The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named Livia Eberlin, 32, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, as one of its fellows for 2018.

In all, the foundation awarded 25 fellowships, known as MacArthur Genius awards, and Eberlin was the only recipient in Texas.

“Working in diverse fields, from the arts and sciences to public health and civil liberties, these 25 MacArthur Fellows are solving long-standing scientific and mathematical problems, pushing art forms into new and emerging territories, and addressing the urgent needs of under-resourced communities. Their exceptional creativity inspires hope in us all,” Cecilia Conrad, Managing Director, MacArthur Fellows Program, said in a news statement.

The Eberlin Lab at UT Austin has developed the MasSpec Pen, which provides a better way for surgeons to rapidly perform and diagnose cancer biopsies. It allows surgeons to extract molecules from tissue and test samples in real time. The sample is then analyzed through a database to see if it matches a cancer type.

“This platform identifies cancerous tissue with a high degree of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and speed, and Eberlin is currently refining and testing the MasSpec Pen for use in surgery,” according to the foundation. “Her technological innovations have the potential to improve health care by decreasing the time between diagnosis to treatment and increasing the accuracy of cancer diagnoses and surgical interventions.

Silicon Hills News first wrote about the invention in 2016 after Eberlin presented the invention at the Innovation Center’s Startup Studio.

Eberlin received a B.S. from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil and a Ph.D. from Purdue University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 2012 to 2015, and in 2016 she joined the faculty of UT Austin.

The MacArthur Fellowship comes with a stipend of $625,000 paid out over five years.

The three criteria for choosing a fellow include exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments and potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

Since 1981, 1014 people have been named MacArthur Fellows.

Austin’s universities play a critical role in the city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

At the first university tract during Austin Startup Week, Ashley Jennings, program manager in the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin, led a panel discussion on the importance of entrepreneurship on campus with experts from local universities.

The University of Texas at Austin recently launched an entrepreneurship minor for undergraduate students.

Jennings asked the panelists what kinds of universities are good at entrepreneurial programs.

There are many kinds of universities and for some, it’s a natural fit and for others, it’s not, said Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at UT Austin.

The U.S. has 100 first-tier research universities and those are good candidates for having active entrepreneurship programs because they are building new knowledge, Metcalfe said. Not all universities are good candidates for this, he said.

MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and UT are all good at new venture creation, Metcalfe said.

New venture creation is a part of entrepreneurship, said David Altounian, interim dean of The Bill Munday School of Business and MBA program director at St. Edward’s University.

“Not all entrepreneurship is technology driven,” Altounian said. “Somebody that starts a new service business or a new type of food business, CPG, is in my mind, an entrepreneurial venture. There are some schools that are better at that type of new venture creation and there are some that are better at changing the world types of technology changes.”

St Edwards is a liberal arts college that doesn’t have an engineering school but its students are entrepreneurially focused, Altounian said. They are most likely to create the next consumer packaged goods company, he said.

Entrepreneurship is a direct route to exporting innovation and expertise on campus into the business community, said Kirstin Spindler, director of IncubatorCTX and business faculty at Concordia University Texas.

The University plays an important role in entrepreneurship, said Hector Gomez Macfarland, director of the Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Huston-Tillotson University. His center focuses on minority groups and women to increase their representation in tech entrepreneurship, he said.

The center is new and plans to be open to the community with training programs and mentoring programs, Macfarland said.

There is also a big difference between the definition of a small business and a startup, Metcalfe said.

“Startups begin with the intention of being huge,” he said. “Whereas many small businesses are going to be small forever. And so there is a different biology to these startups.”

Many startups also face a “Valley of Death” in which it’s difficult to get funding, traction or they face other obstacles. The successful startups can cross that valley, he said.

“If there is a valley of death, I advise you not to ride down into it,” Metcalfe said. Build a bridge or find another way to go around it, he said. There are a number of programs at UT Austin that can help startups get across the valley of death, he said.

When Metcalfe moved to Austin eight years ago, he looked up the biggest venture capital firm in town: Austin Ventures, which has since quit making new investments. They told him that they don’t do business with the University of Texas because it’s too difficult and not worth it, Metcalfe said. Today, UT is overflowing with entrepreneurship ventures and it is actively working with the venture capital community, Metcalfe said.

St. Edwards focuses on small and mid-sized businesses and new venture creation, social enterprise and family-owned business, Altounian said.

“We are focused on new venture creation as opposed to inventing the next Facebook,” he said.

Concordia University will celebrate its 100th year anniversary in 2026, Spindler said. It launched its incubator a little over a year ago, she said. It really caters to serial entrepreneurs in their late 30s, 40s, and 50s. It also focuses on student startups. Most students work with the startups in the community, she said. Concordia’s Incubator partners with G51 Partners and Tech Ranch, she said.

UT Austin is creating a new post-doctoral fellowship that will allow students from the sciences to work on entrepreneurial efforts at UT Austin for two to three years, said Melissa Taylor, assistant dean for strategy and planning in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin.

It’s also launching the University of Texas Inventors program this year aimed at getting undergraduate students involved in entrepreneurial ventures, she said. Students will work on problem statements from faculty members, companies and the US Army Futures Command Center, Taylor said.

“We envision this serving thousands of students,” she said.

Jennings asked the panelists what students need most to pursue entrepreneurial ventures on campus.

Funding is one of the biggest obstacles to students becoming entrepreneurs, said Macfarland, director of the Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Huston-Tillotson University.

Metcalfe agreed that funding is a key problem, but he thinks the problem lies with the quality of the startups.

“We need better startups,” Metcalfe said. “The money will come if the startups are better.”

Concordia needs mentors and opportunities for hands-on learning with companies, Spindler said.

St. Edwards teaches students math and entrepreneurial skills to bootstrap their ventures and understand profit and loss statements so they can land a micro-loan or angel investment to get their ventures launched, Altounian said.

Jennings asked the panelists about entrepreneurial success stories spinning out of their programs.

Metcalfe mentioned a former student who had visited him this week to say thanks. The former student had gone through the Longhorn Startup Lab program five years ago and has since moved to San Francisco. He recently raised $2 million in seed stage funding and had seven figures in revenue. Other startups success stories spinning out of Longhorn Startup Lab include Cerebri AI, which has raised $9.5 million in funding and has more than 40 employees. Professor-led startups spinning out of UT Austin include Apptronik, Diligent Droids and GenXComm.

Altounian mentioned Xelpha Health, co-founded by Lauren Welch, a student at St. Edwards. Xelpha Health that provides a healthcare platform for patients and healthcare providers in Kenya, Africa.

Concordia’s latest success story is HopZero, a data security company, Spindler said. They went through Tech Ranch’s Venture Forth program and one of the founders got his MBA from Concordia and they are incubator member, she said.

Some students have already started businesses at Huston-Tillotson University, said Macfarland. One of the students from Africa launched his own clothing line which has met with great success in Texas, he said.

In 2014, Marc MacLeod worked as an independent software consultant in Los Angeles building Application Programming Interfaces, known as APIs, for companies.

MacLeod noticed that many of the APIs, which are systems of tools and resources in an operating system that enable developers to create software applications, lacked documentation and were poorly built.

So, MacLeod created a set of tools to serve as a blueprint for how to build better APIs, and those tools became the foundation behind his startup, Stoplight, now based in Austin. It sells an API toolkit that empowers more efficient workflows.

Stoplight this week announced it has landed $3.25 million in seed stage funding led by Bill Wood Ventures, with participation from NextGen Venture Partners, Next Coast Ventures, Social Starts, and Capital Factory. To date, Stoplight has raised $4.65 million.

Stoplight, with 11 employees, plans to double its workforce in the next year with a focus on hiring engineering talent, MacLeod said. It also recently hired Brian Rock as director of engineering. Rock most recently served as director of engineering and automation product at Austin-based Applause.

Already, Stoplight has attracted more than 500 paying customers in a vast array of industries including Honeywell, Zendesk, and SendGrid. Stoplight is seeing a lot of interest from the finance and healthcare industries.

“Software is evolving from a state in which it is developed line by line into a monolithic application to one in which it is assembled from small units or microservices” Bill Wood said in a news release. “This approach has enormous advantages, but it does create significant complexity in terms of how these smaller units are assembled and how they relate to each other. Stoplight robustly manages these connections, or APIs, such that developers are freed up to exploit all the advantages of microservices without dealing with the downside.”

Stoplight first came to Austin in 2015 to participate in Techstars Austin. After graduating from the program, MacLeod decided to relocate from Los Angeles and build his company in Austin.

“Austin is generally a great place to build a company,” MacLeod said. The company’s headquarters is based on South 1st Street.

Stoplight is addressing a huge problem companies have today, MacLeod said. Companies have hundreds of thousands of APIs – most built without clear documentation or adherence to any kind of standard. Stoplight works with software developers at the start of building an API to ensure it’s built uniformly and correctly to the company’s standards. Stoplight’s platform also automates all kinds of tasks for software developers and provides a project management collaboration workplace for distributed teams to work on a project.

“Stoplight ensures that everybody’s building APIs in a consistent way,” MacLeod said.

The U.S. Army is creating augmented reality sunglasses with night vision, GPS and computer capabilities for soldiers, said Gen. John M. Murray, head of the U.S. Army Futures Command Center, based in Austin.

It’s on the path in the next couple of years to put the capability of night vision goggles into a pair of Oakley sunglasses, Murray said. It’s been working with the gaming industry to develop them, he said.

The glasses will also be used in training exercises, Murray said. The Army can send various training scenarios to soldiers using the computer embedded into the glasses to prepare soldiers for combat before they go into a real battle.

That’s just one of the innovations spinning out of the new U.S. Army Futures Command Center that is based at the University of Texas at Austin with a satellite office at Capital Factory, which is a technology accelerator with 60,000 square feet in the Omni building in downtown Austin.

Murray spoke in a fireside chat with Capital Factory Founder and CEO Joshua Baer on Monday night as the official kickoff to the Austin Startup Week. The Army Futures Command Center is the title sponsor of the event this year.

The U.S. Army Futures Command Center officially opened in late August in Austin and serves as the hub of innovation for the military. The center plans to work with entrepreneurs and companies to create new products and solutions for soldiers and the Army.

The U.S. Army Futures Command Center being in Austin is orders of magnitude larger in scale than anything that has preceded it, said Baer. Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force established AFWERKS at Capital Factory. And in 2016, the Department of Defense established the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental or DIUx at Capital Factory. It has similar offices in Silicon Valley and Boston. The DIUx works with Austin entrepreneurs to create cutting-edge technology for military applications.

But the U.S. Army Futures Command Center is even bigger, Baer said. It will have 500 people based in downtown Austin. It also controls the largest research and development budget of the military.

Four-star general Gen. Murray most recently served as deputy chief of staff at Army Headquarters in Washington, D.C. He is in the process of moving to Austin.

Murray said he had attended the “A Hack of the Drones” hackathon at Capital Factory last weekend and was impressed with the projects they created.

Baer mentioned all the opportunities for collaboration between startups and the military. Already, Senseye, an Austin-based startup, is working with the U.S. Air Force to train fighter pilots. And New Knowledge is using artificial intelligence to identify fake social media posts and fake news and information, Baer said. Also, Apptronik, a robotics spin out of UT Austin, has developed a full robotic exoskeleton that performs superhuman tasks, Baer said. Those are just a few of the startups already collaborating with the military, he said.

There will be lots of opportunities to work together, Gen. Murray said.

“This is completely different from anything I’ve done for the last 36 years,” he said. “The Army is interested in doing things differently than we’ve done for the last 246 years.”

The U.S. Army is looking for a different way of acquiring things, he said.

But it’s not just about things, it’s about how the military will fight in the future, Murray said.

The U.S. Army is seeking to change its organizational structure, he said.

The goal is to figure out how to augment what the Army’s already doing with innovative technologies to provide the very best technology to soldiers in the field, Murray said. He said he has two granddaughters and when his three-year-old granddaughter is an Airborne Ranger Infantry company commander, he wants her to have the very best equipment this country can provide.

The U.S. Army Futures Command will focus on the Army’s six modernization priorities. Those include “long-range precision fires, a next-generation combat vehicle, future vertical lift platforms, a mobile and expeditionary Army network, air and missile defense capabilities and Soldier lethality,” according to the U.S. Army.

The U.S. Army Futures Command Center is interested in technologies that enable those things like communications, machine learning, artificial intelligence, Murray said.

“One of the things that is clear as you look towards the future is the flow of information is going to get faster and denser as this goes,” Murray said. “And so cognitive aid for decision making for commanders.”

“And really the thing that I want to get out of this you are going to expose us to things we would never, ever see in one of our labs or one of our engineering systems,” Murray said. “Because we are not trained to think like this. We have a very risk-averse system. That has been built up over time.”

Robert McNamara designed the system in the 1950s for the military to acquire things, Murray said. Every time someone made a mistake between the 1950s and now someone got punished and another regulation got put on top of it, he said.

The center is looking for ways to help people who are not familiar with the military with how things get done. The center can help entrepreneurs to be successful. It also invests in promising startups at the earliest stages, Murray said.

“I’m perfectly ok with 80 percent market share being on the commercial side,” Murray said. “That will bring people to the table that otherwise would not be interested.”

The investment in technology is about preventing war, Murray said.

“The one way to guarantee that the U.S. will fight another major war is to show weakness,” he said. “This is all about showing strength. Our soldiers deserve to be equipped with the best equipment.”

Bumble’s mission is to end misogyny, said Sarah Jones Simmer, the chief operating officer of Bumble.

“We’re doing that through a platform of connections but also building a brand, not just a tech company, but a brand that stands for empowerment, accountability, kindness, equality,” Jones Simmer said.

She spoke at the Austin Startup Week Women in Tech Summit at Capital Factory on Monday during a fireside chat with Mellie Price, co-founder of Capital Factory.

Bumble, based in Austin, is a dating app launched in December of 2014 by Whitney Wolfe Herd, a former co-founder at Tinder. She wanted to build a dating app with women in mind. Since then, Bumble has also launched Bumble Bizz, a business networking platform within the Bumble App. Altogether, Bumble has 40 million users worldwide now. It has offices in New York, London, Los Angles, Toronto, Berlin and Sydney and it’s about to launch its first Asian office, Jones Simmer said.

Bumble launched a $1 million fund a month ago to invest in early-stage businesses founded and led by women of color who are creating products that serve women. Jones Simmer is leading the Bumble Fund’s investment strategy.

So far, it has invested in a few companies like Sofia Los Angeles, a swimwear company founded and led by Anasofia Gomez, one of the winners of its inaugural Bumble Bizz Pitch competition.

Bumble has about 100 employees locally and 85 percent are women. It also affects the company’s culture and perks.

“On Fridays, instead of having Ping Pong and beer, we have mani-pedis and blowouts,” Jones Simmer said.

Extended parental leave and flexible work schedules are also ways to accommodate working parents, Jones Simmer said.

To handle everything, Jones Simmer said she must prioritize, and allow some things to undone. She also doesn’t get enough sleep. But she’s focusing on self-care and realizes that she must also hire good people and rely on them to get things done.

Jones Simmer did not talk about Bumble’s plans for an Initial Public Offering. In an interview last month with CNBC, Bumble CEO Wolfe Herd mentioned that Bumble is “actively pursuing” going public. Wolfe Herd also told CNBC that the company is filing a $400 million counter-lawsuit again Match, the parent company of Tinder, which alleges Bumble has violated its patents and trademarks and misused trade secrets, according to the CNBC report.

For more on Jones Simmer talk with Price at Capital Factory, please watch the livestream below.

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By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Austin Startup Week kicked off Monday with the second annual day-long Women in Tech Summit at Capital Factory in downtown Austin.

The event culminated in the afternoon with a pitch competition featuring six female-led tech startups from all over Texas. Capital Factory received more than 150 applications for the six spots to pitch.

Capital Factory’s judges decided to award two $100,000 prizes to the winners. They chose Austin-based The Mentor Method led by Janice Omadeke, CEO and founder. They also picked Austin-based Rectify led by co-founders Melissa Unsell-Smith and Lisa McComb.

Rectify provides cleansing of documents for data sharing for companies.

“At Rectify, we are leveraging privacy enabled AI to protect consumer identities when data is being shared,” Unsell-Smith said.

“Now we all know that data is being created at an exponential pace and the proliferation of data is causing organizations to share information more than ever before,” Unsell-Smith said. “Mainly for business growth opportunities and to gain advantages in the marketplace. But there is a problem. There is a ton of private data residing in this information, things like consumer identities and trade secrets that are required by law to be protected.”

Data sharing activities include open record requests, media requests, merger and acquisition documents and companies that monetize their data and sell it to third parties, Unsell-Smith said.

“Companies are struggling to protect sensitive documents,” Unsell-Smith said.

Rectify created a solution to the problem. It has a patent-pending technology that uses machine learning to organize data and then it leverages automation techniques to remove sensitive content from documents, Unsell-Smith said. Its revenue model is based on the level of automation required to remove data.

“We do consider ourselves data warriors on a mission to standardize smart, safe data sharing,” Unsell-Smith said.

The other winner, The Mentor Method has created an enterprise platform that allows companies to keep their diverse talent through mentorship.

“It’s a monumental problem. Companies are spending $16 billion each year in efforts to keep diverse talent and it’s still not working,” Omadeke said. “Fourteen million minority professionals will leave their employer this year.”

The Mentor Method has created a customizable software platform with a framework focused on professional development, Omadeke said.

The Mentor Method customers include Deloitte and Fannie Mae. It has secured $210,000 of contracts for 2019. It is also working with a government agency to white label its platform for $1.5 million, Omadeke said.

To fulfill its active contracts, The Mentor Method needs to expand its team, Omadeke said.

“We’re making diversity and inclusion affordable, data-driven and easy to implement,” she said.

The Mentor Method plans to use its $100,000 to expand its team, Omadeke. The Mentor Method, originally founded in Washington, D.C., moved to Austin last summer to participate in Mass Challenge Texas. It won a $25,000 award at the end of that program. It has since been accepted into the Capital Factory accelerator, Omadeke said.

The other companies presenting included:

PraxisMetrics, based in Austin, helps small to medium-sized businesses create a dashboard of metrics to measure their business online to eliminate waste, see new opportunities and scale faster. It sells its product on a monthly subscription basis. It also provides custom insights from a company’s data at an additional cost. Meaghan Connell is the co-founder.

EverThread, based in Dallas, has created a patent-pending technology that can automate images fast and easily online so companies can provide customers with multiple variations of their products, particularly for furniture and home décor. Nicole Mossman is the founder and CEO. She said it’s costly to produce images of every product but through her technology companies can offer all kinds of color and pattern combinations for customers to see online.

DearDuck, based in San Antonio, is a software company that helps businesses in the “buying for others” category of gift giving. Katy Aucion is the CEO and founder. The company moved from Houston to San Antonio to join RealCo’s Long-term Accelerator. DearDuck sells software and data insights for businesses on how customers buy gifts.

Benincasa Milano, based in Austin, makes luxury Italian-made high heel shoes with custom insoles to ensure the perfect fit and comfort. It launched with 12 styles earlier this year in Dallas. The company developed its technology in partnership with biomedical and footwear experts. Its patent-pending custom insoles are specially designed to prevent pain in the ball of the feet. Maija Benincasa is the founder and CEO.

It’s hard to believe it’s the eighth annual Austin Startup Week.

Why? Because it’s our eighth time covering the event and last month marked the seventh anniversary of Silicon Hills News.

Austin Startup Week was one of the first events Silicon Hills News covered when the site launched in September of 2011.

Austin was a much different place just seven years and Austin Startup Week, in its infancy, had far fewer events and attractions. For one thing, there was just one track on entrepreneurship. Now, there are multiple tracks from health tech, smart cities, blockchain, fundraising, FinTech, defense innovation, social impact, university track and more.

But while a lot has changed in that time, a lot still remains. Jacqueline Hughes and Joshua Bear are still running Austin Startup week and they’ve attracted a whole lot of sponsors for the week-long list of activities. The title sponsor is the U.S. Army Futures Command Center which set up shop here earlier this year.

Kicking off the week, Monday, Capital Factory is hosting its second annual Capital Factory Women in Tech summit with panels, workshops, a pitch competition, and a $100,000 challenge prize being awarded to a female-led startup. Silicon Hills News covered the first Capital Factory Women in Tech summit last year.

What’s different this year, is for the first time ever the Austin Technology Council is not hosting its battle of the tech bands and opening night kick-off party at Mohawk Austin. Instead, Capital Factory is hosting a kick off party starting at 5 p.m.

On Tuesday, Health Tech Austin is hosting a 7:45 a.m. showcase featuring eight healthcare startups giving their pitches. It’s one of several health tech related events throughout the day.

Also on Tuesday morning, there’s a social impact event at 9:30 at the Center for Social Innovation on “How Austin Becomes the Nation’s Capital for Diverse, Homegrown Tech Talent.” The speakers include Ruben Cantu, Director of Inclusive Innovation and Entrepreneurship, The University of Texas at Austin, Preston L. James II, CEO and Co-Founder, DivInc, Ada-Renee Johnson, staffing manager at Google, Jan Ryan, Director, Creative Entrepreneurship and Innovation, at UT Austin and Matt Stephenson, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Code2College.

And also on the Social Impact track, Dan Graham, founder of Notley Ventures and Zoe Schlag, managing director of Techstars, will discuss “The Future of Austin’s Social Impact Ecosystem at 5 p.m. at the Center for Social Innovation. And this is where the Fear of Missing Out hits. Because there’s also the gShowdown going on at Galvanize on “Will Artificial Intelligence Take Over the World.” It features Charlie Burgoyne, Founder and CEO, Valkyrie Intelligence, and Byron Reece, Entrepreneur for GigaOM.

It looks like Wednesday is a great day to check out the university track with coffee and donuts at Dorm Rooms to Startups Showcase at the University of Texas at Austin. The event features student let startups including ElecTrip, Elite Sweets, Flo Recruit, Forestrike, Hexis, Hitch, Loop, Rev Energy Gum, and Shop Swayy.

And following that event, check out “The University’s role in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems” featuring a panel discussion moderated by Ashley Jennings, program manager, Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship, Growth, and Renewal at UT Austin. The panelists include David Altounian, interim dean, the Bill Munday School of Business and MBA Program Director at St. Edward’s University, Hector Gomez Macfarland, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Huston-Tillotson University, Bob Metcalfe, Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UT Austin, Kristin C. Spindler, director of IncubatorCTX and business faculty at Concordia University Texas and Melissa Taylor, assistant dean for strategy and planning at UT Austin.

And the famous Austin Startup Crawl starts at 5 p.m. on Thursday. Registration is required and attendees can pick up their wristbands at Capital Factory.

See the full schedule here. Events are free but registration is required.

LivePerson has acquired Conversable, an intelligent conversation platform for businesses, based in Austin and Dallas.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Conversable’s AI and automation development teams will join LivePerson, which has created the LiveEngage platform to interact with customers via text and other messaging services.

“Conversational commerce is about using AI and natural language – a conversation – to interact with a brand,” Robert LoCascio, CEO and founder of LivePerson, said in a news release. “Consumers do not want to download more apps or navigate websites to order ahead. They want to type, tap or voice order what they want from the messaging services they already enjoy. Conversable brings to LivePerson proven social and marketing capabilities that will enhance our conversational commerce solutions, along with a set of templates and integrations that accelerate bot development for common consumer requests, and commerce tasks like ordering ahead at restaurants.

Serial entrepreneurs Ben Lamm, former co-founder and CEO of Chaotic Moon and founder of Hypergiant, and Andrew Busey, former founder and CEO of Challenge Games and Pluck, founded Conversable in 2014. They raised $3 million in seed stage funding to launch the venture. Since then, they’ve developed applications for clients in telecommunications, financial services, retail, travel, restaurants and hospital and automotive.

Conversable’s platform lets companies engage with customers through major messaging and voice applications, including Facebook, Twitter, SMS, Amazon Echo, Slack, and Skype. Its customers include major brands like Budweiser, Whole Foods, Domino’s Pizza, Viacom, Wingstop, Victoria Secret, Ernst & Young, and others.

“We are excited for Conversable to join LivePerson in taking conversational commerce to the mainstream market,” Lamm, Co-founder and CEO, said in a news release. “Conversation is a transformative interface and an unprecedented opportunity.”

LivePerson has 18,000 customers, including Citibank, HSBC, Orange and The Home Depot. They use its conversational commerce solutions to engage with customers.

New York-based CLEAR, a biometric identity company, is opening an office Monday with 30 new employees near The Domain in North Austin.

Opportunity Austin, the Greater Austin Chamber’s five-county economic development initiative, announced CLEAR’s new hub office.

CLEAR jas created a biometric scanning system using iris or fingerprint scans to identify people at airports and sports venues.

“CLEAR uses biometrics to get members past lines with just the touch of a finger or blink of an eye, reflecting the growing demand for our innovative technology and consumers’ desire for safer and easier travel throughout their lives,” CLEAR President and co-founder Ken Cornick said in a news release. “The opening of our hub office in Austin allows us to deepen our roots in this vibrant and leading technology community and to build our team to help us create the future.”

CLEAR already operates two lanes at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and has 25 employees.

“With its innovative use of biometric technology, CLEAR is a natural fit in Austin’s tech-friendly environment,” Charisse Bodisch, senior vice president of Economic Development, Greater Austin Chamber and Opportunity Austin, said in a news release. “CLEAR joins a multitude of companies that are attracted to our region’s talent and potential. We’re excited to welcome CLEAR to the community and look forward to its success in our region.”

BuildASign sold Tuesday to the parent company of Vistaprint.

Cimpress, based in the Netherlands, bought BuildASign for $280 million.

“We are excited to welcome BuildASign to Cimpress. They bring strong talent, a customer-centric culture, low-cost production operations and strong e-commerce capabilities that work seamlessly together to serve customers with market-leading prices, fast delivery and great customer service,” Robert Keane, president and chief executive officer of Cimpress, said in a news release.

Founded in 2005, BuildASign.com has been on a steady growth track. (Silicon Hills News did this story in 2012 on its bootstrapping success.) In 2015, PWP Growth Equity took a controlling interest in the company, which has more than 400 employees. The company runs EasyCanvasPrints.com, which delivers quality canvas prints to customers and BuildASign.com, which provides signs and other promotional items for businesses.

Cimpress plans to accelerate BuildASign’s already-fast growth in home décor and reinforce their market position with business signage, according to a news release. BuildASign’s revenue for the 12 months ended August 31st, was about $129 million, up 20 percent from a year ago, according to a news release.

“We are excited to be entering this next chapter for BuildASign, and are thrilled about the opportunities that joining Cimpress will create for our customers and team members,” Bryan Kranik, BuildASign’s chief executive officer, said in a news release. “Through a combination of our large format expertise and Cimpress’ procurement scale and MCP technology, we look forward to continuing to grow in large markets by allowing our customers to express their identity across a wide variety of products.”

Pending regulatory approval, Cimpress expects the transaction to close as early as the beginning of October.