Student Loan Genius has raised $3.5 million in venture capital.

Vestigo Ventures, based in Cambridge, Mass., led the round which included CMFG Ventures, Prudential Financial and Rubicon Venture Capital also participated in the round. The Austin-based startup, founded in 2013, has raised more than $7 million to date.

The company plans to use the funds for sales and marketing, product development and hiring new employees.

“SLG is driving innovation in employee benefits that hasn’t been seen since the emergence of the 401K decades ago. With 70 percent of the emerging workforce saddled with student loans, it is incumbent on employers to empower the current and future workforce generations to succeed in the market, unencumbered by the high cost and burden of debt,” Michael Nugent, Managing Director, Vestigo Ventures, said in a news release. “SLG fits within Vestigo’s mission to finance fintech companies focused on worksite management. We are especially impressed with the management team and its actionable go-to-market strategy to bring SLG’s products and services to major companies nationwide.”

Student Loan Genius is an employee benefits platform that gives employers a way to help their employees pay back their student loans quicker and with employer contributions. Its customers include New York Life, Ralph Lauren and Mastercard.

“In an environment made up of the most educated workforce to-date with the current high employment rate, organizations are becoming keenly aware of the difficulty retaining their best people,” Matt Beecher, CEO of Student Loan Genius, said in a news release. “This new funding validates Student Loan Genius’ mission and efforts to enable companies to retain their top talent in an increasingly competitive workforce through unique benefits, like student loan payments, that meet their employee’s needs.”

Silverton Partners, based in Austin, announced this month that it has closed on Fund V at $108 million.

The venture capital firm, founded in 2006, focuses on early-stage companies and since its launch, the firm has made more than 50 investments in the enterprise and consumer technology categories.

“Fund V, our largest fund to date, is the culmination of a lot of hard work and evidence over the last twelve years that our approach to venture investing is working,” Morgan Flager, General Partner at Silverton Partners, said in a news release. “With this latest fund, we’ve been very fortunate to expand our roster of top-tier institutional LPs who believe in our differentiated strategy and vision for the future of our franchise.”

“We continue to see meaningful increases in entrepreneurial activity in our hometown of Austin, TX, which continues to be one of the top markets in the U.S. for startup activity. Likewise, we have been expanding our network in other regional markets with similar characteristics as Austin,” Kip McClanahan, General Partner at Silverton, said in a news release.

Silverton also reported five full or partial exits representing an aggregate of more than $1.1 billion in market capitalization since the beginning of 2018. “These realizations were generated by the following Austin-based companies where Silverton was the first institutional capital: WP Engine, SpareFoot, Watermark, Favor, and YouEarnedIt,” according to the firm.

Silverton manages over $250 million and is operated by four General Partners: Morgan Flager, Kip McClanahan, Adam Chibib and Mike Dodd.

OJO Labs, an Austin artificial intelligence startup, has raised $20.5 million in venture capital.

The company, founded in 2015, raised the Series B round from new investors Realogy, the Royal Bank of Canada, Northwest Mutual Fund Ventures and ServiceMaster. It also included existing investors LiveOak Venture Partners and Silverton Partners, both based in Austin.

“This Series B round is super unique because we are bringing in all of these huge industry giants,” said John Berkowitz, co-founder and CEO of OJO Labs. “They propel OJO to millions and millions of consumers.”

Previously, OJO Labs raised $6 million in Series A funding from LiveOak Venture Partners and Silverton. At that time, the company only had 11 employees, based at WeWork on Congress.

Since then, OJO Labs, with 33 employees in Austin and 75 employees on the island of Saint Lucia, has moved into new headquarters at 720 Brazos. The company plans to double its workforce in both places, Berkowitz said during an interview at the company’s downtown headquarters on Thursday. For now, OJO has enough office space to accommodate the expanded workforce, he said.

“We’ve been working on this conversational AI platform for three years,” Berkowitz said. “We have applied it to the residential real estate space. So we built an AI assistant to help consumers navigate their home journey – that search for homes, get help with their mortgages, ask questions about specific properties. It’s just kind of a better experience to help consumers make their decisions.”

OJO Labs has several patents pending that are the cusp of being granted, Berkowitz said.

OJO Labs runs a 24/7 operation in the island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean where it trains the Artificial Intelligence agent using human coaches. Berkowitz’s last company, Yodle, had a huge operation in Saint Lucia. When he launched his latest company, the prime minister of Saint Lucia traveled to Austin to meet with him about setting up a new operation there.

“It’s a really stable government,” Berkowitz said. “And really smart, hardworking people. And it’s below the hurricane belt.”

It’s an incredible advantage in AI to have employees to train the technology, Berkowitz said. It’s what he calls the “blue collar” work of AI.

“No PhDs on the West Coast want to find out that the real way to make the AI work is to do real-time training with huge human operations,” Berkowitz said.

Austin has a real competitive advantage when it comes to the AI race because it does business to business software companies and human operations or call centers, Berkowitz said.

“We’re not scared of thousands of employees integrated into the technology, a lot of companies are,” Berkowitz said.

The machines need help from humans, Berkowitz said.

“Our mission on the wall is to fundamentally improve the way people make their most important decisions through the fusion of machine and human intelligence,” Berkowitz said. “Combining machines and humans
is the real key in our venture and we’re proud of it and we don’t shy away from it.”

OJO Labs is laser-focused on creating an experience humans love, Berkowitz said. Its OJO assistant is free to consumers. It lets homebuyers ask all kinds of questions of the OJO assistant about home features ranging from things like swimming pools, views of downtown, large kitchens, large lots, school districts, etc. The OJO assistant sends the homebuyer texts of potential homes with photos and listings. It learns what the person likes and what the person doesn’t like through the interaction. When the person is ready to buy, it refers them to a human agent to handle the homebuying experience and provides the agent with the background information on the customer’s preferences.

“OJO serves the customer like they have a best friend who is the world’s smartest real estate agent,” Berkowitz said.

Real estate is just the first industry OJO plans to use its AI technology, Berkowitz said. It’s also eyeing financial services, healthcare, and other industries for future applications, he said.

With the latest funding round, OJO Labs plans to expand its product, data science, and engineering teams. In February, Peter Kappler, a former Google engineer who was instrumental in developing the AdWords platform and opening Google’s Austin office in 2007, joined OJO Labs as its Chief Technology Officer.

“I’ve looked at numerous technology startup opportunities since I retired from Google, but none as exciting as OJO Labs,” Kappler said in a news release. “I chose to join and help build this company because this technology and team are tackling serious problems by providing a level of personalization at a scale previously unachievable.”

Indeed, the world’s number one job site, Thursday announced plans for a huge expansion in Austin and plans to add 3,000 new jobs.

The Austin-based company is adding 615,000 square feet of office space in two new offices.

“We are committed to growing in Austin, a city that is a proven tech hub with excellent access to talent and a community that encourages innovation,” Indeed President Chris Hyams said in a news release. “As one of Indeed’s founding cities, it has been a great place to grow our organization over the past 13 years as we’ve helped millions of job seekers find new opportunities.”

Indeed is expanding downtown with plans to occupy the top nine floors at Block 71 at 6th and Lavaca Street. It is also developing the full Domain Tower at 721 Domain Drive. These offices are in addition to the company’s tech campus located in Austin tech corridor of Loop 360.

Indeed’s employment has quadrupled in the past three years as the company has expanded globally and added new products.

“Indeed is a hometown success story and a great example of what type of innovation and opportunity find root here in Austin,” Mayor Steve Adler said in a news release.

Austin serves as a global technical hub for the company with a high concentration of engineering and product teams, but it has employees across all functions – finance, legal, sales, marketing, corporate development, client success and human resources. Future hiring will be across all functions.

Indeed was founded in Austin and Stamford, CT in 2004. Today, there are more than 1,600 employees in Austin, and Indeed has over 6,100 employees in 27 offices around the world.

The CEO of the Austin Technology Council Barbary Brunner announced Thursday that she has left the organization to join Phunware, which also announced it’s launching a cryptocurrency called Phuncoin.

Brunner will join Phunware as its Chief Marketing Officer.

Brunner, with 25 years of technology leadership experience, previously served as CMO of Experian’s PriceGrabber business, CMO for Yahoo! Media, Chief Digital Products Officer for MediaNews Group, director of global planning for Microsoft’s MSN business and executive producer for SierraOnline.

Brunner will focus on supporting Phunware as it plans to go public, launches a crptonetworking ecosystem and prepares for its next stage of growth. Brunner reports to Alan S. Knitowski, Phunware’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer.

Other recent hires at Phunware include COO Randall Crowder, GM Audience Building and Monetization Ian Karnell, EVP Product Management and Engineering Matthew Lindenberger, and EVP Corporate Development Tushar Patel. And CFO Matt Aune and CTO and Co-Founder Luan Dong, make up Phunware’s leadership team.

“With our announced intent to merge with NASDAQ company Stellar Acquisition III, Inc, and upcoming launch of Phuncoin, we are at a pivotal moment in Phunware’s history and in the larger landscapes of mobile application software, media and data,” Knitowski said in a news release. “Taking advantage of this moment requires a marketing leader with vision and expertise. Barbary possesses these and more, and we are thrilled to welcome her to Phunware’s leadership team.”

“I’m excited to have the opportunity to join this terrific team of leaders. I can’t think of a more perfect mutual fit than Phunware’s platform, tools and data that touch and improve the lives of more than 1 Billion people globally every month. The breadth and depth of engagement opportunities that Phunware makes available to brands is unprecedented,” Brunner said in a news release. “And I’m also so very pleased to be joining a company that, at 50 percent diversity in its employee population and with a diverse leadership team, understands that how important this is to drive product excellence, customer satisfaction and revenue results.”

Phunware is a software company that focuses on helping brands engage their customers on mobile devices. In February, Phunware announced its intent to go public through a merger with Stellar Acquisition and to launch a cryptonetworking ecosystem.

One of the most anticipated and outstanding events in the Austin startup community every year is going to take place on May 24.

The Austin Chamber of Commerce along with South by Southwest hosts the annual A-List awards and recognizes some of the city’s rising startup stars.

The event kicks off at 4 p.m. at ACL Live at the Moody Theater.

This year, Doreen Lorenzo, assistant dean of the School of Design at the University of Texas at Austin, will serve as the master of ceremonies.

Opening speakers include Julia Cheek, founder, and CEO of EverlyWell, Mark McClain, founder of SailPoint Technologies and Samantha Snabes, co-founder and catalyst of re:3D.

Colette Pierce Burnette, Ph.D., president, and CEO of Huston-Tillotson University is the featured inspiration speaker.And Brian Sheth, co-founder, and president of Vista Equity Partners, is the keynote speaker.

The event recognizes startups in the following categories: emerging or early/seed stage that have received less than $5 million in funding and have less than $2 million in revenue and founded within the last two years, growth or mid-stage companies that have received less than $20 million in funding and have revenue of less than $25 million and Scale or later-stage companies that have received more than $20 million in funding and have revenue greater than $25 million.

Tickets to the event are $25 and can be purchased here.

A-List winners from 2017 can be found here.

RetailMeNot announced Tuesday the acquisition of LowestMed, a website that compares prescription drug prices and provides mobile or printable coupons.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“RetailMeNot is proud to welcome LowestMed to the company as RetailMeNot Rx Saver,” Cotter Cunningham, CEO and founder of RetailMeNot, said in a news statement. “Many consumers don’t know that they can easily save money on their prescription medications. The addition of RetailMeNot Rx Saver helps RetailMeNot consumers save on more of the things they need, making this another step toward RetailMeNot becoming the ultimate savings destination.”

LowestMed, based in Draper, UT, is rebranding to RetailMeNot Rx Saver, an app, and website that will provide coupons for FDA-approved prescription medications. LowestMed, founded in 2009, had previously raised an undisclosed amount of seed stage capital, according to CrunchBase.

“Prescription drugs are expensive, and Americans have to fill medications they aren’t necessarily prepared to pay for on a daily basis,” Brad Bangerter, CEO and founder, LowestMed, said in a news statement. “RetailMeNot Rx Saver allows consumers to compare nearby pharmacy prices and get coupons to help alleviate the burden associated with those costs.”

RetailMeNot is a wholly-owned subsidiary of San Antonio-based Harland Clarke Holdings.

In 2012, Kapil Rajurkar founded Preschool2me in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The company started out as a side project, Rajurkar said.

Rajurkar wanted to be able to keep tabs on his son at his preschool so he created an app that allowed him to connect with his son’s school.

The app is an interactive communications platform between the preschool and its teachers and the parents. It provides them with pictures, announcements and a detailed activity report at the end of the day. It also provides an archive of information that parents can search.

Preschool2me also provides a director dashboard that has time-saving tools to manage the daycare center.

In 2013, Rajurkar moved to Austin and relocated his startup Preschool2me here. His startup has also participated in the accelerator program at Capital Factory.

Today, the app is in more than 450 sites around the country and it’s in several countries around the world including Australia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and more, Rajurkar said.

Preschool2me, based in Cedar Park, now has 11 employees and recently raised an undisclosed sum in seed stage funding.

Keshu Dubey, an investor, and serial entrepreneur led the funding round. Dubey, founder of Xeler8, a startup database analytics platform acquired by Zdream ventures and founder of WeeTracker, a global tech media platform focused on Africa, is also a customer. He uses the Preschool2me platform in a preschool he owns in Round Rock.

The latest round of funding is to help Preschool2me further scale its operations and focus on sales and growth, Dubey said.

Other angel investors in the round include Jawahar Dhandapani, Sandeep Karandikar, Srinu Vemulapalli, Tarun Singhal, Tarun Sharma, Vipin Agrawal, Umad Ahmad, Vinay Arora and Saurabh Dixit.

“Most of the other investors are parents of young kids going to preschool and childcare centers. Their faith in Preshool2me further validates the need for our product” Rajurkar said.

Preschool2me works with leading brands of childcare centers in the country including Children’s Lighthouse, Goddard Schools, Kids ‘R’ Kids Learning Academy, YMCA, JCC among others.

Via email, Rajurkar answered a few more questions about his company.

Q. Who are your customers?

A. Private preschools serving children from birth to 5 years, afterschool programs and camps.

Q. Who is on your team?

Being the founder, I play multiple roles as the CEO and CIO. We have a team in place for business development and support. We have a strong board of advisors and mentors that augment our team.

Q. Why are you guys the ones to do this startup?

As a parent, I saw this need in the early childhood market. Given our understanding of the needs of the customer and technology know-how, we decided to do this startup. Working with early childhood educators and entrepreneurs drives us.

Q. What challenges do you face bringing your startup into the marketplace?

A. Early childhood educators and owners are really busy in their day to day duties. Getting time on their calendar to demonstrate how our product will change their operations and positively impact parent engagement is the toughest part of our startup.

Q. How do you acquire customers?

A. Our customer acquisition is three prong: Word of mouth, tradeshows and direct calling.

Q. What is the business model?

A, We are SaaS (Software as a Service) based product. Customers pay around $125 per month to get access to Preschool2me for unlimited teachers, classrooms, and students.

Q. What Austin resources have you found most helpful?

A. Austin has a strong eco-system of entrepreneurs, mentors, and investors. One of the reasons I moved Preschool2me to Austin was to become part of and benefit from this eco-system. For example, Capital Factory and its mentors have helped us tremendously.

Q. What has been your biggest win so far?

A. When we started back in 2013, I was not sure how we will get in front of some of the biggest franchises in the country. But in the past 4 years, our product and support have allowed us to become part of some of these large franchises. We have also been able to create partnerships with larger organizations that complement our product. To me, these are our biggest wins.

Q. What is your long-term vision?

A. Preschool2me should become the most cost-effective, easy to use and with the best customer support software in the early childhood marketplace serving more than a million children.

Austin-based Meta SaaS, which runs a platform for managing software as a service subscriptions for companies, got acquired by Flexera, a private software company based in Itasca, Illinois.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Meta SaaS, founded in 2016, raised a $1.5 million seed stage round last year led by Dallas Billionaire Mark Cuban.

Flexera, founded in 2008, has grown through a series of acquisitions of software companies with Meta SaaS being the latest.

“The number of SaaS apps in use is skyrocketing – especially among small and mid-size companies. As much as a third of those applications aren’t even being used,” Tom Canning, Vice President of Strategy at Flexera, said in a news statement. “And, because companies can’t see or manage SaaS apps in use across the enterprise, cost and risk are out of control. We’re now able to help customers rein in SaaS spend on more than 32,000 SaaS applications – vastly exceeding the capabilities of any other SAM supplier.”

Meta SaaS tracks company online subscriptions and finds the ones that are not being used frequently or have been abandoned altogether. It ultimately saves a company time and money.

In addition, the Meta SaaS software can notify a company when an employee leaves to end their access to subscription applications.

With Flexera’s technology and the latest acquisition of Meta SaaS, its customers can now identify more than 32,000 SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Office 365, Slack and Box, and manage them more easily. For example, one telecommunications company used Meta SaaS software to discover millions of dollars of spending on 295 unsanctioned products from 266 different vendors, according to Canning.

“We’re thrilled to be acquired by Flexera because of their superior solutions and leadership in the SAM industry. Just as important to us, however, is Flexera’s broad commitment to help customers optimize all their cloud assets – from infrastructure and software running in the cloud, to SaaS. No other SAM vendor comes close to Flexera’s vision and ability to execute,” Arlo Gilbert, Meta SaaS’s co-founder and CEO, said in a news release. Gilbert and CTO Scott Hertel co-founded the company.

Meta SaaS’s operations are going to continue in Austin, according to a blog post by Gilbert on the company’s website.