The first time Silicon Hills News met The Zebra, the two founders showed up at Longhorn Startup Demo Day in 2013 to meet Billionaire Mark Cuban.

They had sent a cold email to Cuban who invested in The Zebra despite never having met the founders.

That night at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium at the University of Texas at Austin, they met.

And since then, the Austin-based startup that has created an online comparison search engine to shop for car insurance and it has gone from a couple of employees to 150 employees.

And this week, The Zebra moved into its new headquarters custom-outfitted with room to expand to 300 employees.

And its last offices weren’t bad either. The Zebra occupied the top two floors of the high-rise San Jacinto Building in downtown Austin. But the insurance startup grew cramped there and needed more space.

Now The Zebra has 43,000 square feet of space or one and a half floors of a new building at 1801 East Sixth St. two blocks from its original headquarters at 4^th Street and Chicon.

 “This neighborhood has something for everyone. Good food, music, coffee and breweries…it’s the ideal spot for The Zebra. We’re very excited about being a part of the East Side again,” Keith Melnick, CEO of The Zebra, said in a news release.

The office includes a coffee bar with an in-house barista and “internally engineered online coffee ordering system,” according to The Zebra.

Its offices also include locker rooms and showers for commuters, and a patio with an outdoor grill and room for outside meetings. The Zebra’s office is also close to the Plaza Saltillo train station and has a below-ground parking garage with bike and scooter storage.

The Zebra worked with the Austin office of global firm IA Interior Architects and Chrystal Toth Designs, of Westport, Connecticut, for the project. 

“The Zebra has grown — and grown up — so much since 2012. In designing their custom office, we made sure to take the elements of mindfulness, efficiency, and modernity that make The Zebra so successful, and work them into the space,” Chrystal Toth, CEO and Principal of Chrystal Toth Designs, said in a news release. “The result features warm, earthy tones, and layering of organic textures with hyper modern clean lines. It’s not your average insurance industry office.”

“IA created a design concept that embraced The Zebra’s mission, ‘Insurance in Black and White’, and established a sense of power through subtly and simplicity. Architectural elements were purposefully designed to construct visual patterns through the use of negative and positive space in screens, which help define social and private work zones,” Raul Baeza, Senior Designer, IA Interior Architects, said in a news release.

To date, The Zebra, founded in 2012, has raised $61.5 million.

TRAXyL, a startup that installs high-speed Internet on roadways, received the top prize of $150,000 in cash from MassChallenge Texas in Austin on Thursday night.

The company,  based in Warrenton, Virginia installs high-speed fiber optic cable on roads, and parking lots. It coats the fiber optic cables in heavy-duty paint that can be glued on top of roads and other paved surfaces.

TRAXyL has also gone through the DreamIt UrbanTech Accelerator program and received a $225,000 grant Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation.

Four other finalists received a total of $350,000 in cash awards. In total, 74 startups participated in the second annual MassChallenge Texas Austin accelerator program. The accelerator picked 14 finalists that competed for the prize money.

Three startups received $100,000 each including Collective Liberty, based in Washington, D.C., that has created a platform to help prevent human trafficking. And Mens Gold Boxx, based in Austin, a big and tall e-commerce site for men. And teleCalm, based in Allen, Texas, which created a phone service aimed at keeping seniors safe.

Olifant Medical, based in San Antonio, won $50,000. The startup has developed a medical device to insert breathing tubes into patients easier.

About 400 people turned out for the second annual awards ceremony held at the Hilton downtown.

The managing director of Mass Challenge Texas, Mike Millard, started the Austin awards ceremony by running around the ballroom high fiving everyone and encouraging the audience to do so also.

Millard has been with the organization since it launched in Texas two years ago.

“It’s been a journey to bring MassChallenge Texas to where it is now, Millard said. “Our goal has been to build a connected ecosystem that attracts the world to the Lone Star State to innovate at an accelerated pace. Through this community, we can provide startups the access they need to achieve milestones and goals.”

Sara T. Brand, a founding general partner of True Wealth Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Austin, gave one of the two keynote addresses. She highlighted studies that show diverse startup teams with at least one woman in a leadership position outperform other teams.

Women-led startups made up 58 percent of the 74 startups selected for the MassChallenge Texas Austin cohort.

“Diversity breeds innovation,” Brand said.

Having diversity at the early stages of a startup builds a culture that leads to greater innovation, Brand said. It’s critical to focus on diversity in the beginning because it’s hard to add it in once the culture has been established, she said.

William Hurley, known as Whurley, founder of Strangeworks, a quantum computing startup, gave the second keynote talk on things they don’t tell you about being an entrepreneur. Previously, Whurley founded and sold Chaotic Moon to Accenture and Honest Dollar to Goldman Sachs.

The number one thing that they don’t talk about is exhaustion, Whurley said.

“Startups don’t like you to have a life,” he said. He talked about how difficult it is to balance family life with the demands of a business.

And the struggle is real, Whurley said.

“Startups are always in one of two phases, they’re either struggling or they’re out of business,” he said.

There is a lot of entrepreneurial bullshit, Whurley said. The covers of magazines like Inc, Entrepreneur, portray a glamorous the startup life, he said. But In reality, it’s difficult path to choose.

When a startup founder says everything is great, I know they are either lying to themselves, the person they are talking to, or both Whurley said.
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“You, as a founder, have to do everything,” he said, “the only person that will make your startup successful, the only one you can count on, is you”.

Tenfold, one of Silicon Hills News’ 25 hottest Austin startups to watch in 2019, recently announced it has raised $7.5 million in additional funding.

The Austin-based company, which integrates customer relationship management programs with voice platforms, announced it has raised a Series C funding round lead by Austin-based Next Coast Ventures.

To date, Tenfold has raised $37.5 million with funding from Next Coast Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Geekdom Fund, Active Capital, Techstars and others.

Tenfold plans to use the funding on developing its products.

“Customers are awaiting the day when they call into a support or service center and the agent on the other end knows exactly who they are and is enabled with relevant information right at their fingertips to provide personalized and efficient service,” Jeff Cotten, the CEO of Tenfold, said in a news release. “This additional funding will give Tenfold the ability to further empower global sales and service organizations to better serve customers at the point of interaction with intelligent ‘no touch’ data capture and streamlined sales and service workflows.”

Tenfold has created a software platform that connects a company’s phone systems with its customer relationship management software, enterprise resource planning software, marketing systems and more and provides users with a unified view of the data. Right now, that’s a challenge at many customer engagement centers, according to Tenfold.

“We’re very impressed with the market traction that Tenfold is getting with large-scale contact centers in strategic industries like financial services, retail and high tech, which is why we wanted to increase our stake in the company,” Bill Patterson, EVP, and GM of Salesforce Service Cloud, said in a news release. “Tenfold provides Salesforce with the depth and breadth we need to better integrate the voice channel into our sales and service CRM and thus are a critical partner for us to enable a more human-centric service experience that is effortless and personal.”

“Tenfold’s mission to revolutionize the customer service experience fits squarely into our investment thesis: a great entrepreneur disrupting a massive industry using cutting-edge technology to solve a universal pain point for companies and consumers alike,” Michael Smerklo, co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures, said in a news release. “Since coming on as CEO just eight months ago, Jeff Cotten has already done an incredible job of reshaping the company’s vision by building out a great team and driving a relentless focus on delivering real value for Tenfold’s growing customer base.”

Tenfold has more than 600 customers in 60 countries. Its customers span a wide range of industries including telecommunications, insurance, financial services, hospitality, and healthcare.

When Christine Ziegler needed a place for 35 employees to meet off the BigCommerce campus, she turned to Reset.

Reset offered up a few venues and Ziegler picked the Tillery Kitchen and Bar at 3201 E. Cesar Chavez. The restaurant features spacious and comfortable indoor seating with big windows and lots of natural light and a patio with a tree-lined view of the Colorado River.

Reset started out as a co-working business that sets up in Austin restaurants by day but has since evolved in the last year to offer more event space for company offsite meetings. Its name Reset derives from the act of resetting the table.

Reset is the brainchild of Siri Chakka and Silva Gentchev, who met each other while getting their MBAs at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. They created Reset to help restaurants use their space during the day when they aren’t as busy as coworking sites and event venues.

 “Restaurants want to monetize their space, but they don’t have the staff and the ability to do that,” Gentchev said.

BigCommerce liked the flexibility of the Tillery space, said Ziegler, a senior executive assistant at BigCommerce.

“We were able to bring in our own food one day,” she said. “They already had the projector and screen ready to go. It was all-inclusive with flexibility too. Should the need arise I would totally go back.”

BigCommerce used the space on a Wednesday and a Friday from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. and they had breakfast and lunch brought in the first day and the last day Tillery catered the lunch.

Going offsite gets people out of their daily routine and gets them thinking creatively, Ziegler said. It’s great for team-building activities, she said.

Reset opened in August of 2018 and it is now working with eight restaurants throughout Austin with plans to add three to four more by the end of the year.

“Over the last year, we’ve learned a lot about the coworking industry. It has become increasingly saturated,” Chakka said.

Reset is still a good choice for the person who works out of the coffee shop, Chakka said. Its location on Tillery is easily accessible, has great wi-fi, coffee, water and plenty of seating in a nice relaxing setting and it offers free parking.

While doing the Reset coworking business, companies began contacting Reset about hosting meetings, Chakka said. Over the last two months, it has been targeting that market, she said.

Pivoting Reset’s business model to offer more event space sourcing for companies seemed like a natural fit, Chakka said.

“Businesses need this, and restaurants are getting more value out of it,” she said.

Reset faces competition from bigger sites like Peerspace, but its advantage is that it’s Austin-based and Chakka and Gentchev have curated a network of spaces that they have vetted personally.

There is no shortage of beautiful restaurants in Austin, Chakka said.

“We act as a liaison or concierge of sorts,” she said. “We are planning the event hand in hand with our clients. Helping them find the space and helping them book it. We are there on the day of the event on-site to make sure everything is going well. We are curating all the spaces. We go, we see them, we talk to the restaurant owners to make sure it’s something we want to represent Reset.”

Reset’s business model is to take a pre-negotiated commission on each event it books. The bulk goes to the restaurant for providing the space, Chakka said. Reset has planned everything from an eight-person team meeting to a 100-person sales kickoff meeting.

Many of the restaurants Reset works with also have the option to cater.

Ian Thurwatcher and Krystal Craig are the husband and wife founders of Intero Restaurant in East Austin. Intero began working with Reset after Chakka approached them to be involved.

“We already love having guests in our restaurant, so the opportunity to host new people, specifically offering other small companies our available areas daytime, seemed like a perfect venture,” Craig said. “We also enjoy partnerships with great people, and we could tell immediately that Siri herself was someone we’d be happy working with.”

So far working with Reset has been extremely positive, Craig said. Intero has hosted small company business meetings and is planning some bigger events.

“Aside from always being greatly responsive, they diligently do all the leg work to set everyone up for the best success in enjoying the shared space experience,” she said.

“From our side, Reset helps to provide new opportunities in meeting people you may not have, aiding in expanding your own network of guests and future possibilities,” Craig said. “From observing the other side- it’s really cool people can enjoy an event or office meeting in a more interesting, or new way, and in a less conventional setting. In a way, overall it feels like it adds some spice in variety for both parties involved.”

Diamonds are made from carbon and people are made up of carbon, so why not make diamonds out of people?

That’s the bright idea behind Eterneva.

And it landed the Austin-based startup a $600,000 investment from Billionaire Mark Cuban on Shark Tank, which aired last Sunday.

Adelle Archer and Garrett Ozar, co-founders of Eterneva, had several sharks interested in investing in their startup which turns cremated ashes into diamonds. But some of the sharks were upset that Eterneva had already raised a $1.2 million seed-stage round of investment. In the end, Eterneva landed Cuban who got a 9 percent stake in the company at an $8 million valuation.

Archer and Ozar handled the negotiations with the sharks well.

“You got to stick to your guns,” Archer said. “You got to know what you’re worth and be comfortable explaining that.”

Eterneva’s deal ranked in the top five percent of all Shark Tank valuations. The investment in Eterneva is a positive move in the right direction of the dying well trend, Archer said. Eterneva’s mission is to celebrate lives well-lived and give those left behind a way to remember their loved one, Archer said.

Following the show, Eterneva saw a ton of traffic to its website, Archer said. And one of the best parts of the pitch was that Eterneva was able to go on a national stage and shine a spotlight on people who are no longer here, she said. During its presentation, Eterneva highlighted several customers who had a diamond made to remember their loved ones.

Eterneva is part of the “death positive movement,” Archer said. People are finally talking about what they want to do at the end of their lives. It’s no longer taboo to talk about death, she said.

Archer got the idea for Eterneva while starting a lab-grown diamond company. One of her mentors, Tracey got diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and she died and was cremated. That’s when Archer decided to extract the carbon from the ashes and grow a diamond to remember Tracey.

“She was the first diamond we made,” Archer said.

That is what drove Eterneva to pivot, she said.

“Being the customer, I feel like I had a good instinct on what the experience I wanted,” Archer said. “It’s as much about the journey to the diamond, like the diamond. We build a ton of anticipation throughout the journey.”

The diamond also provides the survivor an outlet to talk about their loved one when the rest of the world stops talking about them, Archer said.

“We’re really a grief wellness company,” Archer said. “We are for the living who are going through this experience.”

The process of creating a lab-grown diamond from ashes takes eight to ten months and involves a lot of intricate steps from growing the diamond from that carbon, cutting, polishing, certifying and setting in jewelry and hand-delivering the diamond. Eterneva hand delivers every diamond it makes, Archer said.

“A lot of our customers will throw homecoming parties,” she said. “That’s what this is all about. These rituals to help someone through a time that is tough.”

Eterneva makes its diamonds in a few different facilities. Its technology comes from Germany. It also has a brand-new facility in South Austin with 14 employees, up from four employees at the start of the year.

The deal with Cuban is going to take Eterneva even farther, Archer said.

“I think Mark is going to be a phenomenal person to open doors and break into new opportunities,” she said.

Already, Cuban helped Eterneva land a consumer financing plan to make the cost of the diamond more accessible to people, Archer said. Eterneva’s diamonds start at $3,000 with the average price being around $8,000. The cost varies depending on the size, style, and color of the diamond.

A cremated body yields about eight to ten cups of ashes and Eterneva only needs a half of a cup of ashes to extract the carbon and create the diamond, Archer said.

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In June of 2018, Silicon Hills News wrote about Trust Ventures raising a $35 million fund to invest in innovative startups facing public policy barriers.

On Friday, Austin-based Trust Ventures announced the close of its second fund, with more than $70 million in committed funds with a goal of reaching $100 million.

The venture capital firm is still focused on investing in startups “whose services will greatly improve society but face significant public policy barriers that stifle growth,” according to a news release.

Salen Churi and Brian Tochman, are the general partners in charge of Trust Ventures. Silicon Hills News did this podcast with them last year.

“Many of our greatest societal challenges are no longer simply technological, but also require addressing a complex system of public policy barriers that too often serve established companies rather than innovators and consumers,” Churi said in a news release. “Entrepreneurs can drive tremendous social impact in key areas like affordable housing, healthcare, and zero-emission energy, but these are often the areas with the highest barriers.  We offer our portfolio the strategic guidance they need to overcome those barriers and get these innovations into the hands of the people who need them most.”

So far, Trust Ventures has made invests in energy, food, insurance and healthcare.

 “The companies our fund has worked with are innovating in ways that are both competitive in the marketplace and good for consumers. People deserve access to innovations that improve their lives, which is why leveling the playing field against established interests is so crucial,” Tochman said in a news release. “And it’s why we’re working to disrupt the institutions and barriers that cement their market dominance.”

Trust Ventures has invested in Austin-based startups including ICON, which is creating affordable homes using 3-D printing technology, Sana Benefits, providing affordable healthcare insurance to companies.

Other investments include Oklo, a Silicon Valley-based startup that has developed next-generation fission reactor technologies that can supply inexpensive zero-emission energy and can run on fuel recycled from existing reactors.

And Emergy Foods, a Boulder-based startup offering a plant-based meat alternative.

Their portfolio also includes innovative groups like Visibly, and Veryable.

In one of the largest funding deals for an Austin-based startup ever, RigUp announced on Thursday that it has raised $300 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, a16z.

That brings the total raised by RigUp, founded in 2014, to $423.8 million. The Austin-based company is an online marketplace for services and labor for the energy industry.

In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, RigUp’s investors in its Series D round included Founders Fun,  Bedrock Capital, and Quantum Energy Partners. New investors include Baillie Gifford and Brookfield Growth Partners.

As part of the funding deal, David George, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will join RigUp’s board.

“RigUp stands alone in serving the energy labor market with much needed technology and fundamentally allows for better matching of supply and demand, resulting in significantly improved time-to-hire and visibility for both the independent contractors searching for the right projects and the energy companies looking to fill jobs with higher-quality personnel,” George said in a news statement.

Xuan Yong and Mike Witte, both graduates of Texas A&M University, founded RigUp. Today, the company has more than 300 employees. With the funding, RigUp plans to hire additional employees for its Austin office as well as its Denver office.

RigUp’s platform matches contract workers with energy companies. This year, the company will exceed $2 billion in volume, up 200 percent from a year ago, on its platform, according to RigUp.

In the energy industry, blue-collar labor is hard to find and in high demand, according to RigUp.

“Field work, largely performed by a workforce of highly-skilled independent contractors, has typically been staffed through a fragmented network of brick-and-mortar firms,” Yong, RigUp CEO and co-founder said in a news release. “That’s inefficient for the companies that need to quickly staff projects and manage labor costs, and it doesn’t give independent contractors access to all available opportunities.”

RigUp offers contract field workers access to energy companies, flexible payment terms, and access to partners that provide healthcare benefits and training.

“RigUp is serving a workforce that, up until now, hasn’t been able to take advantage of the expanded opportunities technology affords,” said RigUp COO and co-founder Witte. “RigUp covers more than 100 energy industry service categories in every oil and gas basin and every major wind and solar region in the continental United States. That opens up enormous potential for workers and for energy companies looking to hire.”

RigUp plans to use the latest investment to continue expansion into renewable energy, midstream oil and gas, and downstream operations

The University of Texas at Austin has a new Nobel Prize winner in chemistry: John B. Goodenough, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering.

The Royal Academy of Sciences Wednesday awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Goodenough along with Stanley Whittingham of the State University of New York at Binghamton and Akira Yoshina of Meijo University “for the development of lithium-ion batteries.”

“They created a rechargeable world,” according to a news release. Lithium-ion batteries power everything from laptops and cell phones today to electric vehicles.

The Nobel Foundation cited the researchers’ work for creating “the right conditions for a wireless and fossil-fuel-free society, and so brought the greatest benefit to humankind.”

Goodenough, 97, is the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize, according to the New York Times.

Stanley Whittingham laid the foundation of the lithium-ion battery in the 1970s during the oil crisis. He made a lithium-ion battery but the“battery was too explosive to be viable,” according to the Nobel Foundation. In 1980, John Goodenough demonstrated that “cobalt oxide with intercalated lithium ions can produce as much as four volts. This was an important breakthrough and would lead to much more powerful batteries.”

And in 1985, Akira Yoshina created the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery, “resulting in a lightweight, hardwearing battery that could be charged hundreds of times before its performance deteriorated,” according to the Nobel Foundation.

 “Billions of people around the world benefit every day from John’s innovations,” Gregory L. Fenves, president of The University of Texas at Austin and former dean of the Cockrell School said in a news release. “In addition to being a world-class inventor, he’s an outstanding teacher, mentor and researcher. We are grateful for John’s three decades of contributions to UT Austin’s mission.”

“Live to 97 (years old) and you can do anything,” Goodenough said in a news release. “I’m honored and humbled to win the Nobel prize. I thank all my friends for the support and assistance throughout my life.”

“Goodenough began his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory in 1952, where he laid the groundwork for the development of random-access memory (RAM) for the digital computer,” according to a news release. “After leaving MIT, he became professor and head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. During this time, Goodenough made the lithium-ion discovery.”