By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Building a startup is like riding a roller coaster of emotions for most founders.

Monday it was a particularly difficult ride for more than 15,000 founders because of a technical glitch by Y Combinator.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based accelerator created a free online Startup School to pair startups with advisers and those selected to participate in the 10-week program would then go on to qualify to compete for $10,000 grants.

Early Monday, about 11,000 startups worldwide received emails notifying them that they had been accepted into the program. Another 4,000 received rejection emails.

The ones accepted into the Startup School happily shared the good news with spouses, investors, team members and many posted to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and on other social media channels about the great news.

Then two hours later, those 11,000 startups received rejection emails from Y Combinator with a do-not-reply email address.

“We are deeply sorry to have to send this email, but unfortunately an error occurred in the software that triggers acceptance emails. The acceptance email was sent to you even though we are unfortunately not able to include you in the Startup School Advisor Track.

Although you are not in the Advisor Track, you have, in fact, been accepted to audit Startup School and will have access to all of the content just as soon as it is made available.

Again, we regret having made this error and raised your expectations unnecessarily. We hope you continue working on your startup and that Startup School is a huge help,” according to the Y Combinator rejection email.

Many startup founders were upset.

In Austin, several startup founders posted in the Female Founders ATX Facebook Group about their delight at being accepted into the program, only later to reveal that the offer got rescinded and they got the rejection email.

Dozens of startup founders posted on a thread in Hacker News about the incident. They made jokes, created Slack channels to provide feedback to each other, wrote words of encouragement and commiserated about the bad news.

“I think you can use this as a teachable moment for the course. Lesson 10: when a launch goes wrong – the YC Startup School Story” – ModernMech posted on Hacker News.

“Pretty certain I incorrectly received the “Ooops, you didn’t actually email” Please confirm this bug. My company is basically a unicorn” – HelloJebus on Hacker News.

“My cofounder and I were cheers-ing about our acceptance an hour ago and now we’re texting about this y-combinator screw-up–we’re not accepted after all!,” Callend6 wrote on Hacker News. “For all the other founders and teams who had that momentary confidence of outside reinforcement — remember how unstoppable and brave you felt in that moment! That glow doesn’t have to go away with a retraction email. Hold onto the feeling. Go make great things, go make a difference.”

To add to the confusion, the 4,000 startups that had been originally rejected, were in fact accepted into the program. They were elated but still in shock and disbelief. Y Combinator staff responded to posts on Hacker News asking those in doubt to email them and provided a correct email. Y Combinator staff apologized for the technical error.

And Monday night, Y Combinator decided to accept all those startups that applied to the program, more than 15,000, into the Startup School.

Y Combinator wrote a blog post “Startup School: All Applicants are Now Accepted.”

“We messed up and sent acceptance emails to many Startup School applicants who we didn’t previously have a place for,” according to the post. “We’ve decided to use this error as an opportunity to try something new: we’re going to let in every company that applied to Startup School.”

“Many apologies for the back and forth – to be clear: you are in.”

The startups accepted into the program get access to all the course materials, the private community forum in which advisors and YC partners will also participate and they’ll be able to compete for one of the $10,000 equity free grants if they complete the eligibility requirements.

“The most important thing is that you will have a group of fellow founders to connect with so you can support one another,” according to the post. “Unfortunately, we’re still constrained by number of advisors who volunteered to lead each group, which means your group won’t have an advisor. But having peers in a batch is what founders tell us is truly special about YC. We’re going to give you instructions on how to organize the group yourself and get nearly the same experience.”

Y Combinator is a highly-selective startup that accepts a tiny percentage of the companies that apply to its bi-annual residential program. Its investments include Dropbox, Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Reddit, Instacart, Twitch, Cruise Automation and many others.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

The MassChallenge Texas accelerator transformed re:3d’s business.

“We’ve grown by more than 30 percent since we’ve been in the program,” said Samantha Snabes, the startup’s co-founder.

re:3d took home the $10,000 USAA Vetrepreneur Award in the MassChallenge Texas finalist awards ceremony held Wednesday evening at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Austin. Snabes is a reservist in the Air National Guard.

Eight other finalists received a total of $500,000 in awards. Altogether, 84 startups participated in the inaugural MassChallenge Texas accelerator program. The accelerator picked 16 finalists that competed for the prize money.

re:3D now makes an industrial 3-D printer that can print using four types of recycled plastic garbage, Snabes said. It launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign while participating in MassChallenge. Additionally, the company was able to migrate its customer relations management program to the cloud for free using Google Cloud credits, Snabes said. And the company also was introduced to two strategic partners, she said.

And the entire team now has healthcare insurance for the first time through TriNet, which it was introduced to through the program, Snabes said.

“They took care of our team. They took care of our product. They took care of our community,” Snabes said. “MassChallenge helped us lay the framework for a really promising future.”

re:3d, with 23 employees, manufactures out of Houston and has two offices in Austin and one office in Puerto Rico. The company is bootstrapped, and runs on revenue, Snabes said. It also won $1 million in the WeWork Creator National awards last year. It has also received National Science Foundation funding.

“We like having the ethos of being scrappy and agile,” Snabes said.

The two biggest winners of the night were EQO and Sempulse, which each took home $100,000 Diamond awards.

EQO, an Austin Technology Incubator startup, creates molecular solutions to fight aquatic invasive species.

“Austin is a community that really fosters innovation and we’re so proud to be a part of it,” said Stefan Schuster, founding team member of EQO

EQO, founded in 2016, has four employees and it hasn’t raised any capital yet, Schuster said.

EQO has developed an eradication technology to kill invasive aquatic species without harming the environment or other species, Schuster said. The company is piloting a trial of the technology, he said.

The $100,000 will allow the company to generate momentum and get its product out into the field, he said.

“We’re going to save the damn world,” Schuster said.

Sempulse, founded in 2015, makes a medical device that applies to the ear and monitors vital signs within a few seconds. The startup has been testing the device with the military.

“It’s estimated that over half of our causalities in Afghanistan or Iraq were potentially survivable,” said Sean Bauld, Sempulse chief product officer.

The prize money allows Sempulse to continue to minimize the device, Bauld said. The military is the first market for the device for triage kits, he said. But there’s a huge commercial market too, he said.

The company has four employees, based in Austin and San Diego, and has raised about $400,000 to date including National Science Foundation’s SBIR grants.

Sempulse benefited greatly from the MassChallenge Accelerator, Bauld said.

“The French military is flying us out there because of an introduction made through MassChallenge,” he said.

“Our product design has been strengthened because of MassChallenge,” Bauld said. “Across the board, MassChallenge has been able to provide expertise.’’

Another healthcare startup, NovoThelium, which means new skin, out of San Antonio, took home one of the $75,000 Platinum awards. NovoThelium is working to provide nipple grafts to breast cancer survivors after a mastectomy.

NovoThelium, founded in 2015, has raised about $250,000 so far from National Science Foundation’s SBIR grants and breast cancer donations, said Lauren Cornell, cofounder, and CEO.

“This is very important to us,” Cornell said. The money will go to helping the company complete its animal studies and then go into human trials, she said.

The MassChallenge Accelerator provided NovoThelium with helpful mentors and a curriculum on marketing and commercializing products, said Bianca Cerqueira, cofounder, and COO. And UPS helped with shipping and packaging, she said.

“They helped us with critiquing our pitch and getting to that next level to do fundraising,” Cornell said.

Austin-based Cloud 9, a healthcare startup, won the other $75,000 Platinum award. The company has created an app to help provide mental healthcare to those who need it most, said JC Adams, the founder, and CEO.

“The reason we need accelerators like this is that we’re in mental healthcare which is even more broken than our healthcare system,” Adams said. “Healthy minds are often an afterthought. We forget how important they are.”

Cloud 9 needs community support through MassChallenge because sales cycles are so long with healthcare and government agencies and funding sources are uncertain, he said.

“This helps us get that initial inertia and momentum going,” Adams said.

Cloud 9 has shown that cities and counties can save money by investing in mental healthcare. Its customers include community and mental health centers. It is also working with first responders like police officers and firefighters to quickly provide mental health help in a crisis.

A few weeks ago, Cloud 9 won $100,000 in the Smart Cities Challenge put on by Capital Factory. Now it’s talking to multiple cities and counties around the state. It plans to use its prize money to invest in business and product development, Adams said.

And Austin-based GrubTubs took home a $50,000 award in the MassChallenge Accelerator Awards.

GrubTubs, which also participated in the Tarmac TX Accelerator and won $360,000 in the WeWork Creator Awards in Austin last year, is planning to scale its business nationwide, said Robert Olivier, founder, and CEO.

With the help of the MassChallenge Accelerator, GrubTubs was able to hire its first salesperson, he said. That has led to $50,000 in monthly reoccurring revenue, he said.

GrubTubs collects food scraps from restaurants and then takes that waste to local farmers, who feed it to their livestock. The process keeps waste out of the landfill and helps farmers lower the cost of feed for their animals.

During the accelerator, GrubTubs learned a lot about logistics and how to scale its business from UPS, Olivier said.

“What we realize is there is no national food waste solution in this country,” Olivier said. “Now we’re putting together an entire team. Brainstorming how to take Texas first and then the east and west coasts.”

Less than 10 facilities nationwide take food waste to recycle and there are 60,000 farms in the country that need cheaper animal feed, Olivier said.

“Working with the farmers we can scale nationally,” he said.

GrubTubs, with 11 employees, has raised $325,000 in seed stage funding.

Its customers include Facebook’s corporate cafeteria in downtown Austin, which it helped save 53 dumpsters of food from going to a landfill last month, Olivier said. GrubTubs is also working with hotels and convention centers.

“You’ve got billion-dollar trash companies,” Olivier said. “It’s about time we have a food waste solution,”

The Mentor Method, a Washington, D.C.-based, mentor network that creates inclusive workplace cultures, took home a $25,000 award.

“MassChallenge is an incredible accelerator that helps open up a lot of opportunities with access to mentors and resources,” said Janice Omadeke, CEO of The Mentor Method.

The network of entrepreneurs participating in MassChallenge also helped Omadeke.

“We’re like family,” she said. “We help each other through the trenches.”

MassChallenge helped The Mentor Network with customer acquisition and access to mentors, she said.

“We’re impacting lives and helping companies save over $500,000 a year in diversity retention,” Omadeke said.

“Diversity and inclusion are no longer a nice to have but a true business imperative,” Omadeke said. “And by winning this award and by creating the Austin Mosaic Awards that happened in July, we’re energized, and we’re thrilled that corporations are starting to recognize that and are making the correct moves to make sure that diverse talent is seen as assets and not tokens or checked boxes.”

The other winners of this year’s MassChallenge awards included Augmenta, based in Greece, which won $50,000 for its technology that monitors the application of fertilizers and pesticides. And Popspots, based in Austin, won a $25,000 award for its AdMob product for retailers.

In addition, ZPEG, a video compression company, won the People’s Choice Award.

And the event included talks by Cristal Glangchai, founder of VentureLab and author of VentureGirls, Julia Cheek, founder of Everlywell, and Bryan Daniel from the Office of Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

The fourth industrial revolution is one in which machines and humans work together to solve problems and accomplish tasks.

And it’s already here.

One of the leaders in the space is CognitiveScale, a five-year-old Austin-based startup, that announced Tuesday it is partnering with Dell to create a new way to interact with customers using its software platform.

CognitiveScale’s Cortex 5 software relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence to cull through massive databases to find the golden nuggets of information companies need to better serve their customers.

“We are pairing humans and machines to improve customer relations,” said Ganesh Padmanabhan, vice president of market development at CognitiveScale. He previously was general manager of Converged Solutions at Dell and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Capital Factory.

Dell, based in Round Rock, chose CognitiveScale and its Cortex 5 software to handle its customer relations.
But CognitiveScale’s Cortex 5 software delivers much more than just a customer relations management program, Padmanabhan said.

“How do we help customers get disruptive value out of disruptive technology,” Padmanabhan said. “In a nutshell, we make AI practical, scalable and valuable.”

Dell, which merged with EMC in 2016 to form the world’s largest tech company, is on a massive transformation journey, Padmanabhan said. And CognitiveScale has built the next generation customer intelligence platform to help them serve all their customers on a variety of platforms, Padmanabhan said. It can deliver a personalized experience to Dell’s customers easily and efficiently, he said. The software taps into multiple sources of data from transaction history, support history, call center interactions, browsing on the website, and more to deliver a custom-tailored customer experience, he said.

CognitiveScale’s technology is like Waze, the intelligent traffic app, Padmanabhan said. Waze sources information in real time and makes recommendations to drivers on the best alternative route to take in traffic. That’s similar to the role CognitiveScale’s Cortex 5 software plays in making the customer’s journey better, he said.

“Dell is committed to leveraging emerging technologies to transform customer experience while helping our marketing and sales professionals meet the rapidly changing expectations of today’s empowered customers,” Cameron Sojan, Vice President of Marketing and Customer Engagement Platforms at Dell, said in a news release. “We are pleased to partner with CognitiveScale on this innovative initiative that will apply artificial intelligence in a practical, scalable and responsible manner to build deeper, more profitable customer relationships by providing real-time insights into rich behavioral data across every phase of the customer lifecycle.”

CognitiveScale, with 150 employees and 90 in Austin, also has offices in New York, London, and Hyderabad, India. The company is hiring and has 62 open positions listed on its Website.

Overall, Austin is becoming a hotbed of activity in the AI industry with companies like CognitiveScale, Cerebri AI, OJO Labs, SparkCognition, and Hypergiant. And AI Global, a nonprofit organization focused on accelerating the adoption of AI, is based in Austin.

“The Austin scene around AI is emerging and talent is hot, and hiring is hard,” Padmanabhan said. But the atmosphere is more collaborative than competitive, he said.

CognitiveScale has raised $50 million to date from Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures, the Westly Group and USAA.

Manoj Saxena, formerly general manager of IBM Watson, is the company’s chairman and Akshay Sabhikhi is its CEO. Previously, Sabhikhi was the global leader for Smarter Care at IBM.

CognitiveScale focuses on creating AI solutions for financial services, healthcare, and digital commerce markets. Its customers include 25 Fortune 500 companies including USAA, Morgan Stanley, NBC, JPMorgan Chase, ExxonMobil, and MD Anderson.

The promise of flying cars may become a reality a soon.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering has teamed up with the U.S. Army Research Labs and Uber Elevate to develop the technology behind Uber’s new rideshare venture: UberAIR.

By 2020, Uber plans to demonstrate the first flying rideshare vehicles in Dallas and Los Angeles with a full rollout of the service by 2023.

Uber launched its Elevate program in 2016 to build a network of all-electric, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft powered by distributed electric propulsion. To make the UberAIR program a reality, Uber has partnered with aircraft manufacturers and NASA and now UT and the U.S. Army Research Labs.

“UT is uniquely positioned to contribute to this new technology, and Uber has recognized that,” Jayant Sirohi, associate professor in UT’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and the UT team leader on the project, said in a news release. “In addition to the technical expertise we bring to this area, we also already have a rig to test new rotor configurations right here on campus.”

IBM has always been at the forefront of cybersecurity since the earliest days of the Internet.

At the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, I interviewed Nick Simicich, an ethical hacker on the IBM staff, whose day job consisted of breaking into company computer systems to expose the vulnerabilities. That was in 1999. Since then, cybersecurity has grown increasingly important as companies face an onslaught of threats from both domestic and foreign sources.

That’s why the announcement by IBM Security that it has established an X-Force Red Lab in Austin is such an important one. The lab is one of a network of four secure labs focused on testing the security of devices and systems including consumer and industrial Internet of Things technologies, automotive equipment, and Automated Teller Machines. The other labs are in Hursley, England, Melbourne, Australia and Atlanta, Georgia.

The new Labs will be operated by X-Force Red, an autonomous team of veteran hackers within IBM Security. The X-Force Red Labs offer secure locations where X-Force Red’s seasoned hackers will work to find vulnerabilities in hardware and software devices before and after they are sent to customers.

“IBM X-Force Red has one mission – hack anything to secure everything,” Charles Henderson, Global Managing Partner, IBM X-Force Red, said in a news release. “Via X-Force Red Labs, we have the ability to do just that, in a secure and controlled environment. Whether it’s the newest smartphone that hasn’t been released, an Internet-connected refrigerator or a new ATM, we have the capability to test, identify, and help our clients remediate vulnerabilities before the bad guys can exploit them.”

In particular, IBM has seen a huge increase in attacks on ATMs. “In early 2018, law enforcement alerted financial institutions of increased threats targeting ATMs in the U.S. that allow criminals to “jackpot” the machines and steal their contents on demand,” according to IBM. “These attacks have been known to use both malware and physical access to the ATM device to empty all of the cash from the machine. Since 2017, X-Force Red has experienced a 300 percent increase in requests for ATM testing due these emerging threats.”

A week after he moved to Austin, Chris Ripley waited in line at Walmart and noticed a woman covered in paint standing in front of him.

He struck up a conversation with her and discovered she worked at the City of Austin‘s Resource Recovery Center and was learning to recycle paint. Together, they went to the center and Ripley ended up volunteering his expertise as a paint maker there for nine months.

One day he wanted to get some paint solvent from a Drum Storage Container behind a red line, only to discover he was not allowed to touch the “hazardous waste” after people yelled at him. Two Drum Storage Containers were slated to be picked up by a disposal company and sent to an incinerator. The City of Austin paid the company about $5 a gallon to haul off and dispose of the waste. Retailers can pay up to $15 a gallon to dispose of the waste, Ripley said.

Ripley got to use some of the solvents under a re-use policy and that sparked the idea for Smarter Sorting.

Smarter Sorting, based at Galvanize in downtown Austin, takes unwanted consumer chemical products from cities and businesses, primarily retailers, and finds a reuse for them to prevent waste from going up in smoke.

Smarter Sorting, founded in 2017, has closed on $9.3 million in seed funding including $2.5 million from RTP Ventures. The company is using the funds to drive transparency in the chemical waste management industry and to automate environmental compliance processes for retailers. It has created a one of its kind smart chemical database.

Smarter Sorting’s technology gives municipalities, retailers, and waste management companies the ability to accurately identify, categorize and sort every class of chemical-containing product, said Ripley, the company’s founder, and CEO. Next, Smarter Sorting helps to recycle chemical products back into use instead of having them be destroyed.

Smarter Sorting has 30 employees including a team of data scientists and experts behind Wolfram Alpha.

Smarter Sorting’s customers include 17 municipalities nationwide and Canada’s largest retailer, Canadian Tire. And the City of Austin, with its zero waste goal, has partnered with Smarter Sorting to develop its industry-changing technology.

“Everyone using it has experienced substantial savings, both in employee hours needed to sort the waste and in the actual reuse process itself – helping to solve the problem of 1.4 billion pounds of consumer chemical products being incinerated as waste every year,” according to Smarter Sorting.

Just recently, the California Product Stewardship Council awarded Smarter Sorting their most prestigious honor: the Arrow Award for giving cities and retailers the tools they need to identify items that can be reused.

“We are delighted to promote and celebrate California companies who are leaders in driving a circular economy so that nothing is landfilled or incinerated,” Heidi Sanborn, Executive Director of the California Product Stewardship Council, said in a news statement. “I congratulate Smarter Sorting for creating the first database technology that makes it fast scalable and convenient to redirect hazardous products from incineration to reuse.”

“Because of existing compliance and disposal burdens, Smarter Sorting customers save money, increase staff efficiency, and improve their compliance,” according to Ripley.

Smarter Sorting uses a combination of hardware and software to solve the data disconnect to reuse chemical products. The company sends the retailer a machine that scans chemical-based products such as spray paint and cleaners for reuse. Smarter Sorting then takes the products and finds a market for them. Products that have to be destroyed go to an industrial disposal company that incinerates the products.

“We’re the hottest department of weird stuff that is profitable,“ Ripley said.

One of its partners for reuse is Habitat for Humanity.

HFH Home Centers and Smarter Sorting Partnership from Cloudy Logic on Vimeo.

Zac Maurais and Ben Doherty’s first startup, Favor, had a pretty good outcome.

Favor, which launched in Austin in 2013, to deliver food to people’s homes, sold to H-E-B earlier this year.

Instead of taking time off, Maurais and Doherty are back at the startup grind, launching Sunroom, a company that helps people rent apartments and homes.

Maurais knows the pain of finding a rental and moving firsthand. He has rented apartments and homes eight times in the last ten years and he continues to rent today.

“It was hard to find a place in a lot of circumstances,” Maurais said. “Moving is a stressful time. You are up against the clock. You are trying to find a place that checks all of the boxes for you.”

That’s when they came up with the idea for Sunroom.

With Sunroom, renters can view as many apartments or houses as they like with Sunroom’s in-house licensed agents, which they call Tour Guides. Then when they find a place they like, they apply online through Sunroom. The service is free for renters. Agents and landlords pay Sunroom if the company places a renter with them.

Sunroom can help people rent properties in the Greater Austin and Round Rock area initially. Then it plans to expand statewide in Texas and eventually nationally, Maurais said.

And they have raised $1.5M in seed funding from investors including Founders Fund Angel, Tim Draper of Draper Associates, Joshua Baer of Capital Factory, Active Capital, and Boost.VC.

Rentals are a big market with the average person spending 33 percent of their income on housing, Maurais said.

“It meets one of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, everyone has to find shelter,” Maurais said.

Favor also met Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for food because everyone needs to eat, he said.

“Both Ben and I are interested in how we can build really big companies,” Maurais said. They tackle basic needs everyone has and provide a seamless way to get them with complex logistics and technology at a large scale that is all behind the scenes, he said.

And Tim Draper, an angel investor in Favor, is on board with the new venture. He helped Maurais and Doherty think big when they were crafting Favor, which was initially called NeighborFavor and they dropped Neighbor at Draper’s suggestion. He wanted them to think about how they could deliver burritos around the world.

“Draper has lofty goals that sound a little bit crazy to the average person but he’s totally serious,” Maurais said. He challenges Maurais and Doherty to tackle big problems and to create solutions that scale.

This time around, raising money for Sunroom was a bit easier than raising money for Favor, Maurais said.

“All of the investors did really well from our last company, so it was really easy to go to the people we like working with and say we’re back at it again,” he said.

“They just wanted to get behind us as entrepreneurs,” Maurais said. “They know we might not have it all figured out on day one. But we’re going to make the right iterations and pivots and that it is going to work.”

But the grind is still the grind.

“Adam Draper, Tim Draper’s son, lovingly calls us cockroaches because we persevere through the most challenging of times and we’re capital efficient. We just keep going. We can live through anything,” Maurais said.

In fact, when Favor first came to Austin, the company was almost out of money, Maurais said. Doherty was living underneath his office desk to save money just, so the company could survive, he said.

“That is one of the things we’ve had to do to make Favor successful,” Maurais said. “We still have that drive more than ever.”

And Maurais and Doherty are big believers in doing every role in the company.

At Favor, they made hundreds of deliveries. They would code during the day and make deliveries at night.

This past year, they each got real estate licenses. Maurais has done hundreds of showings with renters already.

“You have to get on that front line of defense and talk to customers and do the activity, so you can figure out how to make it better,” he said.

Sunroom has nine full-time employees and seven tour guides, which are contractors.

Sunroom launched a pilot program a few months ago. It is now available to everyone in the Austin area. Renters can sign up at SunroomRentals.com.

Galvanize recently announced plans to buy San Francisco-based Hack Reactor, which will make it one of the largest coding programs in the country.

“From the beginning, we saw a clear compatibility through a shared passion for innovative, high-quality instruction combined with measurable outcomes and we are thrilled to welcome the Hack Reactor team to the Galvanize family,” Galvanize CEO Al Rosabal said in a news release. “This combination continues to position Galvanize as one of the largest, fastest-growing and highest quality immersive technology education providers focused on delivering extraordinary outcomes for students, members and enterprise partners.”

The acquisition of Hack Reactor will make Galvanize Austin the go to place for people looking to acquire software engineering, Web development and data science skills, said Bill Blackstone, general manager of Galvanize Austin.

“What this does do is continue to drive us in a position of leadership when it comes to accelerated learning programs,” Blackstone said. “It takes the best of Hack Reactor and the best of what we have been able to do and provides even better outcomes for individuals to take advantage of the digital economy.”

Galvanize Austin, which has 14 employees, will combine operations with Hack Reactor at its Second Street location. Hack Reactor will move its operations to Galvanize by the end of September, Blackstone said.

Currently, Galvanize Austin offers courses in Data Science and Web Development and it plans to integrate Hack Reactors programs to offer a single software engineering program, Blackstone said.

Galvanize and Hack Reactor combined have 7,400 graduates who have been placed with 450 employers nationwide with a 87 percent placement rate for Web development and an 85 percent placement rate for data science.

In a way it is an Austin story because Hack Reactor purchased Austin-based Maker Square in early 2015, Blackstone said.

“It’s neat that now a local brand that was started here and acquired by someone else is now part of our ecosystem,” Blackstone said. “There is part of that Austin flair within Hack Reactor.”

But Blackstone is primarily excited about the opportunities the combined company offers in giving people more access to education.

“It allows as many people as possible that have the drive and determination to access these technical careers,” Blackstone said. “Places like Galvanize provide a welcome home to everyone and equal access to the digital economy.”

In addition, Galvanize has secured a $32 million Series C financing led by growth equity firm Catalyst Investors with participation from New Markets Venture Partners and existing investors: ABS Capital Partners, University Ventures, and the Colorado Impact Fund. Tyler Newton from Catalyst Investors will join the Galvanize board of directors.

“When searching for the right organization, Galvanize emerged as the best possible partner, with complementary strengths in community, software engineering, enterprise partnerships, data science, and a shared focus on quality education,” Hack Reactor CEO, Harsh Patel, said in a news release “This deal ensures we continue delivering the best possible education to the students and create vibrant community destinations – on campuses and online – that connect entrepreneurs, alumni, enterprise partners and students.”

The acquisition adds Los Angeles to Galvanize’s innovation hubs for technology students, alumni, entrepreneurs, startups and established companies, in addition to the markets it currently serves including Austin, Boulder, Denver, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle and online.

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Austin is home to several interesting and innovative drone technology companies, but when most people think of drones they typically think of a toy or a piece of military equipment. Software companies in the drone space are now taking off, helping businesses across a wide array of sectors. One of the most interesting of these companies is DroneSense, launched in 2015 by UT alums, Christopher Eyhorn and Gerard Juarez. The company recently secured its Series A financing, led by public company FLIR Systems, a pioneer in thermal imagery sensors and systems.

“Drones are a transformative technology ideally suited to help first responders get ‘eyes in the sky,’” says Juarez. “DroneSense has worked hand-in-hand with public safety professionals to create a software platform designed to revolutionize the way police, firefighters, search and rescue and other public safety workers do their job.” With DroneSense’s software, first responders can fly any drone, easily collaborate with other pilots, and access all the data collected in a central location. From managing flights, hardware, and team member data, to providing detailed reporting and direct integration with the FAA for flight authorization, DroneSense platform offers an end-to-end, simple solution that allows users to focus on the mission at hand.

While drone imagery and video footage have already been used for a few years by public safety organizations, implementations of drone programs have experienced obstacles and limited success to date. “There is a host of reasons why many organizations struggled to build their programs,” Eyhorn says. “A lack of skilled pilots, difficulty sharing data, concerns about privacy, and the security of collected data – we build our software to specifically address these problems.” The result of all this work is the DroneSense platform, which consists of three components:

• Pilot is the drone-agnostic flight control app that provides real-time views and mission-critical functionality, including tools for autonomous operations and pilot-to-pilot collaboration.
• OpsCenter is the command and control module, giving stakeholders and pilots collaborative tools and multiple live aerial views via a secure and common operating picture.
• AirBase is a full system of record, enabling detailed and automated data collection and management of an organization’s drone program, leading to greater accountability and transparency.

For local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, drones are becoming a necessary tool, and are applicable to a wide range of use cases. For example, aerial views from a drone can not only provide police officers the location of an active shooter, but also an understanding of the surrounding area. This level of situational awareness provides valuable information such as the direction the shooter might be headed, escape routes for victims, and the shooter’s firing line. Officers can then plan the appropriate response (without putting each other at risk) while also helping to prevent civilian casualties.

Firefighters can also realize many benefits from using drones such as timely, multi-dimensional views of fires that were previously unattainable or required expensive helicopters. Firefighters equipped with drones can better understand a situation and determine the best way to respond, helping save time while mitigating their exposure to harm. Moreover, drones equipped with thermal sensors can see through smoke, identify hot spots on a roof, and determine the intensity of a fire from a safe distance. Following an incident, drones can provide data and imagery to map an entire scene in 3D–valuable information that can be used for preventative measures, future planning, analysis, and investigations.

Drones are also increasingly being used in natural disaster response, such as wildfires and flooding to assess environmental and terrain conditions before the first responders (and second responders, such as utility crews) hit the ground. A prime example of how drones can save lives was in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey that hit the Houston area in 2017. Drones were used throughout the region to assess damage, identify stranded residents, and inspect critical infrastructure such as power lines and roadways.

“Despite the devastation and loss, it was highly encouraging to see the wide deployment of drones in this catastrophic situation. Drones used by our platform have a tremendous opportunity to be a force multiplier in such widespread and chaotic situations,” says Eyhorn. “Everyone at DroneSense is driven by a common desire to make a positive impact in real-world situations, namely using drones to help save lives.”

Additional use cases are being discovered every day in public safety, and drones have enhanced many missions already. Please visit our website to see a selection of these.

The genesis of DroneSense was the culmination of the founders’ interests, passions, and background in technology and aviation. Juarez had an established career in aerial photography and was an early adopter of drones in his business. Eyhorn is a manned aviation pilot and proven entrepreneur in the tech industry. Together, both founders recognized a significant opportunity in helping first responders utilize these new innovative tools in their operations.

“Working hand-in-hand with first responders has given us great insight into how we can help the men and women tasked with keeping us safe use drone technology to solve real-world problems,“ said Juarez.

Check out more at dronesense.com.

Editor’s note: This is a sponsored post.