YouEarnedIt, a startup focused on helping companies reward employees, has received $1.5 million in seed stage funding, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company received the funding from Capital Factory, an Austin-based incubator and accelerator of tech companies led by Joshua Baer and advertising giant WPP PLC, according to the article.
The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce also recently names YouEarnedIt as one of its A-List Austin startup to watch for 2014. The company’s customers include Gatti’s Pizza, Conde Nast, Y&R, RetailMeNot and Spredfast.
Kenny Tomlin founded the company in 2011. He was replaced as CEO last year by “Steve Semelsberger, a former senior vice president and general manager of California-based Demand Media Inc.’s (NYSE: DMD) social products group,” according to the Austin Business Journal. The Wall Street Journal story listed YouEarnedIt’s CEO as “Autumn Manning, who previously worked as a partner at training and coaching services firm SVI World.”
Tag: Austin (Page 9 of 37)
Austin-based Compare Metrics, which makes analytics software aimed at retailers, announced that is has received $3.8 million in follow-on venture capital.
Austin Ventures led the investment with additional funding by existing investors Julie Allegro of Allegro Venture Partners, Bob Greene of Contour Ventures, Capital Factory, Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate, Brett Hurt of Hurt Family Investments and independent investors Dean Drako, Ralph Mack and Adam Ross.
This brings the company’s total amount of funding to $8 million. Compare Metrics received $4.2 million in first-round financing in May of 2013.
Compare Metrics recently made the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce’s A-List of Startups to watch in Austin in the emerging growth category.
The company plans to use the money to support its continued growth. It now has 32 employees and several customers including Fresh Pair, Lenovo, Rebecca Minkoff and The Wasserstrom Co.
Garrett Eastham, Mikael Solomon and Stephen Goodwin co-founded Compare Metrics in 2012 based on Eastham’s cognitive science research at Stanford University.
“It has been exciting to watch the journey of the Compare Metrics team from a three-person start-up to the high-growth and maturing company that it is today. This follow-on investment is indicative of the company’s progress in proving out their market value,” Chris Pacitti, general partner with Austin Ventures, said in a news release. “Retail client results have again validated our original confidence in the company’s potential, and I look forward to watching their continued success going forward.”
Alex Mitchell, President and co-founder of StepOne, photo courtesy of StepOne
LiveOak Venture Partners led the round with participation from Silverton Partners. The company plans to use the money to add employees and to expand sales and marketing efforts.
StepOne has already landed Telstra, Australia’s largest telecomm company, as a customers as well as a major U.S. cable company.
StepOne’s flagship product, Contextual Care, focuses on helping large companies with complex products deliver excellent customer support.
Although lots of products currently exist to help companies deliver self-service customer support, StepOne has a different approach. It “predicts a customer’s question by measuring hundreds of customer attributes like what services they’ve purchased, the state of their billing cycle and the technical performance of the product, and then matches the customer to the optimal content for their predicted question,” according to a news release. “The adaptive software continuously learns which specific pieces of support content best serve various customers, improving its accuracy over time.”
“From product onboarding to in-life support, self-service for customers is broken,” Alex Mitchell, CEO and co-founder of StepOne, said in a news release. “Even though most customers prefer to solve problems themselves, they give in and finally pick up the phone. There is too much content presented to solve the problem and too many irrelevant results in search queries. Our goal is to make self-service become a driver of customer loyalty and cost savings. When you can answer the customer’s question before they’ve even asked it, they’ll stick with you.”
Last year, LiveOak Ventures invested an undisclosed amount of seed stage funding into StepOne.
“Since our seed investment, the StepOne team has achieved significant customer traction, so we are delighted to continue to support the StepOne team as they scale their operations,” Krishna Srinivasan, co-founder and general partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, said in a news release.
A graduate of the Longhorn Startup class for undergraduates at the University of Texas, LanternCRM just landed $250,000 in angel funding.
The Austin-based startup received funds from angel investors Jason Cohen of WP Engine, Rob Taylor or Black Locus, Mikey Trafton of BlueFish, Bill Boebel of Pingboard, Pat Matthews, formerly of Rackspace, and Joshua Baer of OtherInbox and the Capital Factory Fund.
“The funding comes as user signups increased 300 percent over a period of three months, which included the Austin Chamber of Commerce,” according to a news release.
The company plans to use the money to hire more employees and to market its software to more customers.
LanternCRM provides automatic email tracking, phone service and integration with hundreds of existing business services in its software. Those features make it different from competitors like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, according to the company.
“We found that a vast majority of users either hated their current CRMs or didn’t use them because they required too much manual data entry,” Alex Smith, CEO and co-founder said in a news release. “By focusing on automatically importing from existing systems like email, calendar, and phone, our users can focus on building their business instead of maintaining information in their CRM.”
LanternCRM is part of the Capital Factory’s accelerator program.
“The CRM market for enterprises may be maturing, but the market for small businesses is wide open and growing, fueled by the popularity of mobile and tablet computing. Entire industries that still operate on pen and paper or email and spreadsheets are going to be transformed over the next few years,” Baer said in a news statement.
In 2007, a startup called Click Forensics began operations in San Antonio.
The company, founded by Tom Cuthbert and Tom Charvet, tackled the problem of click fraud online. Austin Ventures provided its initial $500,000 seed stage funding.
Click Forensics ended up moving to Austin and pivoted to become a marketing analytics firm called Adometry.
On Tuesday, Google announced it bought Adometry for an undisclosed price. Since its inception, Adometry has raised $29.1 million in venture funding from Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures, according to the company.
Adometry and Google both announced the deal it in separate blog posts.
“Adometry is joining Google, where they will build on the momentum of our existing measurement and analytics offerings, which include Google Analytics Premium as well as other products,” according to a Google blog post.
“Attribution solutions, like Adometry’s, help businesses better understand the influence that different marketing tools — digital, offline, email, and more — have along their customers’ paths to purchase (http://goo.gl/tXTliw). This heightened understanding, in turn, enables businesses to measure marketing impact, allocate their resources more wisely, and provide people with ads and messages that they’re likely to care about.”
Adometry moved into new headquarters last year at the Lakewood Center Building II on Capital of Texas Highway and has about 135 employees, according to this profile Silicon Hills News did of the company in March.
“We couldn’t be more excited to join Google — a company that shares our core values. Not only do they focus on innovation and solving big problems, but also like Adometry, they seek to provide brands and their agency partners with the analytics and insights to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns,” Paul Pellman, Adometry’s CEO, wrote in a blog post on its site.
By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
IAG Cargo’s team: (LtoR) Camilo Garcia, head of Global Key Accounts, David Shepherd, president of commercial business and Joseph LeBeau, vice president of commercial, the Americas.
And it might be flying in salmon, automotive and other parts into Austin Bergstrom International Airport from its hub at the Heathrow Airport.
“A market like this is great because it’s so diversified,” said David Shepherd, head of commercial business for IAG Cargo.
IAG Cargo wants to make sure Austin companies can deliver products worldwide as fast as possible, Shepherd said. They are particularly targeting the growing high-tech industry in the region.
Shepherd spoke at a press conference Friday morning at the Austin Chamber of Commerce offices in downtown Austin. Four British journalists flew to Austin to learn more about the company’s operations here. They were going to go on a tour of the city and visit Freescale Semiconductor and then have a special dinner at Salt Lick.
IAG Cargo formed in 2011, after the merger of British Airways with Iberia. The company has $1.5 billion in revenue annually and is the seventh largest cargo company in the world. It has more than 2,700 employees worldwide.
“We’re not the biggest but we believe we’re the best,” Shepherd said.
In March, IAG Cargo began offering services out of Austin when British Airlines launched its direct flights between Austin and London. The company has 380 aircraft and connects to 350 destinations worldwide through its hubs at Heathrow and Madrid.
It’s not just geeks flying from Tech City London to Austin’s bustling startup scene. It’s a lot of cargo too.
IAG Cargo transports general cargo, live animals; secure products, gold, airmail, dangerous goods, human remains and courier services.
IAG Cargo has 20 gateways in the U.S. and operates more than 45 flights per day. It already operates out of Dallas and Houston and Austin was the next logical expansion, said Joseph LeBeau, IAG Cargo’s vice president of commercial, the Americas.
“It’s been in the works for about two years,” he said.
“Texas has been very kind to IAG Cargo,” he said. “Between Dallas and Houston, for as long as I can remember, we have been 100 percent full every day.’’
The cargo flights on the Austin to London route were 88 percent full after just three weeks and now operate at 90 percent to 95 percent capacity, LeBeau said.
“It’s not all Austin. It’s being fed into by San Antonio and Laredo,” he said. “This route eases the capacity crunch at Houston and Dallas.’’
Austin is shipping high tech products from the “Silicon Hills” as well as aviation and oilfield spare parts and equipment and pharmaceuticals.
IAG Cargo has a fully functional warehouse at the Austin airport and is expected to get its constant climate accreditation shortly for its refrigerated cargo. Its transatlantic service began daily service as of May 1st and is serviced by a Boeing 787 Dreamliner that can transport up to 44,000 pounds of cargo per night.
Joseph LeBeau providing an overview of IAG Cargo’s Austin and North American operations.
BY LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Greg Fenves, Provost of UT, Bob Metcalfe, professor of Innovation at UT, Joshua Baer, founder of Capital Factory and Longhorn Startup Labs instructor, Bobby Epstein, founder of COTA and Ben Dyer, EIR at UT and instructor at Longhorn Startup Lab.
“You might pivot a couple of times,” he said.
Epstein gave that advice at Longhorn Startup Lab’s Demo Day Thursday night to hundreds of people at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium. Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at UT, interviewed Epstein, who runs COTA, a Formula One racetrack and one of the largest startups in the Austin area. He quizzed Epstein about his entrepreneurial background and asked him what advice he would give to aspiring student entrepreneurs.
“The best advice you can give anyone as an entrepreneur is to be prepared to work 70 hours to 80 hours a week,” Epstein said.
It’s ok to risk everything, Epstein said. “But don’t risk more than that.”
Too many people start undercapitalized businesses.
“It’s great to be ambitious and start a business but don’t risk everything you have to start something that’s undercapitalized because that’s potentially a formula for failure,” Epstein said. “Don’t think that when you get to that next point the next dollar is going to be there. I think that’s really important before you spend it all.”
Epstein, a UT graduate, was born in New Jersey, but grew up in Dallas and spent time in Indianapolis. His father was an engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur and worked at Bell Labs.
He didn’t have a lemonade stand but he did host a carnival in his backyard. And he ran a DJ business in high school.
Epstein attended UT in 1983 and graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts. When Metcalfe asked him if he knew Michael Dell, who founded his company at UT in 1984, Epstein said no.
“He was a year ahead of you,” Metcalfe said.
“In many ways,” Epstein said.
Epstein didn’t start a company in college. But he did drop out of medical school. He ended up working on Wall Street on a bond-trading floor doing research. He created predictive and regression models on trading patterns.
“It was supposed to be a summer job,” Epstein said. He liked the job and he worked a lot of hours. He decided not to go to medical school and he continued working in the bond trading industry. He ended up working on mortgage derivatives and in 1992 he founded a broker dealer. He sold that business with 100 employees in 1995. He founded a new business, Prophet Capital Asset Management, and moved it to Austin in 1997 and has had 19 years of steady growth. His hedge funds manage more than $2 billion, according to a Forbes article.
“So this business was so successful that you were able to consider founding and financing COTA,” Metcalfe asked.
“Yes,” Epstein said.
“Can you tell us how that happened?” Metcalfe asked.
He met a guy who wanted to bring Formula One to Austin and Epstein thought that was a terrible idea. But he had a piece of property he bought in 2005 in Southeast Travis County that Epstein planned for houses. Instead, he pivoted. He turned what would have been a residential development into a racetrack. Today, that piece of property is about 20 percent of the land that COTA sits on. The 3.4 mile racetrack is on a 350 acre development. It also includes an amphitheater, which can accommodate up to 14,000 people.
The Circuit of the Americas got its primary funding from San Antonio Billionaire Billy Joe “Red” McCombs along with Epstein’s contributions. The state of Texas, through its Major Events Trust Fund, also pledged millions to the project.
Since COTA has been in business for a year and a half, it has had an economic impact of $1 billion, Epstein said. It has also raised the global profile of Austin, he said. And it has created lots of jobs, he said. COTA has 100 year-round employees and thousands that come in to work for events. The project costs $400 million in construction, the two Formula 1 races have generated $250 million to $300 million each in economic impact and the track has hosted more than 1.4 million people, Epstein said. And 250,000 have come in from outside Texas.
“A billion dollars in revenue in a year and half. Doesn’t that make you the biggest startup in Austin?” Metcalfe asked.
“It’s not all our revenue,” Epstein said. “That’s the only thing. We have two revenue streams. One revenue stream that goes to everyone else and one revenue stream that goes to COTA.”
“Let’s call it gross revenue,” Metcalfe said.
COTA does encourage people to come in from out of state and spend money, Epstein said.
“We get the people with the biggest pockets and have them come here and empty them out…if they have a great time they’ll come back,” Epstein said.
COTA isn’t yet profitable but it has helped the local economy tremendously, he said.
The racetrack is betting on other events such as the X-Games and concerts at its amphitheater, which will host a Jimmy Buffet concert next month, to push it into profitability.
Metcalfe also asked Epstein about all the technology used in the cars and said that’s one more reason COTA is a high tech startup. The criteria for a fast car, according to a Ferrari car designer, are a fast engine, aerodynamic design and high-tech wheels, Metcalfe said. He didn’t mention the driver, he said. He asked if there would a driverless robotic car race or an electric car race.
Epstein said he didn’t think the drivers were expendable. They have tested driverless cars on the track though, he said. And they have raced electric and solar vehicles there also.
By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
On a sunny Saturday, 12 children and young teens convened in MakerSquare’s classrooms for a little weekend coding. “What do we think these are?” teacher Drew Robinson asked a room full of kids seated before laptops. “Opening and closing HTML tags,” an elementary school boy speedily replied. Turns out, a kid’s ability to soak up languages extends to computer languages too.
The Saturday event was a free workshop and part of MakerSquare’s outreach effort for Hatch After School, a weekly web development and computational thinking program for K-12 students. The program costs $159 per month.
Barely a year old, MakerSquare started offering its web development boot camp last summer. Today, the school has two tracks for adults: A 10-week, part-time web development course that costs $3,380 and a 12-week full-time course that teaches the fundamentals of software engineering for $13,880. Demand is high, students come from all over the country and world. Co-founder Muhammad Meigooni says so far they’ve graduated 130 students, and they have a 96 percent job placement rate within three months of graduation. Now they also have youth program Hatch. The basics of that course are very similar to how adult students start to learn.
“They’re learning as quickly as adults,” Meigooni said of the first batch of Hatch students.
Hatch After School is loosely designed in eight-week blocks, units can be shortened or lengthened based on the group of students. For the first eight weeks, students become familiar with HTML and CSS and the basics of computational thinking. In phase two, they’re introduced to Java and basic game design, and in the final phase they work on advanced web development or build an actual game using Java. The whole schedule might take six months to a year, and for advanced students who complete the phases and want to continue learning, MakerSquare will pair them with a mentor in the community who can continue to help.
Learning to code can be a daunting prospect, which is why MakerSquare’s program keeps it simple in the beginning. To start out, kids use “drag and drop” tools to place blocks of code to build web pages. From there they move on to pattern recognition and learning the vocabulary of which HTML tags do what, then after that they begin to write their own code.
Presently, most Hatch students are middle schoolers, but the program can accommodate students as young as second or third grade. The entry barrier is essentially typing ability: If kids don’t have solid typing skills, the level of frustration becomes too high.
Hatch After School isn’t all about screen time. Teachers Meigooni and Robinson like to break it up with real-life exercises too. One exercise they have kids do is divide up into pairs, one student is given a group of triangular and square-shaped puzzle pieces, and one student is given a diagram for how to arrange them (into the shape of a spaceship, for instance). The students sit back to back and the kid with the diagram has to instruct the other on how to put the pieces together without showing his partner the diagram. This lesson in computational thinking shows kids how very specific instructions have to be in order for a computer to produce a desired outcome.
Drew Robinson started out as a MakerSquare student in February. Previously, she was a high school teacher in Tulsa. Originally she taught history, but when the AP computer science teacher retired, she was tapped for the job due to her tech-savvy reputation and given just a summer to teach herself Java. Without formal training though, she couldn’t be as effective as she wanted in the classroom.
“If I kept going, I would’ve burned out,” she said.
Robinson left her teaching job and picked MakerSquare to continue her coding education, partly because she was attracted to the school’s outreach programs. She immediately started volunteering with the school’s CoderGirls program for Girl Scouts of Central Texas. In the beginning of April, MakerSquare asked her to come on full-time with the Hatch program as director of k-12 curriculum.
The school is also working on putting together a space equipped with logic puzzles and iPads with games that will let kids work on critical thinking exercises while they wait to be picked up after their Hatch lessons end.
For kids and parents who want to check it out, there are free 90-minute workshops on some Saturdays. Check MakerSquare’s website or Facebook page for details on the next session.
Photo courtesy of AT&T
The company already delivers its 1 Gigabit per second broadband Internet network to Austin. It began to offer service there after Google announced plans for a 1 Gigabit network in Austin.
Google also announced earlier this year that San Antonio is on a short list of cities which may receive its Google fiber high speed network.
Why is this a big deal for Central Texas’ technology industry? Because Austin already has a Google Fiber network underway and AT&T is offering the service there. San Marcos-based Grande Communications has also announced plans for a 1 Gigabit network in Austin. And Time Warner announced plans to increase its speeds to 300 mbps up from 50 mbps in June.
Competition is good for the consumer. It means lower prices and better products.
But the benefit doesn’t stop there.
Startup companies and established companies with access to high-speed networks can dream up the innovative products that will drive our economy forward. They will be able to compete on a global scale with other countries that have much faster networks in place already.
In addition, the ability to get high speed Internet to all areas of the city benefits everyone because an educated population is a productive population.
“Similar to previously announced metro area selections in Austin and Dallas and advanced discussions in Raleigh-Durham and Winston-Salem, communities that have suitable network facilities, and show the strongest investment cases based on anticipated demand and the most receptive policies will influence these future selections and coverage maps within selected areas,” according to a news release.
In addition to San Antonio, the other metropolitan areas includes: Atlanta, Augusta, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Fort Worth, Fort Lauderdale, Greensboro, Houston, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Oakland, Orlando, San Diego, St. Louis, San Francisco, and San Jose.”
AT&T U-verse with GigaPower services are available in Austin and some surrounding communities, and are expected to roll out in parts of Dallas this summer. AT&T is also expanding its coverage in the Austin area.
RideScout, an app that helps people find transportation, announced it is expanding to the San Francisco area.
The Austin-based company has also recently expanded its coverage to include “Sidecar, Silvercar, Muni, BART, Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit, AC Transit, Blue & Gold Fleet, Baylink Ferry and SamTrans — along with Flywheel, City CarShare, Bay Area Bike Share, and Scoot– as well as walking, driving, and even parking with Parking Panda,” according to its news release.
The free mobile app, available for both iOS and Android mobile systems, aggregates all ground transportation options for users.
“From day one, we have received requests for RideScout in San Francisco, as people have seen how easy and efficient it is to get around a city with our app,” Joseph Kopser, RideScout Co-Founder and CEO said in a news release. “The Bay Area has a wealth of ground transportation options, but the fastest or cheapest ride is not always clear. With RideScout, people can choose the best transportation option based on their needs right then and there, wherever they are, sorting by arrival time, cost or type of ride.”
RideScout is also available in Washington, D.C., where it launched in November of 2013 and Austin. It plans to add more partners in the Spring.
