Microsoft buys Austin-based XOXCO, a software product design and development studio known for its conversational artificial intelligence and bot development.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Ben Brown and Katie Spence started XOXCO in 2008. The company raised $1.5 million in 2015 from “Bloomberg Beta, True Ventures, a small angel group called Outlier and numerous individual investors,” according to Techcrunch.

“When Katie Spence and I started this company, the idea of chatbots and other talking computers was just beginning to get attention in the tech world,” Brown wrote in a blog post. “We found a developer ecosystem hungry for resources – searching for tools, tutorials, or well-defined best practices. It was like the early days of the web…an exciting wild west of new technology and fresh opportunity.”

In 2015, they released Howdy, a bot add-on for slack, followed by Botkit, an open source set of building blocks for building bots. They also founded Talkabot, a community of bot builders in Austin.

“Today, Botkit is used by hundreds of thousands of developers across GitHub for building chatbots, apps and custom integrations for major messaging platforms,” according to Brown’s post.

“Over the years, we have partnered with XOXCO and have been inspired by this work,” Microsoft wrote in a news release.

“We have shared goals to foster a community of startups and innovators, share best practices and continue to amplify our focus on conversational AI, as well as to develop tools for empowering people to create experiences that do more with speech and language,” according to Microsoft.

The Microsoft Bot Framework supports more than 360,000 developers.

Austin lost its bid for Amazon’s HQ2 project.

The Seattle-based company announced this week it has selected New York City and Arlington, Virginia, as the locations for its new headquarters. Amazon plans to invest $5 billion and create more than 50,000 jobs in the new locations.

“The fundamentals that made Austin a top 20 finalist and have helped our city be a leader in job generation – our incredible talent and lifestyle – haven’t changed,” according to a blog post by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.

“Amazon already calls our region home. It has created thousands of jobs here with Amazon Web Services, the fulfillment center in San Marcos and, just last year, it acquired Whole Foods – a true Austin original.”

Austin and Dallas were the only two cities in Texas to make the top 20 finalist list. Amazon announced a year ago that it would be searching for a new HQ2 and it received 238 proposals from across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to bid for the project.

Amazon announced it will split the project between New York City and Arlington and have three headquarters in North America. The company also announced a new Center for Excellence for its operations business in Nashville with 5,000 new jobs.

“We are excited to build new headquarters in New York City and Northern Virginia,” Jeff Bezos, founder, and CEO of Amazon said in a news release. “These two locations will allow us to attract world-class talent that will help us to continue investing for customers for years to come. The team did a great job selecting these sites, and we look forward to becoming an even bigger part of these communities.”

Early on as an actress in Hollywood, when Reese Witherspoon attended meetings to discuss her movie characters and mentioned a character flaw she would like to accentuate, the male producers would almost always say yes, but that would make her unlikable.

In those meetings, Witherspoon said she felt like she was always reminded she had to stay in her lane. Stay in a place that felt comfortable for everybody and conformed to some other person’s definition of what made a woman likable.

“I think as I got older I said, I’ve had enough of that,” Witherspoon said.

“Women are complicated, they are complex, they are dynamic,” Witherspoon said. “Those are the women I want to see on the screen.”

That led Witherspoon to create her own production company that focused on movies with strong female characters as the stars.

Witherspoon discussed her life, her career, launching her business and her role as an advocate for other women Friday afternoon at the Texas Conference for Women during a keynote interview with 60 Minutes Correspondent Sharon Alfonsi. More than 7,500 people attended the sold-out conference that featured a full day of speakers, breakout sessions, networking and more at the Austin Convention Center.

Witherspoon’s production company has produced Gone Girl, Wild and the HBO drama series Big Little Lies. She self-funded the company for the first five years, and now it is profitable, she said.

In 2010, Witherspoon got a script that she thought was bad. The two women in the movie didn’t seem to have any purpose other than obsessing over the same man. She sulked about it and complained to her agent. Witherspoon also sought out studios that were producing movies starring women. And she couldn’t find any worthwhile projects. Then she decided to do something about it and that’s when she started her company.

Witherspoon read a lot of books, she knew what made a good movie, she knew a lot of screenwriters and she knew movie studio presidents. She decided to take a risk. She called up two friends who were good at business and they helped her create a business plan.

“Ambition has been inside me since I was a little girl and I wish I could turn it off sometimes,” she said.

But ambition is not a dirty word, Witherspoon told the audience.

Witherspoon said she read a study recently from Columbia University about traits in women that made them good job candidates and ambition ranked low.

“Why is that such a negative trait in women?” Witherspoon asked.

“We have to reframe this idea about women and ambition that women are out for themselves,” she said. “They are usually out for their family, their community, their schools, out for their business that is going to help those areas, out for the government.”

Women who are very ambitious are often perceived as selfish, Alfonsi said.

“Yeah, I hear that all the time and it’s simply not true,” Witherspoon said.

Women wake up and they do things for their family, their kids, their husband, their community, their charity, and they rarely have time for themselves, Witherspoon said.

“Women are natural leaders and organizers and they don’t even know it,” Witherspoon said.

Witherspoon started working when she was 14. She grew up in Nashville. Her dad is a doctor and her mom is a nurse. They didn’t understand her desire to pursue acting, but they supported her.

When she got the starring role in a movie at 14, her teacher put up a picture of Witherspoon on a bulletin board and someone took a pen and stabbed her eyes out at her school. She said she learned to put her head down, do her work and not call attention to herself and to stay quiet about her accomplishments.

At 29, Witherspoon won an Oscar. But she didn’t put it on display until a friend came to her house and commanded her to put the Oscar by the front door.

“It’s interesting how even women who are very accomplished in any kind of aspect of their life, we learn how to tone it down,” Witherspoon said.

Women need to own their accomplishments and be proud of them and they don’t need to tone them down, she said. And there is room for plenty of women at the top, she said. It’s not about one and done.

“Instead of scarcity, I think we have to think of abundance,” Witherspoon said. “And when we do lift ourselves up, we have to lift up women with us…You have to lift other people and tell them how amazing they are.”

Right now, Witherspoon’s production team is working on four television shows and they are being written by women of color, LGBTQ women, disabled women, women from all walks of life, Witherspoon said.

“In order to change the stories, we had to change the storytellers,” Witherspoon said. “To be authentic, to really walk the walk, to invite people into the process.”

Don’t start a company, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies and 8VC, told a couple hundred University of Texas at Austin students.

“I think in general it is very rare students end up founding very big companies, there are some exceptions,” Lonsdale said in a response to a question about how to support student founders.

Instead, join a startup and learn from people smarter than you, Lonsdale told them.

That’s what he did.

“I was exposed to a few well-run hyper-growth startups before I built it myself,” Lonsdale said at the event, which took place Tuesday evening at the UT Recreational Sports Center.

Cat Cheng, due diligence lead at the Genesis Program, interviewed Lonsdale, followed by questions from the audience. The Genesis Program, a student and alumni fund aimed at fostering startups at UT, hosted the event.

As a freshman studying computer science at Stanford University, Lonsdale sought out Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, and convinced him to give him an internship. He got rejected at first. But he persisted. He ended up getting in a year later. He worked as an intern for a couple of years with Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and others. From there, he went to work for Thiel in a hedge fund.

“By seeking out where a lot of smart people are going you kind of put yourself in a position to be exposed to a lot of great things,” Lonsdale.

Lonsdale said he probably wouldn’t have been able to build Palantir without first being exposed to other ventures like PayPal first. In 2003, Lonsdale founded Palantir with Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp. The privately-held software company, based in Palo Alto with 2,000 employees, specializes in big data analytics. Its a highly secretive organization that works closely with law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and others at data mining and predictive analytics.

Lonsdale, 36, was interested in entrepreneurship from an early age. He grew up in the Silicon Valley area in the East Bay and he got to be part of the first Internet bubble and learned how to code early on. He also saw a lot of cool things he worked on blew up when the Internet bubble burst in 2001.

The technology worked but the business models didn’t in the dot-com bust, which was primarily focused on consumer Internet business, Lonsdale said. But a lot of things that people tried back then are now working because the economics make sense, Lonsdale said. People learned a lot from those failures and moved forward with better business models, he said.

Cheng asked Lonsdale about how to go about finding mentors to help a young entrepreneur with a venture.
“Not everyone who is talented is going to want to help you do these things,” Lonsdale said.

Lonsdale once asked one of the PayPal co-founders, who he declined to name, for help build a company and advice. The guy told him “Sorry, you either have it or you don’t.”

In other cases, there are people who help and follow up, he said.

At 21, Lonsdale started Palantir and no one would take them seriously at first. Its first customers were agencies with the U.S. Intelligence Community. But because they were so persistence they got the agencies to try some software.

“Persistence was really important, but we also had these adults around us that were connecting us in the right ways,” Lonsdale said. Peter Thiel was a co-founder and he was well connected and able to connect with George Tenet, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

When it comes to investing, the number one criteria Lonsdale looks for in a startup is the team and the talent behind that team. Number two is working on a mission that is going to change how an industry works, he said. Number three is a way to capture data to enable the platform to work better. Lonsdale is the founding partner of 8VC, a technology investment fund, based in San Francisco with 34 employees. In 2018, Forbes ranked him Number 22 on its Midas List of the most successful investors.

Red flags he looks out for when deciding to make an investment are people who don’t understand their business, industry and business model and their budget, he said.

“Most people shouldn’t be entrepreneurs and there are various reasons why one of the main reasons people shouldn’t be entrepreneurs is very few people have their own personal opinion where they believe this is how things should look, and why everyone else in the industry is wrong,” Lonsdale said.

“If you’re not a disagreeable person, you probably shouldn’t be starting something,” he said. “When you are starting something, you are building something different and changing how things should work.”

One of the areas he is particularly interested in right now is the bio-information technology wave that is going on, Lonsdale said. Startups in genomics and liquid biopsies.

“The fun thing about being an investor is you get to learn about new things,” he said.

The Texas Health Catalyst held its Demo Day Tuesday afternoon with 13 early-stage ventures showcasing their new projects.

“These are really, really early innovations,” said Nishi Viswanathan, director, Texas Health Catalyst at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. They are still figuring out if they clinically viable projects, she said.

The Demo Day 2018 class consisted of UT Austin and Dell Medical Faculty, graduate students and Austin Startups. The invitation-only event took place in the auditorium at the Edgar R. Smith Building at the Blanton Museum of Art.

So far, the program has received 220 applications, provided 24 consulting awards and $590,000 in funding to 16 projects. It relies on 225 plus clinical and business advisors who have volunteered 5000 plus hours during the last three years.

Each startup addressed an unmet need and a pain point in the medical industry, Viswanathan said. The startups focused on devices, diagnostics, therapeutics, and digital health.

Each presenter gave a five-minute pitch about their project.

CLOXERO – First up, Ashlee Brunaugh, UT Austin College of Pharmacy, presented Cloxero, a student-led startup that aims to treat Non-Tuberculous Mycobacterial infections with an antibiotic formulation that delivers high concentrations of the drug at the site of infection through a portable inhaler device. Cloxero has reduced side effects and faster treatment times, Brunaugh said. Non-Tuberculous Mycobacterial is classified by the Food and Drug Administration as an Orphan Disease, meaning it affects less than 200,000 people in the U.S. The startup has received funding from the Texas Health Catalyst fund and a $3.5 million from a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research, known as SBIR, grant.

GALILEO – Next, Abhijeet Pradhan, CEO, Galileo Clinical Decision Support, presented its intelligent assistant for radiologists. It can view an image, suggest most likely diagnosis including rare conditions, and draft a report. Galileo uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analysis to make recommendations for radiology cases. Dr. Nick Bryan, chair of diagnostic medicine, Dell Medical School, is the founder, chairman and chief scientific officer.

DRUG DELIVERY – Bryan Davies, assistant professor, UT Austin College of Natural Sciences, presented a project to deliver neuro-pharmaceuticals to bypass the blood-brain barrier. He’s working on the project with Colleen Mulvihill, UT Austin College of Natural Sciences.

DRUG ADHERENCE – Tyler Gums, assistant professor, UT Austin College of Pharmacy, presented his predictive model and clinical decision support for medication non-adherence. Patients not taking their medication is a huge problem, especially prevalent with patients not taking their blood pressure medication properly. Gums led a pilot study for patients suffering from hypertension with mixed results. The clinicians liked the model but didn’t follow it strictly, he said. He’s making revisions and launching a new pilot soon.

DIAGNOSTIC TOOL – Sina Haeri, assistant professor of women’s Health, Dell Medical School, presented a quick and cost-effective diagnostic tool to measure blood loss during hemorrhage after childbirth. It’s a hand-held hemoglobin tester that will tell whether the mom is in trouble or not. “It’s unacceptable that these many moms are dying from something that’s preventable,” Haeri said. He’s working on the diagnostic device with Thomas Milner, professor, UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering. They are focusing on providing access to care for women and a timely diagnosis. They are focused on rural areas in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa.

ENZYME-BASED CANCER THERAPEUTIC – Everett Stone, Ph.D., UT Austin College of Natural Sciences, presented enzyme-based cancer therapeutic to stimulate an immune response. The enzymes help boost the body’s immune system to eliminate cancer cells.

SEMPULSE – Kurt Stump, CEO of Sempulse, presented its sensor device to monitor vital signs in real time. It’s focused on the triage and trauma care for the military. The medical device attaches to the back of the ear and reads vital signs. The startup recently won the top prize at MassChallenge Texas and took home $100,000.

MEDNOXA – Evan Skowronski, Ph.D., MedNoxa, presented its “smart bandage,” which is an oxygenated bandage to prevent scarring and bacterial infections. Its CEO is Eric Frey, but he was in China and was unable to present, Skowronski said. The bandage is aimed at the $50 billion wound care market and, at Diabetic foot ulcers. But first, it’s going to pursue the cosmetic market, particularly C-section scars for women. They licensed the technology out of Perdue University and they hold the worldwide rights to the technology.

E-TATTOO – Daniel Sanchez, Ph.D. student, in the lab of Nanshu Lu, associate professor, UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering, presented its smart e-tattoo blood pressure monitor. They are working with Joshua Chang, department of neurology and population health, Dell Medical School, to bring the device to market. It’s a tattoo-like sensor for continuous blood pressure monitor. It’s a disposable device that works for up to seven days monitoring a person’s heart rate. They have two patent applications and a proof of concept prototype. They plan to enter clinical trials and then to the FDA for approval and the commercial market.

CLEARCAM – John Uecker, MD, associate professor, Dell Medical School, CEO of ClearCam presented its laparoscopic cleaner that prevents lens fogging during surgery. He developed the device with Chris Rylander, associate professor, UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering, CTO, ClearCam, Doug Stoakley, COO, ClearCam and Chris Idelson, Ph.D. candidate, UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering, VP Engineering ClearCam.

MENTAL HEALTH PATIENT CARE APP – Kasey Claborn, Ph.D., Assistant professor, psychiatry, Dell Medical School, presented a patient care coordination app. She’s developing it with Avani Jhaveri, project coordinator, psychiatry, Dell Medical School. The U.S. experiences $193 billion in losses each year related to mental health issues and another $740 million in criminal acts and lost work related to substance abuse, Claborn said. The app would improve mental health treatment and referrals and allow for interoperability across systems.

ADVANCED SCANNERS – Jeff Levin, co-founder, CEO, Advanced Scanners, presented its real-time imaging and live brain animation technology during surgery to map brain shift. He’s developing it with Aaron Bernstein, Ph.D., research scientist, CTO Advanced Scanners and Lars Kuslich, biomedical engineer, Advanced Scanners. Brain shift is a difficult problem during surgery and small errors can lead to a lifetime of challenges for the patient and their families. They are working to get their project through clinical trials and into commercialization by 2020.

URGENT WELLNESS CARE – Freya Spielberg, Chief of Family Medicine, Dell Medical School, presented an urgent wellness care model to help low-income populations. She’s working on the project with Ofelia Zapapta, lead community implementation, president South East Memorial High School PTA. They want to place wellness clinics in schools and low-income housing communities to target populations that have serious challenges accessing healthcare. They also want to use medical vending machines with a critical point of care tests placed in those facilities.

By DAVE MANZER
Swyft Communications
Sponsored Post

The only industry booming in Austin more than commercial real estate — nearly 10 buildings over 40 stories are either approved or in the planning phase for downtown — is the tech industry.

According to Crunchbase, Austin startups raised $368 million across 39 deals in the first quarter of 2018. That’s more than double what was raised for the same quarter in 2017. Austin’s even on track to post a billion dollars in fundraising for the year, which may very well be a first.

But the growth in Austin’s tech scene isn’t just about startups. Existing tech companies like Apple, Oracle, and Google have sunk deep roots in Austin over the past decade, fueling the real estate boom.

Indeed, the home-grown Austin job search company plans to soon have 3,000 tech employees working in a downtown office tower. Resideo Technologies, a $4.8 billion spinoff from Honeywell International, just announced it will move the HQ of its 14,500 strong global workforce to Austin in 2019, making it the city’s largest publicly traded company.

Nor is the growth limited to U.S. companies. Shopgate, a global e-commerce company from Germany, moved its U.S. HQ to Austin. So did Purple, a UK-based Wi-Fi data analytics company with over 20 million users across 73 countries.

In short, Austin is slowly pivoting away from being a hip, trendy town to launch a bootstrapped startup to one that now sports a diverse cross-section of tech companies looking to make waves around the globe.

To match this evolution in the tech industry, we in the creative industry must make a similar pivot. Many of today’s startups and established tech companies have their sights set on disrupting markets outside the U.S. They need support from creative agencies based right here in Austin that are familiar with working across continents, time zones, languages, and cultures. They also need agencies capable of harnessing Austin’s combination of commerce and cool to put them on a path toward profitable growth and market leadership.

Over the past few years, our focus has been on helping international B2B tech brands grow in the U.S. and abroad. Through that work, we realized there was an opportunity to create a new kind of agency that stood in contrast to most multinational and regional agencies, which can be cumbersome and costly options for small and mid-sized enterprises seeking global growth. These companies need an agency that is highly-responsive and works at the speed of a startup. Hence our new name: Swyft.

In addition to our Austin-based team, we’ve developed a global network of like-minded PR and marketing agencies. At SXSW this year, when we were providing media relations assistance to the Brazil Trade and Investment Promotion Authority, it dawned on us that we had achieved something special: we successfully supported three clients at three trade shows on three continents, all within a week of each other. For an independent agency with its roots right here in Austin, this was a moment for high-five.

Yet, we also knew that an ability to work across continents is not enough for today’s global tech brands. They need highly agile agencies capable of moving in lockstep with their marketing team in order to drive measurable gains in brand awareness, website traction, and new leads.

Rebranding as Swyft has put our agency squarely in the B2B tech marketing space. To make that happen, we added new services, including website design, lead management with marketing automation support, and video marketing. We went from a PR agency dabbling in marketing to an agency focused 100% on integrated sales-funnel activities. Our team is now capable of designing websites, building high-impact content assets, and executing email and digital marketing campaigns to drive more website traffic, downloads, and marketing qualified leads.

So, even though we’ve changed our name to Swyft and embraced a new vision for helping our customers grow here in the U.S. and abroad, we still provide the same level of agile, creative, and results-driven support we’ve championed since our founding nearly eight years ago.

Editor’s note: this a sponsored post.

Adam Lyons, the founder of The Zebra, an auto insurance marketplace, grew up in Pittsburgh and his father still lives three blocks from the Tree of Life Synagogue.

Hugh Forrest, Chief of Programming at South by Southwest, interviewed Lyons Tuesday evening at WeWork Barton Springs at a PowerUp Austin event put on by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. He started off with a somber discussion about the hate crime last Saturday when a gunman killed 11 individuals and wounded two others at the Tree of Life Synagogue. It is believed to be the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States, according to a statement from the Anti-Defamation League.

“It hit close to home for me,” said Lyons, who is Jewish. “Thoughts and prayers have been with the city of Pittsburgh.”

It’s incredibly sad, Lyons said.

Forrest asked Lyons about the effect social media and technology have had on fueling hateful discussions and actions.

Lyons said he thinks a lot about free speech online, but he doesn’t have the answers. Technology has made it easy for people to manipulate others. They can create fake stories, video, and audio today, he said.

“Now you’ve got a situation where you can literally have anybody saying anything on video,” Lyons said. “And I think folks, especially who aren’t in tech, are just going to look at that and think that’s real. And that’s today. Fast forward five, ten years and I think at this rate it’s going to be very hard to distinguish what’s real and what’s not.”

Some regulation would be good, Lyons said. At the same time, it gets to be tricky and dangerous if you start to edit people. It’s very subjective, he said.

Forrest asked Lyons if there were opportunities to create better social media platforms in which subscribers paid to participate instead of the technology companies selling data on its users to make a profit.

“The traditional media model is a challenge especially if you are starting something new today,” Lyons said.

There are some organizations that are doing cool things charging subscriptions for content, Lyons said. He went to the Middle East two years ago and a group of teenagers, half were from Palestine and half were from Israel, were involved in a project to create a news site with both sides of news stories. Over time, they became close friends.

“There is a need to get the conversation going in a way that both sides are there,” Lyons said.

In 2012, Lyons launched The Zebra, an aggregation and comparison site for insurance, in Pittsburgh.

Lyons’ took an unusual path to entrepreneurship. At 15, he dropped out of high school. A year later, he left home and worked several odd jobs and had no idea what he wanted to do.

“A lot of folks in my life brushed me off and said he’s not going to do anything,” Lyons said.

He got fired from bagging groceries. He got fired from packing boxes.

“I didn’t really have a choice, I had to go figure out how to school myself at this point,” Lyons said. He ended up realizing he wanted to do business. He snuck back into community college and then transferred to Temple University. He graduated and got an internship in London and ended up working in insurance. He saw how massive and antiquated the industry was, he said.

Lyons didn’t know anything about tech, managing people or venture capital. But he knew he needed to modernize the insurance industry. He quit his job and took a trip around the world. He came back and moved into his friend’s basement and started working on what would become The Zebra. He got into a five-month Alpha Lab Incubator program there.

One day, Lyons was scraping websites to get data on the insurance industry for his startup and the Pittsburgh police visited him to shut him down after one company complained. He took that as an opportunity to land the insurance company as a customer. And today, they are one of The Zebra’s biggest customers, Lyons said.

The Zebra is now the most visited auto insurance comparison site in the U.S. and the company has raised more than $70 million and it has 100 employees, Lyons said.

“I’m very proud of what we’ve built,” Lyons said. “It’s been named the best place to work in Austin five years in a row now.”

Lyons is also famous for cold emailing Billionaire Mark Cuban and getting an investment sight unseen. He sent a very short and to the point email with the subject “Wanna Disrupt the Auto Insurance Market?”

Cuban only took 20 minutes to respond. And he’s been an investor in the company ever since Lyons said. The first time they met was when Cuban gave a talk at the Longhorn Startup Lab at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013.

Forrest asked Lyons to talk about the fundraising process.

“It’s never fun to go around begging for money,” Lyons said.

At the end of the day, no one prepares an entrepreneur for the fundraising process, Lyons said. It’s incredibly challenging to run the day to day operations of the business and grow the business while also trying to raise funds, Lyons said.

“There is a lot of stress,” he said.

Over the summer, Lyons announced that he was leaving The Zebra. He’s now out of the day to day operations. His next venture will not be focused on the insurance industry, Lyons said. He is not ready yet to announce what he plans to do, he said. He said he likes consumer businesses and building new brands. And he does plan to launch his next venture in Austin.

“There’s one opportunity I’m incredibly excited about,” Lyons said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to Lyons as the co-founder of The Zebra. He is the sole founder. We regret the error.

Sputnik ATX, an Austin-based accelerator, held its second Demo Day last week featuring presentations from the five startups in its latest cohort.

The invite-only event for accredited investors was held at Sputnik ATX’s offices in downtown Austin. The companies gave 15-minute presentations followed by questions and answers.

“They are all awesome,” said Oksana Malysheva, co-founder and CEO of Sputnik ATX. “They have become better entrepreneurs and companies through this process.”

Sputnik ATX has begun accepting applications for its third cohort in Austin. It is looking for Texas-based startups that have some traction and at least one paying customer. The startups selected for the program receive $100,000 investment from Sputnik ATX and undergo an accelerator program which includes mentoring and coworking space at Sputnik ATX’s downtown office. Applications for the third cohort close Christmas Day and Sputnik ATX will announce the new class in January. It accepts four to six companies.

In August, Sputnik ATX launched the Texas Startup Bible, a free online platform for current and aspiring entrepreneurs. The site features content developed by Sputnik ATX as well as curated content vetted by Sputnik ATX, to provide a centralized resource of information for startup founders.

In September, Sputnik ATX also struck a partnership with the University of Texas at Austin. It will host one UT Austin student with every cohort, and it is making a version of its curriculum available online and tailored to UT Austin students.

The latest cohort accomplished quite a lot during the program and several found product-market fit and saw a lot of revenue growth, said Joe Merrill, partner and Chief Financial Officer of Sputnik ATX. Sputnik ATX looks for maker-founders that are highly driven and focused on customers and revenue, he said.

This is a recap of the presentations from the five startups in the latest cohort:

AI Maps

First up, AI Maps, an oil and gas pipeline asset management startup, presented its platform that uses proprietary software to detect and track corrosion and other problems on a pipeline, so companies can fix it before problems occur.

AI Maps provides the first line of defense for oil and gas companies to make sure their oil and gas assets are operating effectively, said Deke Wright, co-founder, and CEO.

Wright and his co-founder Justin Thatcher have spent their careers in corrosion detection. The systems in place today are antiquated and do not adequately provide real-time information, Wright said.

“We’re building a system that just doesn’t suck any more because that’s what we are dealing with today,” Wright said.

AI Maps launched in April in Phoenix at an international corrosion trade show. In the coming months, the company plans to ramp up sales, increase marketing, bring development in-house and complete the four core features of its platform.

AI Maps has commitments for $650,000 revenue in its pipeline right now, Wright said. It’s working to complete its minimum viable product to enter pilots with Anadarko, Magellan, Phillips 66.

Newchip

Next, Travis Brodeen, co-founder of Newchip, presented its marketplace for alternative investing.

Newchip is not an equity crowdfunding platform. Instead, it aggregates the best deals from a variety of equity-based crowdfunding platforms in one place for non-accredited investors to invest in deals $100, $500 or $1000 at a time, Brodeen said. Newchip has been called kayak for funding, Google for Startups, and Kickstarter for investing, he said.

“From my lens, angel investing is broken,” Brodeen said. It’s an inefficient process that wastes a lot of time, he said.

“This leads to what I call the tragedy of innovation,” Brodeen said. “A lot of good ideas die on the vine.”

Newchip has 120,00 users, 25,000 weekly sessions and has listed 1,500 investment deals and helped to facilitate $1 million in revenue in the market, Brodeen said.

Newchip makes its money from deal listing fees, commission on investments, exchange transaction fees, data analytics and partners. It seems the equity crowdfunding market growing rapidly from $600 million in 2016 to $1 billion in 2017 and $2 billion in 2018 and projected to grow to $130 billion by 2021.

Brodeen is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer and Ryan Rafols is founder and CEO.

Newchip has raised $2.6 million in funding including $650,000 over two and a half months on in equity crowdfunds on WeFunder.

Newchip is using that capital to launch its Newchip fund, exchange, and it’s also focusing on growth marketing and the Security Token Offering, known as STO, Market, Brodeen said.

“We believe early next year there will be massive awareness of this opportunity,” Brodeen said.

LAMIK

Kim Roxie, the founder of LAMIK Beauty, presented her startup which is creating a vegan, non-toxic cosmetics line for busy professional multicultural women.

“Women of color spend nine times as much on beauty products,” Roxie said.

And 64 percent of women of color prefer natural beauty products, Roxie said. It’s a $7.5 billion market she’s tackling.

And Roxie knows the market firsthand. Previously, she ran a brick and mortar makeup store in Houston with $5 million in sales. Her clientele included celebrities, business moguls and Congresswomen.

“This is not just a bright idea, it’s tried and true,” Roxie said.

LAMIK is free of the BS, full of authenticity, Roxie said. In November, the company is launching a celebrity brow kit. She has 6,600 women signed up on a waitlist for the product. By this time next year, LAMIK will have a full cosmetic line including foundation, lip gloss, and other products, Roxie said.

LAMIK expects to have $1.5 million in revenue within 12 to 18 months, Roxie said. Its plan is to go e-commerce, direct to consumer, but Roxie also plans to do retail pop up shops too.

ZenYala

Jacob Bernstein, the founder of ZenYala, presented his software platform for organizing and hosting better meetings.

The software is available as an iPad app, Android and Web apps as well. It helps people organize for meetings before, during and after.

The software is designed to structure meetings, allow participants to act, reduce inbox overflow and provide organizational memory.

The software integrates with Zoom, WebEx and Skype for Business and other programs. It also integrates with Gmail, Outlook, and Slack.

ZenYala is available as a subscription product. It costs $1,250 for a team of 50 every month or $13,000 a year, Bernstein said.

Save them time and preparation, drive to a decision quicker, save time on follow-ups and more things get done, he said.

ZenYala spun out of BoardMaps, which sold $5.3 million in Europe to companies to organize board meetings. ZenYala reaches a much broader market aimed at corporations, educators, government agencies, healthcare institutions, nonprofit agencies and more.

Every year, companies waste an estimated $728 billion worth of time in meetings for companies with more than 100 employees, Bernstein said. Executives in the US spend 23 hours per week in meetings, 71 percent of meetings are ineffective, he said.

Next year, ZenYala plans to reach 100 companies with the existing product $120,000 in monthly recurring revenue. It just launched and already has $35,000 in revenue in four weeks, Bernstein said.

TeacherTalent

Michael Barnes, the founder of TeacherTalent, presented his software as a service platform that allows schools to recruit and hire teachers.

This year, 500,000 of America’s teachers will churn out of their schools, Barnes said. That’s 16 percent of the overall workforce, which creates an $8 billion problem, he said.

The single most important school-based factor in student achievement is the teacher, Barnes said.
“Job boards are dead,” he said. “You don’t get a job from a job board.”

TeacherTalent mines data on teachers and salaries from Freedom of Information Act requests on the nation’s 3.7 million teachers in public schools. Already, the company has 58 school districts in 10 states as customers.

The schools pay a monthly fee to generate warm leads and they can also add on additional services in the last 90 days, TeacherTalent has generated $185,000 in monthly reoccurring revenue, Barnes said.

It launched its pilot project in March of 2015. It started a private beta in June of 2017. The company also participated in the Techstars accelerator in the fall of 2017. It projects monthly reoccurring revenue of $2 million by 2020.