rapidly expand our products and services in response to a fast-growing customer base,” CEO and co-founder Xuan Yong said in a news release. “When we started in 2014, we knew there was a huge opportunity for modernization in the industry, and we’re proud of the impact we’ve had in five years. With this round of funding, we’re positioned to see that impact grow exponentially.”

The company has created an online digital platform for oilfield services and personnel. RigUp expects about half of the oil and gas workforce to retire in the next five years. It has created the platform for pre-qualified contract oilfield workers to find a job quickly and easily.

RigUp estimates its platform can save companies time and money.

“RigUp is solving interesting process problems in a part of the energy industry that hasn’t always been quick to adopt new technology. The platform has quickly gained traction in the market, and we feel that they’re well positioned for continued growth,” Napoleon Ta, Partner at Founders Fund said in a news release.

While working at another fintech startup, Chris Doyle saw a major problem with commercial subcontractors not being able to pay suppliers in time for their projects.

He left that startup to found Billd, which acts as a bill me later service for commercial subcontractors to buy materials and pay for them over time.

Austin-based Billd launched nationwide last year and Tuesday, in yet another big funding announcement in January for Austin startups, Billd, announced it has raised $60 million in funding.

LL Funds, a Philadelphia, Penn.-based firm, led the Series A round.

Billd plans to use the funds to hire key employees, further develop its product and on sales and marketing, said Billd CEO Doyle. 

Doyle previously worked at Dividend Finance, a consumer lender focused on the home improvement marketplace.

“The construction industry has a major supply chain finance problem,” Doyle said. “ I started connecting the dots of the finance world and the construction world and saw all the inefficiencies.”

Billd launched in 2018 to provide timely loans at an affordable price to subcontractors in the commercial construction industry. Billd takes a transaction fee when the payment is sent out and charges a rate every month when the balance is outstanding.

“What we found is that if all the dollars come in about the right time – the financing doesn’t cause you that much,” Doyle said.

Billd handles credit and risk management for suppliers, Doyle said. It is working with suppliers to offer the product to subcontractors in the commercial construction industry nationwide.

Existing investors funded Billd through the startup process last year. With its initial funding, Billd bought Atlass44, a small business out of Scottsdale, Arizona that provided credit lines to the construction industry.

Billd is based at 2700 West Anderson Road in Austin and has 20 employees. It expects to double its staff this year with about 50 employees by the end of the year, Doyle said.

“The reception so far from suppliers has been great,” Doyle said. “We’re super excited. Our culture is built around understanding the construction industry: contractors, suppliers. We are looking at this untraditionally. Our hypothesis is these contractors are great borrowers. We’re going to make this the go-to option for them.”

Billd currently works with thousands of contractors across the US to ensure reliable cash flow and timely payments. 

Generally, construction suppliers provide 30-day terms to contractors to purchase materials while it takes contractors 60 to 90 days to receive payment for their work.  With Billd, contractors receive 120-day terms and avoid this gap in cash flow with simple, flexible and transparent finance products.

“The construction industry is known for inefficient supply chain financing across all major sectors, and subcontractors and suppliers are the last in line,”  Doyle said.  “Billd provides subcontractors solutions so they can take that extra project, grow their business, and simplify their process while also giving suppliers more payment options to share with their customers.”

As part of the transaction, Shivraj (Raj) Mundy, partner with LL Funds, will join Billd as its Executive Chairman.

Other big funding announcemnts in January in Austin came from DISCO which raised $83 million, Outdoorsy with $50 million and DOSH, which added another $40 million.

DISCO, which makes software for the legal industry, announced Thursday that it has raised $83 million in additional funding.

The startup, which moved to Austin in August of last year from Houston, has raised $135 million to date.

Georgian Partners, based in Toronto, led the latest round with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, LiveOak Venture Partners, The Stephens Group, and venture-debt provider Comerica.

DISCO plans to use the funds to accelerate product development for the $12.5 billion electronic discovery legal market. DISCO has created a platform for lawyers to use artificial intelligence, cloud computing for compliance, disputes, and investigations.

 “DISCO’s mission is to create technology to modernize the practice of law,” DISCO Founder and CEO Kiwi Camara, said in a news release. “Great legal technology helps great lawyers and legal teams deliver better legal outcomes for their clients. We do this in ediscovery today; over time, we will do this in all areas of legal practice.”

“Artificial intelligence is poised to transform the legal industry. As a trusted partner to hundreds of enterprise clients, DISCO is ahead of the curve in securely applying artificial intelligence,” Tyson Baber, Partner at Georgian Partners, said in a news release. “We are excited to help DISCO accelerate as they drive the speed of innovation in this industry and find better ways to serve legal professionals around the world.”

DISCO also plans to use the funds to continue international expansion. DISCO opened an office in London last October and plans to open offices in Canada,  Europe, Asia, Australia, and Latin America over the next several years.

DISCO’s headquarters are located at 3700 North Capital of Texas Highway. The company currently has more than 200 employees.
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Chicago-based Cision announced Wednesday that it has acquired Austin-based TrendKite for $225 million.

Cision, a public relations software and services provider, paid $94 million in cash and approximately 10.2 million shares of Cision for TrendKite.

“The addition of TrendKite’s award-winning application platform, known for its innovation and dynamic user experience, gives our customers additional ways to demonstrate and measure the business impact of their earned media communications,” Kevin Akeroyd, Cision’s Chief Executive Officer, said in a news release.

“TrendKite and Cision have a shared understanding of the communications industry’s need to quantify the business value of earned media campaigns,” Erik Huddleston, former TrendKite CEO and new Cision President said in a news release. “The combination of TrendKite’s rich analytics platform and the Cision Communications Cloud platform will powerfully impact our joint customer base with the most robust, end-to-end Earned Media Management solution available.”

TrendKite, a digital PR platform, uses artificial intelligence and analytics to help brands understand the effect communications programs have on corporate reputation, website traffic, and business outcomes.

TrendKite, founded in 2012, has raised $48 million in venture funding, according to its CrunchBase profile. The company has 230 employees in five offices across two continents, according to a blog post on the company’s website.

Techstars is one of Austin’s oldest and most recognized accelerator programs.

This week, Amos Schwartzfarb, its managing director, kicked off the 2019 program with 10 new startups. The companies come from Los Angeles, Chattanooga, TN, Toronto, Canada, Houston, TX, and Austin.

The three month long program culminates with Demo Day on April 10th.

Here are the companies (with descriptions provided by Techstars):

Countertop Smart (Austin) – CountertopSmart is an online marketplace that allows homeowners and construction trade professionals access to a little-known, secondary market of countertop remnants, the remaining unused portions of full stone slabs. Consumers use Countertop Smart to buy stone in smarter quantities, typically saving between 60%-80% on a broader design selection.

CPRWrap (Chattanooga, TN) – CPRWrap is a product that provides a CPR template and mouth piece so bystanders can successfully provide emergency CPR.

Dearduck (Houston) – Dear Duck provides retailers with tailored recommendations for consumers searching for gifts for another person, increasing the accuracy of buying for others.

Knocki (Austin) – Knocki makes the smart home easier to use by transforming a surface into a control interface. With Knocki installed, any wall or table becomes a remote control with a few taps. Users no longer need to open apps or use voice control to activate their smart home devices.

Livsn (Fayetteville, AR) – Livsn creates durable, innovative, and high-quality outdoor apparel created with sustainable materials that stand the test of time.

Pass It Down (Chattanooga, TN) – Pass It Down’s is a digital storytelling platform that allows museums, libraries, and companies to showcase their history and culture.

Slice of Sauce (Los Angeles, CA) – Slice of Sauce sells individually-wrapped condiment slices that are non-GMO, all-natural, gluten-free, and packed with all of the flavor of a sauce.

Succession Matching (Toronto, Canada) – Succession Matching connects small business owners that want to transition out of their businesses with resources, potential buyers, and other succession planning professionals.

Woorly (Chattanooga, TN) – Woorly is a mobile app that allows companies to reward customers that recommend their products and services to friends and family and earn rewards.