Texas reported 150 venture capital backed deals worth $1.3 billion in 2013, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.
The number of deals in Texas fell nearly 9 percent from 163 but increased 37 percent in the dollars invested from $948.8 million in 2013.
The report found venture capitalists in the U.S. did 3,995 deals worth $29.4 billion, up four percent in number of deals and seven percent in dollar volume from a year earlier.
In the fourth quarter, Texas had 47 deals worth $315.9 million; up nearly 24 percent in number of deals and a 54 percent increase in dollar volume. Overall, $8.4 billion went to 1,077 deals nationwide in the fourth quarter.
The bulk of the money went to software and Internet companies.
The money invested in software companies reached the highest level since 2000 with $11 billion invested in 1,523 deals last year.
“Dollars going into software companies accounted for 37 percent of total venture capital invested in 2013, the highest percentage since the inception of the MoneyTree Report in 1995.”
Tag: software
IBM Wednesday unveiled its new product design studio in Austin, which will focus on designing software for a global audience.
The 50,000 square foot studio will serve as the center for IBM’s software efforts in Big Data, cloud, mobile, social software and cognitive solutions.
IBM designed the space to encourage collaboration and to bring together designers, developers and product managers involved in creating new software products.
“This studio is the embodiment of a new approach to software design. It is the home of IBM Design Thinking, a broad, ambitious new approach to re-imagining how we design our products and solutions,” Phil Gilbert, general manager, IBM Design, said in a news release. “Quite simply, our goal — on a scale unmatched in the industry — is to modernize enterprise software for today’s user who demands great design everywhere, at home and at work.”
IBM already hosts a one-week training camp at its studio called “Designcamp.” So far, it has held more than 60 camps.
IBM is also recruiting design experts from top design schools nationwide.
This week, IBM released its first commercial product, InfoSphere Data Explorer, using its IBM Design Thinking initiative.
In addition to the Austin Design Studio, IBM’s Austin campus also has research and development labs, SmartCloud Innovation Center, Watson Solutions, cloud and smarter infrastructure teams and IBM Security Systems.
Gravitant, which makes software for companies to manage their cloud services, announced Wednesday that it has received $10 million in Series B funding.
Corsa Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investor S3 Ventures.
The Austin-based company plans to use the money to expand its sales and marketing, to fulfill customer orders and to add more features to its cloud management platform.
In addition, Alex Gruzen with Corsa Ventures will join Gravitant’s board of directors.
“Gravitant has the potential to change the way Enterprise IT is done,” Gruzen said in a news statement. “While cloud computing shows much promise in transforming IT, CIOs are struggling with cloud adoption and simply not getting the ROI they expect from their private and public cloud investments. Gravitant’s cloudMatrix brokerage and management platform optimizes agility and cost while maintaining control. The result is a vastly improved cloud ROI.”
“Customer interest in cloud brokerage and management platforms is accelerating, and this funding will help us take advantage of this rapidly growing market space,” Mohammed Farooq, co-founder and CEO of Gravitant said in a news statement. “We believe Gravitant will be the next major software company in Austin, and we are very pleased to see the support from Austin-based venture capitalists to help us realize this goal.”
Revionics, which sells retail software as a service, known as SaaS, online, plans to move its headquarters to Austin.
The company, which is relocating from Roseville, Calif., plans to expand its marketing, sales and training operations and plans to hire hundreds of new employees. It reports plans to quadruple in size.
Revionics currently has less than 200 employees, according to its LinkedIn.com profile. Its new office will be at 5000 Plaza on the Lake.
Revionics also has offices in Scottsdale, Arizona and London and will keep an office in Roseville.
“As we enter into our second decade of strong growth, relocating to Austin helps position us for more rapid expansion in the retail technology industry and offers our employees the benefits of a culturally rich city with a relatively low cost of living,” Marc Hafner, its president and CEO said in a news release.
“We are excited to become part of the ‘Silicon Hills’ community, which currently includes leading technology innovators such as IBM, Dell, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Facebook, Oracle Corporation and more. With our global expansion, we also envision establishing offices in other regions of the world as our tremendous growth continues,” Hafner said.
The company, founded in 2002, has raised $18 million to date, according to its CrunchBase profile.
A startup software company, Jumpshot, has successful raised $98,255 on Kickstarter to create a software program to clean up the hard drive of PCs and combat malware and viruses.
Its Kickstarter program exceeded its $25,000 goal and still has more than 40 days to go.
The software comes on a really cute USB stick and once it’s inserted into a PC, the software goes to work cleaning up tracking cookies, killing viruses and fighting spyware and other unwanted programs.
The program gets smarter as more people use it, according to its founders David Endler and Pedram Amini, two former security research managers in HP’s TippingPoint division. They launched the company in mid-July with a Kickstarter campaign.
“We left our day jobs and created Jumpshot for a totally selfish reason.” co-founder David Endler said in a news release. “We were exhausted being PC tech consultants to our family and friends. Don’t get us wrong, we love to help. But we knew there had to be a better more enjoyable way to assist them. We truly wanted to build something that passed the Grandma test, a product we were proud to leave behind that also wouldn’t impact the quality of our holiday gifts.”
The company decided to launch Jumpshot on Kickstarter because its “a scrappy self-funded startup and we’ve gone pretty far on our own,” co-founder Pedram Amini said in a news release. “Our dream is to leverage the momentum and cash from our backers to truly ‘kick start’ Jumpshot into a viable standalone product. The money will feed directly into USB manufacturing, advancing the Jumpshot engine and driving future improvements. We also appreciate the fact that crowd funding will transform Jumpshot into a better product by listening to the feedback of our early adopters.”
To strengthen its software business, Dell announced plans to acquire Quest Software for $2.4 billion.
Round Rock-based Dell, which started out as a PC company in 1984, has recently begun to diversify into more software and solutions products. Dell recently launched its software group.
Quest’s software products and technology will only strengthen Dell’s move to provide end-to-end software solutions to companies.
Quest reported $857 million in sales in 2011. It has 1,500 software sales experts and 1,300 software developers that will join Dell.
Dell’s software business is currently worth about $1.2 billion in annual revenue.
Quest, founded in 1987 and based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., has more than 100,000 global customers including 87 percent of the Fortune 500. The company has approximately 3,850 employees and operates 60 offices in 23 countries.
“The addition of Quest will enable Dell to deliver more competitive server, storage, networking and end user computing solutions and services to customers,” John Swainson, president, Dell Software Group, said in a news statement.
Ziften Technologies just closed on $5.5 million in its Series B financing.
And the Austin-based startup released its first software product, Behavioral Lightweight Intelligence for Stressed Systems, nicknamed BLISS, which lets companies easily manage and deploy software across Windows desktop computers.
Ziften’s software leds to “improved uptime, business alignment, performance, security, and reduction of errors and annoyances,” according to the company.
With the latest round of funding, Ziften plans to add additional software products and market BLISS.
“We are ready to deliver BLISS to IT organizations everywhere,” Mark Obrecht, Ziften’s CEO, said in a news statement.
The two year old company has raised $11.3 million so far with the latest round led by Fayez Sarofim & Co. Other investors include Andrew Busey, former CEO of Challenge Games now with Austin Ventures.
Ziften serves several Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace, chemical and publishing industries already with its BLISS software product.
Austin-based Kinnser Software announced Monday that it has received a $40 million investment from Insight Venture Partners.
The company plans to use the money to expand its software business and for a national sales and marketing campaign.
“Kinnser provides services to more than 55,000 users working in more than 900 home health agencies and therapy providers nationwide,” according to the company. “Revenue at Kinnser has grown more than 80 percent annually since the company was founded in 2003.”
Kinnser made INC. magazine’s list of the fastest growing private company for 2010 and 2011.
Dell is number one worldwide in Healthcare technology solutions.
Dell partners with other companies like Citrix, VMWare and others to provide complete technology packages to hospitals, clinics, doctor’s offices and other healthcare providers. The company offers electronic medical records, medical archiving and mobile clinical computing.
Employees with the Dell healthcare division donned blue scrub outfits at Dell World and had a mock patient room set up to talk to people about its healthcare solutions. Sara Schaeffner, director of Dell’s healthcare services, talks about the company’s latest offerings at Dell World.
