Diversity in tech is one of the most pressing issues facing Austin’s technology industry and the technology industry as a whole.

Getting more women and minorities involved in the technology industry is a key to innovation and growth of the overall ecosystem, said Preston James, one of the founding members of DivInc, a 12-week accelerator program promoting diversity. The other founding partners are Ashley Jennings and Dana Callender.

The accelerator is looking for early-stage tech startups or tech-enabled startups run by women or ethnically diverse founders.

“We are looking for those with a good attitude, who are persistent and really want to build a highly scalable business,” James said.

DivInc held its first cohort last fall with nine startup companies that culminated with a Demo Day at Google Fiber. The startups can be from anywhere as long as they commit to being in Austin for 12 weeks, James said. In the last cohort, two of the companies came from Houston and one from San Antonio, he said.

The startups in the original cohort have done well. Just last week, ConfirmX, one of the DivInc member startups based in Austin, launched in cities throughout Texas.

DivInc’s Spring cohort will run from April to June. It is based at Galvanize in downtown Austin. The deadline to apply is Friday.

“We welcome all to come experience the energy, the joy and the journey of building a successful startup business,” James said. “And DivInc is here to help them be successful and set them on a path for greater things.”

Austin-based OwnLocal announced its acquisition of Print2Web, a digital service provider to the newspaper industry, on Monday.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Print2Web, founded in 2001 in St. Petersburg, Florida, was one of the first companies to digitize print ads for newspapers. The company works with more than 450 newspapers and tens of thousands of local businesses, according to a news release.

“We look forward to leveraging OwnLocal’s global network and vast resources to help more local media organizations empower businesses in their communities,” Al Corey, founder and president of Print2Web, said in a news statement. With the acquisition, he is retiring. Print2Web’s other 30 employees will join OwnLocal.

The acquisition fits the mission of OwnLocal’s business which is to use technology to automatically turn traditional print, audio and video advertisements into online marketing campaigns. The company works with more than 3,000 newspapers including Gannet, tronc and Gatehouse Media. It handles digital ad campaigns for more than 100,000 local businesses every month. The addition of Print2Web allows OwnLocal to expand its partner network and the services it provides to its media partners.

“Newspapers have a difficult time offering affective and affordable digital solutions to their advertisers,” Lloyd Armbrust, founder and CEO of OwnLocal, said in a news statement. OwnLocal fills that need for small to medium sized businesses, he said.

OwnLocal, founded in 2010, has raised $3.45 million from 22 investors, according to Crunchbase. It is backed by Y-Combinator, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Knight Foundation, Baseline Ventures and angel investors. OwnLocal has acquired four companies since 2011 including Whoosh Traffic, Sidengo, Smart Media Kit and Print2Web. It has 70 employees.

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

The shortage of tech talent is acute in Austin and every U.S. city.

The U.S. faces a shortage of as many as 21 million skilled workers by 2020 in manufacturing, energy, health care, technology, education and other fields, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To fill job vacancies, Austin tech companies are going global.

Four Austin-based tech startups are finding software developers in Africa thanks to three-year-old Andela. The company, founded by Jeremy Johnson, Christina Sass, Ian Carnevale and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, has hired around 250 developers based in its Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya campuses.

Africa is the continent with the fastest growing population in the world with 1.2 billion people and a median age of 19.5, according to Andela. The company provides selected applicants with training and mentoring to become world-class software developers.

“Outside of New York and San Francisco, Austin is the largest location for Andela,” said Johnson. He spoke last week at The Zebra, an insurance aggregation startup, based in downtown Austin.

Andela hosted a panel discussion on “The Future of Work Will Be Distributed” last Thursday at The Zebra’s headquarters.

Right now, Andela works with four companies in Austin including The Zebra.

The company doesn’t like to call what it does outsourcing. It calls it distributed work.

“Andela basically finds and connects people to top developers,” Johnson said.

The developers work out of Andela campuses around the world and serve as team members of high growth companies like The Zebra, he said. Andela is well funded to pull off such a massive endeavor. To date, Andela has raised $39 million including $24 million last June in a Series B investment led by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and GV, formerly Google Ventures.

In the past two years, Andela has hired around 250 developers, of which 22 percent are women, from more than 50,000 applicants. The company has worked with more than 50 companies including Google and IBM. Each of its employees commit to working for four years with the company they are placed with, Johnson said. The retention rate is 97 percent, he said. At the end of the period, the developers either go to work directly for the companies they work with or they go to launch new companies.

In Austin, software developers change jobs, on average, every 18 months, said Meetesh Karia, Chief Technology Officer of The Zebra. He likes working with Andela’s developers. He also works with a small team in India and a small team in the Ukraine. The difference with the Andela developers is that they are more like a team member, he said. Technology tools like video conferencing, skype and Slack make it easy for developers in Austin to collaborate with developers in Lagos, Nigeria, he said. Those developers also travel to Austin to meet their team members in person and that makes creating great software even better, Karia said.

Kosy Anyanwa, Andela software developer based in Lagos, Nigeria, is working with The Zebra. She has been with Andela for a couple of years.

“Being at Andela I’ve worked with really smart people and I’ve learned a lot,” she said. “Working with The Zebra is a good company to work with.”

The company has a good cultural and her coworkers at The Zebra have a great sense of humor and that makes working with them even easier, she said.

Andela isn’t like outsourcing in the classical sense, Johnson said.

“We wanted to create a system that would allow for great software to get built,” he said. “The caliber of the people and the way they interact with each other. They engage like a teammate.”

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Austin has lost one of its greatest proponents of the technology industry, Laura Kilcrease to Alberta, Canada.

Last week, hundreds of people turned out at the Four Seasons Hotel downtown for a going away happy hour to honor Kilcrease, who has been a pillar of the Austin tech community for three decades.

Kilcrease is leaving to head up the Alberta Innovates Corporation.

“This is just a unique opportunity to connect people from Austin, Texas to people in Alberta’s Edmonton, Calgary and other areas, ” Kilcrease said. “We were an oil state here and still are and they are an oil state there. It was just an opportunity to change the landscape of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Kilcrease was one of the major players in Austin’s transformation from a sleepy college town dependent on the oil and gas industry to one of the nation’s top technology centers.

From 1989 to 1997, Kilcrease served as executive director of the University of Texas IC2 Institute’s Center for Commercialization and Enterprise. Kilcrease is the founding director of the Austin Technology Incubator at the University of Texas at Austin. Kilcrease, along with George Kozmetzy, also founded the Austin Software Council, which became the Austin Technology Council, and the Capital Network, which became the Central Texas Angel Network.

She is an expert at collaborating between businesses, universities, government and private and public institutions.

Born in London, Kilcrease has been a permanent resident of the United States since 1984. She received her certification as a Chartered Management Accountant in the U.K. in 1980 and an M.B.A. from The University of Texas at Austin in 1992.

In Alberta, Canada, government officials expect Kilcrease’s leadership will work her magic to help that region develop into a major globally competitive research and innovation center.

“Laura Kilcrease has demonstrated that with the right supports innovative researchers and entrepreneurs can diversify an economy and create new jobs in both emerging and traditional sectors. Alberta’s world-class researchers, entrepreneurs and academic institutions can be proud their international reputation has attracted world-class talent to take on this exciting new role,” Daron Bilous, minster of Economic Development and Trade, said in a news release.

Alberta Innovates enables and funds provincial research and innovation – ensuring entrepreneurs and researchers have expert support in responding to challenges and opportunities – building on Alberta’s strengths in the health, environment, energy, food, forestry/fibre, and emerging technology sectors.

The new CEO will report to the Alberta Innovates board, comprised of 11 prominent innovators and business leaders across a variety of sectors.

Most recently, Kilcrease served as the director, professor of practice of the Center for Entrepreneurial Action at Texas State University. Before that, she served as Entrepreneur in Residence at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. And Kilcrease was one of the founding members of Women@Austin, a group that meets to support women founders. She is the founder and managing director of Triton Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in spinout and early-stage technology companies.

Kilcrease plans to keep her house in Austin. She plans to keep in close contact with her contacts here.

Austin-based RxWiki, a digital health company, has announced its merger with TeleManager Technologies, a communications solutions company based in Newark, New Jersey.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Together, they have launched Digital Pharmacist with 55 employees. The company provides digital, communications and other solutions for 5,500 pharmacy locations, national pharmacy wholesalers, hospital systems and pharmaceutical brands. The company reports that four million patients use its products every month.

Digital Pharmacist will be based in Austin. Val Gurovich and Paul Kobylevsky, co-founders of TeleManager Technologies, will become executives in the newly combined company, reporting to Chris Loughlin, the company’s CEO. Loughlin previously served as CEO of RxWiki.

“Digital Pharmacist’s platform allows patients and pharmacies to communicate quickly and efficiently via telephone, web, mobile or SMS text,” according to a news release. “Patients can refill digitally with one click or call, set adherence reminder alerts, complete reviews, learn about their conditions or medications through interactive adherence tools, and ask their pharmacist questions. Digital Pharmacist integrates into the workflow of 53 pharmacy systems.”

“We are pleased to merge our companies to form Digital Pharmacist, a new company that offers the very best digital adherence solutions and the most robust pharmacy communication solutions. Our offices in Austin and Newark are brimming with talented people who care about independent pharmacies and patients. Through our merger, we are able to bring even more robust products and services that help patients and ultimately help our clients compete,” Loughlin said in a news release.

RxWiki raised $5.75 million in funding last October from investors including LiveOak Venture Partners and Milestone Venture Partners LP.

Silicon Hills News did this profile story on RxWiki last summer for our third annual life sciences magazine.

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

The StARTup Studio put on by the Innovation Center at the University of Texas at Austin had a decidedly pharmaceutical focus during its January presentations.

Three professor-led startups presented a variety of ideas including a traumatic brain injury treatment drug, a peptide sequencing platform to combat bacteria and a new way to create antibiotics.

The StARTup Studio is a monthly series of invitation-only presentations put on by the Innovation Center at the Cockrell School of Engineering. UT Professor of Innovation Bob Metcalfe runs the center along with Louise Epstein, managing director and Steve Nichols, Advanced Manufacturing Center director. The series is sponsored by the Innovation Center, the UT Office of Technology Commercialization, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and WeWork Austin.

The first company to present, NuvoNuro makes a drug to be given within 24 hours of a traumatic brain injury to lessen the detrimental effects of the injury and lead to a speedier recovery.

UT Research Scientist Jim Sahn and Chemistry Professor Stephen Martin presented the early stage startup NuvoNuro, which has discovered a drug compound to treat brain injuries. The company is preparing to go into more extensive animal trials next.

The need exists for a new drug to treat traumatic brain injury, Sahn said. Traumatic brain injury is a major cause of disability and death. It affects more than 10 million people worldwide each year. In the U.S., 5.3 million people suffer lifelong disability because of traumatic brain injury. No new drugs have been developed to treat the injury in 20 years, Sahn said.

Football players and other sports professionals, the military, first responders, young children and males between the ages of 15 and 24 are at the highest risk, Sahn said.

Secondary brain injuries result within hours after the initial injury and the drug would intervene to mitigate that damage, Sahn said.

NuvoNuro’s drug compound has been shown to improve cognitive performance following a traumatic brain injury in mice and the drug is low on toxicity, Sahn said.

Next, UT Molecular Bioscience Professor Bryan Davies presented bDAT Therapeutics, a high throughput antimicrobrial screening technology. The problem is antimicrobial resistance causes 700,000 deaths annually and in 30 years, superbugs are expected to kill more people than cancer, Davies said.

And no new antibiotics have been developed in 50 years, Davies said.

bDAT’s solution is antimicrobial peptides, which are biologically occurring short chains of amino acid monomers linked by peptide bonds.

bDAT has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, Welch Foundation, Sanofi and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. It is looking at is looking at either licensing its technology or attracting outside investors to take it to market, Davies said.

The last presenter, Molecular Bioscience Professor Andy Ellington and Research Professor Greg Ippolito presented a new way to create antibiotics.

The company uses bioinformatics and gene sequencing to target single T-cells and B-cells of the immune system to kill diseased cells.

A company called AbVitro, based in Boston, and spun out of Harvard University, does similar work and Seattle-based Juno just acquired AbVitro this month for about $125 million.

Austin-based BuildGroup announced Tuesday that it has invested $30 million in CSDC Systems, a software company based in Toronto, Canada.

CSDC Systems makes software for licensing, permitting, and compliance duties for local, state and federal governments hosted on its online platform. The company plans to use the money to support customer growth, product expansion, support services and more.

The company’s software helps governments and their agencies work more efficiently and effectively, according to the company.

“Governments are increasingly looking for modern technology solutions that can automate their business processes, increasing the efficiency of their work to save time and money. Also, they want to consolidate this functionality on a single platform if possible,” Dan Mishra, founder of CSDC Systems, said in a news release.

BuildGroup will serve in a supportive capacity to the company with a specific focus on growth and long-term strategic direction.

“We see a compelling opportunity to use modern cloud technology to radically change how governments are run, and believe that CSDC is in a position to lead this shift long term,” Lanham Napier, BuildGroup co-founder and former CEO of Rackspace, said in a news release. “We’re excited to help CSDC realize this vision, bringing the strong operational background of our partners to increase growth and profits. With CSDC’s established experience and innovation within the market, we believe the company can lead the needed technological transformation to modernize governments.”

ATX Seed Ventures announced it is the lead investor in GoCo’s $2.5 million financing round.

Other investors included Guardian Life Insurance and Salesforce Ventures.

GoCo.io, based in Houston, is a software startup that provides an all-in-one Human Resources platform focusing on small to medium sized companies. Its founders, Nir Leibovich, Jason Wang and Michael Gugel have worked together on two previous startups. The company has also partnered with OneDigital, a human resource provider and a subsidiary of Fidelity National Financial.

“The demand for enabling technologies and solutions for human resources, benefits and payroll departments is remarkable,” Chris Shonk, founder of ATX Seed Ventures, said in a news release. “Much of the enabling and transformative technology developed and deployed thus far has initially focused on sales, operations and other departments. Driving culture at scale, and the attraction and retention of talent as the pinnacle activity for executives, GoCo.io is water in the desert. Delivering time, economic savings and actionable insights to department heads clamoring for better technology and customer service is a top priority for any CEO or board room discussion.”

ATX Seed Ventures, based in Austin, specializes in early stage invesments. Shonk founded the firm in 2014. It has $25 million under management and it recently launched its second fund.