Sponsored post by Zoho

Integrated software can make or break your business, but it might not feel like that now. As your business grows, you’ll develop more business processes and eventually, you’ll need software to help automate and streamline those processes. But efficient processes are seamless, and integration isn’t always that easy.

Too often we spend time trying to make our software work instead of actually getting our work done. As a small business using separate apps without integration, you’ll find your time is spent on copying and pasting information from one app to the other. You’ll spend time logging in and logging out of apps, figuring out how to transfer information, and trying to make sense of how it all works together. On top of that, many are unaware that when starting a business, you’ll be playing the role of developer and IT technician. The truth is, most of us didn’t sign up for that.

Whether you’re a solopreneur or a mid-size company, it’s hard to carve out time to spend integrating your business applications. Because of how complex it can be and how much time is spent on the process, most companies resort to using third-parties like Zapier and Cloudworks, or even hiring an outside consultant to take care of the integrations for them. While these may sound like solutions to integration nightmares, these third-party services are very expensive and still time-consuming, not to mention they don’t always do what you want them to.

That’s why businesses have started to heavily prioritize applications that integrate easily to eliminate tedious copying and pasting, not to mention human error. On average, two in five data professionals spend more than half of their work week on tasks unrelated to analysis. Without integrated business software, growth can plummet because your business is spending so much time and effort on things integrations could automate or challenges fully integrating. And even once everything’s integrated, you may find that you’re left with what we call integration spaghetti, where your apps only communicate with other apps in certain ways, leading to lost productivity and inaccurate data.

So how do you avoid one of these software hairballs? Build your business with a fully integrated suite of apps. Using an integrated suite like Zoho One gives you all the apps you need to run every facet of your business in one place. That means that as you grow, you’re covered for anything you need for sales, marketing, finance, support, collaboration and productivity, HR, and more. And what’s more, all those apps communicate without expensive or time-consuming third-party services. Wouldn’t we all agree that it’s easier to keep track of tasks and business processes when they’re all in one place? Zoho One allows you to view everything from one single dashboard with one single login and analytics across your entire business.

Join us in Austin, TX on January 11th to learn more about how Zoho One can help you grow with one integrated suite of 40+ apps.We’ll be going over basics best practices for running your business, and go in-depth on how integrated software can take your business to the next level. Register for your free spot here.

Editor’s note: this is a sponsored post by ZOHO.

Manufacturing companies rely on suppliers to get parts on time to fill production orders and deliver goods on time.

Problems can arise when a parts supplier is late or doesn’t deliver the right item or doesn’t have enough inventory on hand to fulfill the order.

That’s the problem SourceDay solves. The Austin-based company has created a software platform complete with a dashboard, analytics, and data that allows manufacturers to manage their suppliers and receive just in time inventory.

The result is more efficiency and a big cost saving to manufacturers, said Tom Kieley, CEO and co-founder.

SourceDay Wednesday announced it has completed $6.5 million Series A round of funding from Silverton Partners, Draper Associates, and ATX Seed Ventures. To date, the company, founded in 2013, has raised a total of $10.8 million.

Kieley and Clint McRee, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, met at a software company a while ago in Austin and came up with the idea for SourceDay. They both have worked in the manufacturing and supply chain industry. They understood the problems a manufacturer experiences when not getting supplies in time, Kieley said.

SourceDay, which has 30 employees and is based in Northwest Austin, plans to double in size by the end of next year, Kieley said. It plans to use the funds raised to expand its sales and marketing efforts and to accelerate its product development and strategic hires, he said.

“Manufacturers and distribution companies struggle to manage their suppliers,” Kieley said. And as a result, they might be unable to deliver a customer’s order.

Just in time manufacturing is the goal and one of those “unicorn type things to achieve” for many, Kieley said.

That’s where SourceDay’s software platform comes in. It provides manufacturers with visibility to the supply chain in real time, Kieley said.

“We do that by giving real-time data,” Kieley said.

SourceDay has 100 enterprise companies as customers and more than 3,000 suppliers in seven countries on its platform and it’s growing, Kieley said. Some customers have reported a 35 percent improvement in supply chain management as a result of using the platform, he said. It has customers in the oil and gas, transportation, aerospace, healthcare medical device, and wholesale industries, he said. Most of them have between $30 million to $2 billion in annual revenue, he said.

“SourceDay’s software is well-timed with the rapidly increasing demand for solutions that digitize the supply chain,” Morgan Flager, General Partner with Silverton Partners, said in a news release. “We see direct spend purchasing and procurement as areas ready for improvement. Also, we are seeing expanding interest in SourceDay as awareness of this ideal automation solution expands across the industry.”

SourceDay’s software as a service model automates and provides standards to the entire procurement process for manufacturers. It automates purchase orders, invoices, and more in a centralized cloud-based application. As a result, SourceDay significantly reduces cost, accelerates operational performance and diminishes the risk to the supply chain, Kieley said.

Lyft launched its dockless electric scooters and bikes in Austin Tuesday.

The ride-hailing company joins Uber which launched Jump, dockless electric scooters in October in Austin and bikes last summer.

Other electric scooter companies operating in Austin include Lime and Bird.

Austin is the fifth market where Lyft is offering scooters on the Lyft platform, according to a news release.

Lyft is charging $1 to unlock the scooter and 15 cents for each minute in use. People can reserve and use the scooters through the existing Lyft app.

Lyft plans to pick up scooters at night, charge them and perform maintenance, and then distribute the scooters throughout the city. It is also working with the City of Austin to place docks for riders to park their scooters on streets in areas where there is high demand and near transit stations.

“Lyft believes scooters are a powerful and environmentally-friendly solution in Austin, complementing existing mobility options to help Austinites get where they are headed and reducing congestion and carbon emissions in the City,” Mike Kilpatrick with Lyft Bikes & Scooters Austin, said in a news release. “Lyft views the successful integration of scooters in Austin as part of a bigger movement to design cities for people, not just cars. Lyft looks forward to working in coordination with the city and other stakeholders on this issue into the future.”

Lyft plans to donate proceeds to Austin’s Farm & City (Vision Zero) organization.

“Vision Zero Texas works closely with the City of Austin and regional and state leaders to meet the challenge of the City’s Vision Zero Action Plan – to end traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2025,” Jay Blazek Crossley, Executive Director of Farm & City and Vision Zero ATX Board Member, said in a news release.

Aceable, a mobile-focused platform for certification and training courses, announced Tuesday that is has closed on $47 million in venture capital.

Sageview Capital led the Series B investment.

Aceable plans to use the funds to expand into new markets nationwide, according to a news release. As part of the funding deal, Dean Nelson and Mike McClure of Sageview Capital will also join the Aceable board of directors.

Aceable, founded in 2014, previously raised $9.8 million in Series A, and seed stage funding from Silverton Partners, Floodgate, Next Coast Venture Partners, Wildcat VC, Nextgen Partners and the Capital Factory Fund.

“This funding will fuel the next inflection point in Aceable’s journey,” Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable, said in a news release.”This past year we were able to validate that our teaching methodology is head-and-shoulders above the competition. Now it’s time to expand our catalog of five-star products across more markets and educational verticals.”

Aceable served more than 550,000 students in the last 12 months. The company, which started out teaching driver’s ed online to students, has since branched out to other kinds of digital courses including certification for real estate agents. It has exceeded its growth targets in the real estate industry, according to the company. Aceable now has more than 100 employees.

“The future of required education is online and mobile first, and the Aceable team has done a terrific job building a leading business at the forefront of this revolution,” Nelson, Partner at Sageview, said in a news release

Laurie Felker Jones founded JuiceBox Hero to create a marketplace for parents to comparison shop for childcare.

The childcare market is highly fragmented today. New parents often don’t know where to turn to find and compare what’s available in their neighborhood. Now they can turn to JuiceBox Hero. It’s like a Kayak comparison site and marketplace for childcare.

Austin-based JuiceBox Hero graduated last summer from the DivInc accelerator program. And Felker Jones has just been accepted into the prestigious Women’s Startup Lab, an exclusive, immersive accelerator in Silicon Valley. The program begins next week.

Also, JuiceBox Hero, a bootstrapped startup working out of Capital Factory, is currently running a crowdfunding campaign on IFundWomen.com and it has raised almost $6,000 from 73 backers to date. It has just one day left of its campaign with the goal of reaching $7.500 in funding. That money will go to finance JuiceBox Hero’s operations while Felker Jones attends the accelerator and some of the expenses of the accelerator program.

An estimated 11 million children in the U.S. are in childcare facilities every week and it’s growing, according to Felker Jones. Eight out of ten babies are born to Millennials with mostly dual-income households, she said.

Felker Jones founded JuiceBox Hero to simplify the process of finding childcare for all working parents.

In addition to running JuiceBox Hero, Felker Jones is the founder of Female Founders Texas, an active group of female entrepreneurs seeking to establish and scale large companies.

JuiceBox Hero is already launched and providing services in Central Texas. It lists more than 800 licensed childcare provides with more than two dozen filters for parents to search for the kind of care they want.

Companies collect massive amounts of data from their operations every day.

The problem is making sense of the constant stream of information and applying insights from the data to improve business operations.

Today, Hypergiant Sensory Sciences launches with its “mission to deliver human perception at impossible scale.”

The company is creating a software platform that uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural networks to harvest information from data streams collected by companies through cameras and sensors. It will turn that information into actionable insights a company can use to operate better and more efficiently.

Hypergiant Sensory Science’s initial focus will be on the oil and gas industry, the Department of Defense and healthcare.

Austin-based Align Capital led Hypergiant Sensory Sciences’ Series A, which also included Capital Factory, CPG Ventures in Dallas and others.

Hypergiant Sensory Sciences is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hypergiant Industries. It is led by Dave Copps, Chris Rohde and Ben Lamm. Copps and Rohde previously led Brainspace which built a machine learning platform for digital investigations that sold as part of a $2.8 billion deal with Cystera last year.

“As we looked deeper into this opportunity, we started to see a vision of how emerging technologies like deep learning and modeling software could reshape and amplify our ability to perceive physical environments,” Dave Copps, CEO of Hypergiant Sensory Sciences, said in a news release. “With new learning methods we saw that we could even create learning networks by connecting multiple environments.”

Hypergiant Sensory Science’s core technology uses custom deep neural networks “that combine object detection, classification, and tracking we generate massive data streams containing detailed information extracted from activities occurring across thousands of scenes,” according to the company.

“We founded Hypergiant Sensory Sciences with the goal of taking our expertise in artificial intelligence and unstructured data and applying it to a new area. We were stunned to find that machine perception and sensory search are still green pastures,” Chris Rohde, President of Hypergiant Sensory Sciences said in a news release.

Hypergiant Industries and Hypergiant Sensory Sciences are based in Texas, with offices in Austin, Dallas, and Houston.

Big companies can struggle with how to engage their employees in cybersecurity training.

Living Security, based in Austin, has a novel approach that focuses on behavioral design and gamification to educate employees about cyber threats in the workplace and how to avoid them.

The startup has created the Cyber Security Escape Room training for employees in an actual room in real life that involves problem-solving, puzzles in a fun and engaging environment. It also recently created Cyber Escape, a digital training platform.

Ashley Rose, CEO of Living Security, founded the company in 2017 with her husband Drew, who has spent 12 years in the Cybersecurity industry including seven years as a military intelligence systems engineer in the Army National Guard. They both previously worked at a cybersecurity company together.

This week, Living Security announced it has closed a $1.25 million seed round with Active Capital, a San Antonio-based firm, leading the round. It also includes investment from Cathexis Ventures and Capital Factory. The company previously closed a $500,000 seed round investment in August.

Active Capital invested in Living Security’s pre-seed round and has gotten to know them and really likes their products and the market they are tackling, said Pat Matthews, the firm’s founder, and CEO.

“I think they are going after a big market,” Matthews said. “Think about all the Cybersecurity threats facing us. There is still a majority of hacks and threats that come through the workplace from everyday mistakes employees make. That is how bad guys get in.”

“What I like about what they are doing – they are building a new approach to how security training happens in the enterprise,” Matthews said. “A gamified platform that makes training engaging and informative.”

Living Security has gotten in the door with several major companies with its physical escape room challenge approach and they are building a lot of relationships, Matthews said.

“I think the timing could potentially be perfect,” Matthews said. “It’s gamified entertaining software that people are going to enjoy. That’s how all people learn today. I think it’s brilliant to take this approach into the enterprise with a focus on a security awareness.”

Living Security is working with over 50 companies, many of which are in the Fortune 500. Its customers include CVS Health, American Campus Communities, International Association of Security Awareness Professionals, InnoTech.

The company plans to use the new funds for continued product growth and go-to-market execution, Rose said.

Living Security wants to decrease human error–the greatest cybersecurity risk enterprises face–through immersive and intelligence-driven training solutions, Rose said.

Living Security is part of the Capital Factory accelerator and Darkfield, a Cybersecurity focused accelerator, based in Denver.

Capital One this week announced its acquisition of Wikibuy, an Austin-based online website that allows shoppers to compare prices for items.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Wikibuy, founded in 2016, has 20 employees, based at 3939 Bee Cave Road in Austin. Its free service has more than two million members.

“We believe that consumers want intelligent, real-time banking tools that proactively anticipate and deliver on their needs,” said Joe Poellnitz, senior vice president of US Card at Capital One Financial, said in a news release. “With Wikibuy, we’ve acquired an innovative startup that helps customers save time, money, and enables them to shop with confidence.”

Austin will continue to be home for Wikibuy and it will continue to be run by Adam Gauvin, Wikibuy’s CEO and President and Walt Roloson, Co-CEO and Chief Business Officer.

“We’ve been impressed by Capital One’s strong vision for the future and considerable experience leading innovation through technology,” Gauvin, Co-CEO of Wikibuy wrote in a blog post announcing the news. “As it has moved further into digital experiences, Capital One has expanded the ways it helps customers make better financial decisions.”

Wikibuy has helped its customers save $50 million this year, according to the company.

“The “wiki” in Wikibuy comes from the idea that one customer’s shopping helps other customers find savings. When it comes to finding lower prices, it works like Waze. When one customer finds a great price on a product, other customers who have looked at that product are notified of the savings available,” according to the blog post. “And, future customers who have looked at the product will see the lower price too. The community benefit is true with coupons too! If one customer finds savings with a great coupon, customers who shop later will also automatically be offered that coupon.”

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Kronologic has created software that turns sales leads into meetings automatically.

Through automation, bots and artificial intelligence, Kronologic’s software moves the conversation to the calendar, said Trey Allison, the company’s co-founder.

“Let’s get to the yes quick or let’s get to the no quick and let’s cut through all the noise that is the inbox,” Allison said.

Allison and co-founder Ben Parker encountered the problem firsthand while working at VMWare, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies that provides cloud computing and platform virtualization software and services.

Allison and Parker met and started on the same day at VMWare. Soon after, they noticed that the company spent millions on marketing and half of the leads they generated were never touched or they would take months to follow up on, Allison said.

So, Allison and Parker built a software program that when sales leads came into the system, the software would reach out and schedule time with salespeople automatically.

“It worked, really, really well,” Parker said.

The software improved operations for the 40-person staff significantly. It doubled their revenue in six months and shrunk the team size down to 25 employees, Allison said.

“They were following up on all the leads,” Allison said. “For the first time in our history, we didn’t have a backlog of leads because we processed them all.”

That’s when they decided to found Kronologic to bring their solution to even more companies. They hired an attorney and VMWare gave them permission to start over with the project and create a new company, Parker said. That was two years ago.

Since then, they’ve built the software, made it scalable, raised an undisclosed amount of seed-stage funding and now they are entering the market aggressively. The software is integrated with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office 365, and Google’s Gmail.

Parker left his job at VMWare on Oct. 1st. Kronologic is based at Galvanize in downtown Austin. They are starting a pilot project with Thompson Reuters and they’re working to land other customers.

“We want to target the enterprise where we came from and to do that, we had to have an enterprise-grade application,” Parker said.

Kronologic’s broader vision is to automate the work calendar.

“Ultimately a lead is a like a flag or a signal or an alert,” Allison said. “All it’s telling a salesperson is there is someone somewhere interested in something. That’s all it is. There is an interesting thing in this CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or database that you should check out. And then the person acts on that by trying to turn that into a meeting on their calendar, so they can have a conservation.”

“The workflow goes something like – hey Bill – saw you downloaded a white paper I would love to get 20 minutes of your time tomorrow at 2 p.m. I can send a calendar invite in case that works for you,” Allison said. “Then they will respond and say Trey, I would love to talk but can we do next week. There is an AI that will do the scheduling, so all Bill has to do is show up.”

That same signal works for a customer support role too, Allison said.

Last summer, Kronologic.ai joined the RealCo, long-term accelerator based out of Geekdom in San Antonio.

“I was impressed with the team,” said Chris Saum, a former partner with RealCo, met Allison and Parker at the Collision Conference in New Orleans last May. “I think they have a great founder dynamic. They both push each other and work really well together.”

Saum also liked Kronologic’s technology and the problem it solves for customers.

“There is a real need that is underserved and they are the right team to execute on this,” Saum said.

“I like their story,” said Richard Grote, managing director of RealCo.

Allison and Parker were able to test their mettle with a scrappy version of their software inside a big organization, Grote said. That gave them proof of concept and the data to back that up, he said.

RealCo provides $100,000 investment into a startup for a six percent stake and every company that is accepted into the 15-month long program should be in a position for a Series A round of institutional investment by the end of the program, Grote said.

“We select for teams we think we can help grow into significant companies,” Grote said.

Kronologic met that criteria, he said.

Kronologic is selling a Software as a Service model. Its software integrates with other systems like customer relationship management programs, Zendesk, any system that generates any sort of alert that people need to do something with, Allison said.

“The calendar to us is the new frontier,” Allison said.

Electronic calendars are the way of the world, Parker said.

“More and more the market is starting to use the calendar as an inbox,” Allison said. “It’s like hey instead of sending a message proposing we find time to do something – why don’t we just start with the thing we are all talking about. Why doesn’t the discussion start with the meeting? Instead of dancing around it.”

“Ultimately a company is just a bunch of humans and their time,” Allison said. “We focus on making humans much more human.”