Tag: Austin (Page 7 of 37)

LawnStarter Launches in Austin to Simplify Lawn Care for Consumers

August 9, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 12 Comments

Ryan Farley, co-founder of LawnStarter, a Techstars company in Austin

When the temperatures hit triple digits in Austin, many homeowners don’t want to mow the lawn.

A new startup, part of Techstars in Austin, has a solution.

LawnStarter, founded in August of 2013, wants to take the pain out of lawn maintenance by hooking up homeowners with lawn care crews. The company officially launched this week and provides service to all of Austin and many outlying areas from Marbles Falls to San Marcos and Round Rock.

LawnStarter is taking a “highly fragmented, old school industry” and bringing it into the digital age, said Ryan Farley, one of the founders.

“The bar for the customer experience is extremely low,” Farley said.

That’s why it’s ripe for disruption, he said. Farley and Steve Corcoran founded the company originally in the Washington, D.C. area with $110,000 in seed stage capital they raised from a group of angel investors. This summer, they relocated to Austin for the Techstars accelerator.

“Texas is one of the biggest markets for lawn care,” Farley said.

A few guys have become millionaires doing lawn care but that that’s a small fraction of the market, Farley said. In fact, the top 50 lawn care companies account for just 15 percent of the market, he said.

“There’s lots of small companies out there that need help,” Farley said.

While Farley didn’t grow up mowing lawns, he did work on grounds maintenance during the summertime and for a golf course. His co-founder, Corcoran ran a lawn mowing business.

In studying the industry, they found some lawn service companies are completely offline and don’t even have a website. They typically are one to two person companies, Farley said.

“They are at a point in their business where managing the business is becoming hectic,” he said.

LawnStarter wants to take the pain and paperwork out of the process, Farley said. The company takes 15 percent to 20 percent on each transaction, depending on the job. The average price for lawn service is $48 for half-acre lots, Farley said. And typically, homeowners get their lawns mowed every few weeks.

LawnStarter’s platform matches consumers with lawn care providers and lets them get an estimate for any yard work with a few clicks.

LawnStarter is working on developing partnerships with national chains. The company wants to scale to provide service to the entire Southwest region of the U.S. by next summer, Farley said.

“The shared economy is doing well right now,” said Brandon Marker, analyst with Techstars in Austin.

Companies like HomeJoy have found success matching cleaners with consumers.

“But this does not exist for lawn care,” Marker said. “People have tried to make this work for lawn care but they haven’t succeeded so far. I don’t believe that’s because there isn’t a need or a market for it. It’s just difficult to do.”

But the LawnStarter team has got all the ingredients to make it work, Marker said. And now people are more comfortable with the shared economy.

The LawnStarter founders taught themselves how to code and gave up good jobs on Wall Street to do LawnStarter.

“They turned a great deal of financial experience into coding experience,” Marker said. “They found out how to do this successfully in the Washington, D.C. market. And now they’re replicating that success in the Austin market.”

Facebook Reaches Out to Small Businesses in Austin

July 24, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of small business at the Facebook Austin Fit event.

Facebook, with more than 1 billion active users, has become the digital main street for small business owners from plumbers to jewelry stores.

They can hang their shingle, a Facebook business page, and reach their small town customers or a global audience.

And just a fraction of Facebook’s 30 million small to medium-sized businesses are active advertisers. In the last month, 1.5 million businesses spent anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, said Dan Levy, the company’s director of small business. But it’s growing. And the growth is coming from mobile customers.

Of the small businesses using Facebook, 19 million actively manage their page from a mobile device, Levy said.

“If you’ve got a mobile phone and a Facebook page, you’ve got a mobile strategy,” he said.

Levy spoke at the first Facebook Fit Austin, a boot-camp style event to educate small business owners about how to use Facebook effectively to grow their companies. The sold out event drew more than 1,000 people to the morning and afternoon sessions at the Austin Music Hall. It featured a keynote speech from Levy, a small business panel discussion with local businesses and training sessions led by Facebook and its partner companies, QuickBooks, Square and LegalZoom.

It’s the first time Facebook has held these kinds of events in communities across the country, Levy said. The Austin event was the largest of five events, he said. Facebook also has an office in Austin with a few hundred employees. It handles North American small business sales from here, he said.

Small businesses have contributed to significantly to Facebook’s revenue growth. The 10-year-old company Wednesday reported revenue of $2.91 billion for the second quarter, up 61 percent from the same time a year ago. And mobile advertising revenue represented 62 percent of all its ad revenue, up from 41 percent for the same quarter a year ago.

Facebook’s advertising has gotten more sophisticated in recent years with more targeted ads. The company offers small businesses the chance to upload email lists and target their current customers using Facebook’s platform. They can also get really specific in targeting customers by location, gender, interests and other factors. Facebook also lets business owners “boost” their daily posts to reach more people for a few dollars or $50 or more.

“We want to be the solution that helps them reach their customers,” Levy said. “It’s really important for us to make ads that are relevant. Our goal is for the ads to be as good, if not better, than the content you see on Facebook.”

During his morning keynote, Levy said even plumbers have grown their sales using Facebook. He gave the example of Morgan Miller Plumbing in Kansas City. Jeff Morgan, owner, has landed new customers and hired employees on Facebook. He has seen a 39 times the return on the $2,000 he’s spent on Facebook ads.

The key is being authentic, Levy said. Morgan has built his brand and expanded his business by telling who he is. Trust is a major issue when it comes to hiring a plumber and Morgan provides information about his employees along with pictures of them on the Facebook site.

The Austin small business panel at Facebook Fit

To illustrate how local small businesses are using Facebook, Rhonda Abrams, author and USA Today columnist, moderated a panel featuring Chi’Lantro, Korean infused Tex-Mex food, Allens Boots, Yeti Coolers and Kendra Scott Jewelry.

Chi’Lantro, with more than 10,000 likes on Facebook, spends about $400 to $500 a month on Facebook ads to promote its food trucks, said Jae Kim, its owner. He started Chi’Lantro with $28,000 in savings and financed it with his credit cards. He now has five trucks in Austin and Houston, 25 employees and he plans to open a brick and mortar restaurant this year.

Yeti Coolers, founded in 2006 in Austin, makes high-end durable coolers for hunters, anglers and other outdoor enthusiasts. The company has 150 employees and more than 212,000 likes on its Facebook page. Yeti uses Facebook to communicate with its customers and to build brand loyalty and awareness, said Harrison Lindsey, its digital content coordinator. Authenticity is key to building the brand on Facebook, he said.

“We have to be very authentic and understand what our customer needs are,” he said.

Allens Boots, which has a location on Congress Avenue and a store in Round Rock, doesn’t do traditional radio ads anymore, said Kirsten King, marketing manager. It has also created two Facebook pages updated for the different customers in the separate stores, she said.

“The good thing about it is it’s cheap,” King said.

She estimates Allens Boots gets seven times return on its ad spend on Facebook.

Kendra Scott Jewelry, with more than 51,000 likes on Facebook, uses online analytics and tailors its posts to its targeted customer base, women between the ages of 18 to 34, said Lara Schmieding, spokeswoman. Its market research on Facebook has also helped the company decide where to open its next store in 2015, she said.

Zach Dell’s Startup Thread is a Dating Site Just for College Students

July 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Lander Coronado-Garcia – CEO , Zachary Dell – Founder and Chairman,
Patrick Adiaheno – Head of Product

Michael Dell never pushed entrepreneurship on his son, Zach, which may be the reason Zach started asking about business, reading tomes by people like Warren Buffet and playing stock simulators by the age of 12.

“My dad and I are extremely close,” Dell said. “When I started asking him about starting his business and what it meant to be an entrepreneur, he started telling me more and more. He would give me little lessons every time we were in the car and use real world examples, like the Bernie Madoff scandal, to teach me about insider trading. We’d talk during car rides, dinners…we spend a lot of good time together.”

At 17, Dell is founder of a new online dating service for college students called Thread—not the same as a former Facebook effort to get into online dating by the same name. The idea, according to CEO Lander Coronado-Garcia, is that college students are safer and more likely to find good matches dating other college students, rather than being on sites like Tinder where anyone can view their profiles. The company intends to launch this fall with University of Texas organizations—like fraternities and sororities—and restrict membership to people with utexas.edu email addresses. In the future the company hopes to expand by adding other area colleges, and spreading from there.

To test the market, Thread created a fictional profile of an attractive UT student on Tinder. Of those who responded, 13 percent were UT students, 17 percent students of other schools and 70 percent “who knows?” Coronado-Garcia said. Moreover, some of the comments left by prospective “suitors” were obscene, bordering on threatening.

“Thread is about classy dating,” Coronado-Garcia said. “We’re going to be very explicit about the kind of behavior we deem acceptable.” In other words, a dating website even Mom would like.

Thread will tackle some of the other weird issues that crop up in online dating, too. With “hookup” sites, people can make 100 matches in an hour—clearly not the behavior of somebody looking for a substantive dating relationship. Thread will limit the number of potential matches presented each day to 10. If both parties say yes to the match, they can keep that match among 12 on a list. If someone adds another match, one falls off.

“That way,” Coronado-Garcia said, “You have to be a little more judicious in who you choose to match with. Each match is a little more important than if you just keep everybody in a bucket and keep storing them.”

A Junior Entrepreneur

Dell’s first business venture was hatched when he was playing golf on vacation in Hawaii at the age of 10. He had a friend along and they realized that golfers who hit balls into the lava fields never went to retrieve them. This was a high-end course. The abandoned balls were expensive. So Dell and his friend began collecting them to sell.

“We built up this huge inventory,” Dell said. “I had just finished reading about leveraged buyouts and selling your business and I thought ‘I want to sell my business.’ My business was the inventory so I decided to find someone to buy all my golf balls.” A friend of his dad’s, who was less than a stellar golfer, routinely lost golf balls. Dell offered to sell the golfer his entire inventory for a reduced price. It was the sale of his first business.

Another opportunity came along when his cousins started a summer camp in Dallas, Camp Spark. Initially, it was held at the cousins’ home. Then, as it grew, expanded to a local school. In recent years, the company has expanded to Austin, San Francisco, Boulder and Boston. By and large, it’s a camp where kids do all kinds of sports.

“If you’re a middle school kid, you’re happy to hang out all day with high school kids,” Dell observed.

Dell started Thread on his own. He had the advice of his dad’s network, but he refused to take money from his parents. Longtime family friend Brett Hurt introduced him to Coronado-Garcia who had been part of the founding team of Meritful—the winner of Capital Factory’s first annual “Move your Company to Austin” competition during SXSW Interactive. Thread is also in Capital Factory’s Incubator and Capital Factory is an investor in the company.

Getting Thread Up and Running

Coronado-Garcia, who has a degree in mechanical engineering, said he suffers from “career ADD.” He worked as a consultant for Accenture IT Systems but decided to go back to school for his MBA. He graduated from Wharton in 2011. He moved to Austin as part of Meritful but when that company folded, Coronado-Garcia was almost immediately tapped for Thread.

Eric Simone, CEO of ClearBlade had been a mentor of Meritful and also serves as a Thread mentor. Initially, Dell hired some developers to build the product and wound up with an unusable app. So he had to raise more money and Thread hired ClearBlade to build a software solution at a flat fee that could add functionality and scale.

“We said ‘Tell us how many hours it’s going to take and how long it’s going to take and we’ll hold you to that deadline,” Simone said. “That way we can control the scope of work and effort and not shove too many features in. So far the team has worked incredibly well together.” ClearBlade will also, for an additional fee, serve as Thread’s CTO until the company is ready to hire one.

“At first I thought, ‘Another dating app? Is that really what we need?’” said Simone. But the team convinced him that the absence of sleaze and protection of college students were huge differentiators. Also advisor Sam Decker has encouraged the team to involve Thread is women’s empowerment and safety programs as part of its brand, Coronado-Garcia said.

Max McKamy with the Tau Deauteron Chapter of Phi Gamma Delta at UT, otherwise known as FIJI, will be coordinating its first part of the year with Thread to make it a launch party. The main point of the app, he said, is to make dating sites safer for girls and if the girls are signing up, that’s where the boys will be.

Thread is close to completing its seed round of around half a million dollars, Dell said.

“My dad has been a huge help on the advice side,” Dell said. “What he understands is that for me to learn I’m going to have to make a lot of mistakes. If I make a decision, he’ll tell me what he thinks but he will never tell me I have to change it. He’s never invested a dime in my company and he never will. My mom is a very smart woman. She is an entrepreneur herself and she wanted to invest immediately but I knew I wouldn’t be learning as much if she did. And it’s been such a learning experience.”

Austin-based Comfy Lands $600K in Seed Stage Funding

July 12, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Comfy, a startup that helps students find housing, received $600,000 in seed stage funding last week.

The Austin-based company received the money from a group of investors led by Mike Lee, partner at Dominion Ventures. The round also included prominent angel investors and Austin Ventures.

Comfy has developed a mobile and online platform that uses proprietary software to serve as a matchmaking service between college students and the off-campus housing market.

The other investors include former Brocade Communication Systems CEO and founder of Rhapsody Networks Mike Klayko, former Skull Candy CEO Jeremy Andrus, Mark Harris, Jared Stone, and others.
Comfy plans to use the money to expand into new markets and scale its product.

“We feel fortunate to have the caliber of investors we were able to attract. With their backing Comfy is disrupting a fragmented and opaque market with a mobile app and website targeted at student renters,” Comfy Co-Founder and CEO Jordan Wright said in a news release. “Due to the niche nature of off campus student housing in the multi-family industry, the student population is served complicated products that aren’t a good fit for their specific needs, which are quite different from the normal multi-family renter. We’re using trending technologies, a new business model, and a little bit of our own secret sauce to solve this problem. This seed financing gives us the opportunity to take our innovations to the next level in this large, yet underserved market.”

Rackspace to Move 570 Employees into Austin Mall

July 12, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

A rendering of the proposed renovation by Gensler, photo courtesy of ACC

Rackspace Hosting is known for innovating in old malls.

The San Antonio-based hosting company moved into the former Windsor Park Mall in Windcrest in 2007. Rackspace transformed the defunct and dilapidated mall into a vibrant and dynamic space with a slide, cafeteria, wide open spaces and a conference center for its tech community.

Now the Web hosting company plans to expand its operations in Austin into another mall, the former Highland Lakes Mall, owned by the Austin Community College. Rackspace plans to relocate 570 employees by late next year to Highland and expand in the future.

Last week, the Austin Community College’s Board of Trustees approved a move to negotiate an agreement with Rackspace to allow the company to renovate the former Dillard’s department store and lease it to Rackspace.

The collaboration between ACC and Rackspace includes providing paid internships for ACC students, enhancing tech training.

The Austin-based Live Oak-Gottesman will renovate the “four-story, 194,000-square-foot Dillard’s space, funded by a portion of Rackspace’s lease payment,” according to a news release from ACC.

“Highland represents the future of higher education, and partnerships like this are a very important component of that—creating new opportunities for students and ensuring a pipeline of skilled workers for the region,” Dr. Richard Rhodes, ACC president/CEO said in a news release. “Rackspace is one of the area’s top employers and has a strong commitment to education. Live Oak-Gottesman has a three-decade track record of successful development in Central Texas. We look forward to seeing this partnership come to fruition.”

Joshua Baer Rejoins Email Marketing Firm PostUp

July 11, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Joshua Baer, serial entrepreneur and cofounder of Capital Factory, has joined the board of directors of PostUp, formerly known as PulseConnect, an email marketing software company.

Baer founded the Austin-based company under the name of Skylist in 1996 and later sold it.

“Although I founded the company almost 20 years ago, PostUp still offers a cutting edge and unique solution for email marketers looking for scale, optimal deliverability and deep database integration,” Baer said in a news release. “As an independent company, PostUp now has a singular focus and more resources to invest in R&D and marketing to propel us forward for the next 20 years.”

Last January, Transition Capital Partners and Petra Capital Partners, bought the company.

PostUp’s customers include ABC Mouse, HBO, NBC-Comcast, Sony, Turner, Univision and others.

“Our rebrand to PostUp positions us as a stand-alone company that allows us to sharpen our focus and innovate at a much more rapid rate around the specialized needs of our customers,” PostUp CEO Tony D’Anna said in a news release.

Got Lunch? Cater2.Me Wants to Feed the Bellies of Austin’s Startup Community

July 10, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Zach Yungst and Alex Lorton, co-founders of Cater2.me

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Countless workers face the same problem every day when they get to their office.

What’s for lunch?

Cater2.me aims to solve that problem for companies and their employees in Austin.

The San Francisco-based startup launched last month in Austin and now has nine employees in its local office. The bootstrapped startup with 60 employees nationwide also has operations in New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

Cater2.me expects to have between ten and 15 employees in Austin by the end of the year including sales staff, operations team and managers.

While some large companies have personal chefs and built out kitchens, many startups do not have those kinds of facilities. That’s where Cater2.me comes in. It caters lunch for startups and small to medium sized businesses.

The company, founded in 2010, built an order management system that helps gather and hold preferences for clients including budgets, menus and other attributes but its “secret sauce” is in how all of that gets mashed together.

The startup was born out of a hunger for diverse food at lunchtime.

“My business partner Zach and I were working for financial services companies,” said Alex Lorton, co-founder of Cater2.me. The company brought in lunch daily, but the food was kind of bland and boring like turkey sandwiches and mixed green salads, he said.

“I didn’t like to complain about a free lunch,” Lorton said.

But Lorton and Co-Founder Zach Yungst thought they could do a better job. They found local vendors and assessed whether they could handle a large catering order and handle the service side. They worked a lot with local mom and pop restaurants and food trucks.

“Startups and tech companies are a large segment of our customer base,” Lorton said.

Providing lunch to employees can help a company build its corporate culture by encouraging employees to bond over a good meal and it can positively impact productivity, Lorton said.

“That shared table is kind of the modern day fire pit,” Lorton said. “It’s where people gather and share stories.”

Cater2.me’s role is to help companies manage the whole process of having a food program. Its only requirement is a minimum of ten people.

For example, if a 75 person company wants to get lunch on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and offer different types of food along with vegetarian and gluten-free options, Cater2.me takes the hassle out of all of that. Its current Austin-based clients include Dropbox, Atlassian and Indeed. A few of the local eateries they are working with are Regal Ravioli, Hot Mamas Café, Austin Daily Press and Roll On.

“Whenever we move to a new city we look for a couple of things – a lot of growth and an active tech community,” Lorton said. “That’s something Austin has in spades. We also look for a really great food community – a lot of food trucks and food festivals. We don’t want to go to a city with all they have is chain restaurants.”

Cater2.me also has its eyes on Houston, Dallas and San Antonio for future expansion.

WP Engine Opens an Office at Geekdom in San Antonio

July 1, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

WP Engine, founded in 2010 at Capital Factory, has 150 employees in Austin and it’s hiring.

The plucky startup also has another 10 employees in a satellite office in California.

And WP Engine has just opened a San Antonio office at Geekdom, a technology incubator and coworking space.

WP Engine doesn’t want to add people just for the sake of having additional headcount, said April Downing, the company’s Chief Financial Officer.

“That’s why we looked to San Antonio,” she said. “There’s a really good culture fit. “

WP Engine, a managed hosting platform for websites and apps built with WordPress, has more than 20,000 customers. It expects to have up to 20 employees in San Antonio by the end of the year, Downing said. Right now, the company has two offices on the seventh floor of Geekdom’s new headquarters in the historic Rand building, which can hold up to eight people. But as Geekdom builds out the sixth floor and additional floors for larger technology companies, WP Engine expects to expand its operations there.

WP Engine Chief Financial Officer April Downing

Last summer, WP Engine moved out of Capital Factory and into 15,000 square feet at 504 Lavaca in downtown Austin. At the time, WP Engine had 50 employees; it has tripled in size since then and hired several key executives including Downing. WP Engine also hired Heather Brunner, who became CEO last October. Previously, Brunner served as COO of Bazaar Voice. Jason Cohen, who founded the company with Ben Metcalfe, now serves as Chief Technology Officer.

WP Engine also raised $15 million in venture funding in January, bringing its total investment to $16.2 million. That money has helped fuel the company’s expansion and fast growth.

Last week, WP Engine held a meet and greet recruiting event at the Peal Brewery and more than 50 people attended. The company got some great potential job candidates out of the event, but they also enjoyed meeting community members, Downing said.

“Our event last week was amazing,” Downing said. It proved the company’s decision to move to San Antonio was the right one, she said.

“It was a neat community embrace that we got,” Downing said.

WP Engine has had quite a few transplants from San Antonio who moved up to Austin to work at the company, she said. It also has a few who still commute daily, she said. The San Antonio office will allow those people to work closer to their home. A few people from the Austin office also want to move to San Antonio, she said.

San Antonio reminds Downing, who has lived in Austin for 15 years, of the early days of Austin’s high tech industry.

“There’s a lot of investment being made in San Antonio around technology,” Downing said. “Fifteen years ago that wasn’t the case.”

Rackspace has served as a major catalyst for San Antonio’s technology industry. And it’s producing a lot of technology talent.

WP Engine recently hired former Rackspace Senior Vice President of Marketing, Klee Kleber to serve as its Chief Marketing Officer. And it finds the talent coming out of the Open Cloud Academy and the Linux Ladies program, sponsored by Rackspace, attractive, Downing said.

The Central Texas area is becoming more of a tech region with Austin as the thriving technology hub and San Antonio as the emerging market, Downing said.

“It’s really exciting to see it happening in real time,” she said.

With the fast-paced growth, WP Engine works hard to preserve its company culture, Downing said.

Each week the company hosts a town hall conference call that everybody dials into. During the call, they share everything that has been happening in the company, Downing said.

WP Engine also hosts training sessions called “Full Frontal Nerdity” that are open to everyone and once every four months the company hosts a weeklong gathering, Downing said.

“We do a lot of team building exercises during that week,” she said. “It’s something you have to continue to cultivate.”

WP Engine is moving into Geekdom, where Pressable, formerly known as Zippy Kid, is housed. Vid Luther, Pressable’s CEO and founder, started the company around the same time as WP Engine.

But WP Engine doesn’t see Pressable as a direct competitor. WP Engine focuses more on enterprise businesses and medium sized businesses.

There’s still plenty of room for growth in the industry, Downing said. WordPress powers 22 percent of all Internet sites. If any company got one percent of that business, that would be a pretty big market, Downing said.

Silicon Hills News Contributor Tim Green did this profile of WP Engine last March.

Capital Factory Celebrates its Sixth Anniversary Kung Fu Geek Style

June 22, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Joshua Baer, founder of Capital Factory, at its sixth anniversary party. Photo by Laura Lorek

Capital Factory celebrated its 6th anniversary Friday night with a party at Kung Fu Saloon in downtown Austin.

More than 800 people RSVP’d to attend the event and Capital Factory gave away 400 T-shirts.

Key employees and founders of Capital Factory received giant wooden Jenga blocks with their names engraved on them to commemorate the event.

Capital Factory has come along way since its founding in 2008 by Joshua Baer and a handful of Austin entrepreneurs and investors.

Up until 2012, Capital Factory served as a traditional incubator and accelerator for high-tech startups.

But in May of 2012, Capital Factory evolved into a coworking site as part of the Austin TechLive initiative with the Austin Chamber of Commerce. That’s when Capital Factory began hosting entrepreneurs, companies and others in a 22,000 square foot space on the 16th floor of the Omni building at 701 Brazos Street.

Since then Capital Factory has grown to more than 600 members, 200 companies and funded 40 companies in the last year, Baer said. Capital Factory hosted more than 600 events last year, attended by more than 25,000 people, he said.

Also, President Obama visited Capital Factory in 2013 and met with Baer and several tech startup founders.

This year, Google for Entrepreneurs designed Capital Factory as one of its entrepreneurial “hubs” a network of organizations around the country and world fostering high-tech entrepreneurship.

Capital Factory also recently launched a “device lab” where companies can demo their products and make them available to entrepreneurs and hackers. It also has a video lab that is in beta mode right now, Baer said.

Capital Factory also launched a funding program with Silverton Partners and Floodgate to provide early-stage funding to companies in its incubator program. Companies with $25,000 in support from two Capital Factory mentors will receive another $50,000 in matching funds from Capital Factory’s Fund along with $25,000 each from Silverton and Floodgate for a total of $150,000 in funding.

Capital Factory has 100 companies in its incubator right now and is adding anywhere from five to ten per month, Baer said.

Startups like WP Engine and SpareFoot started at Capital Factory, but they grew too large and moved out.

That’s the idea, Baer said. They’re still part of the network, but once a company gets to 15 employees they need their own space, he said.

“Our goal is to get them to $1 million in annual revenue,” Baer said.

Printing the Human Body

June 20, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Photos courtesy of UTEP News Service – Aurelio Hernandez

“Our first product will be the nipple,” says Laura Bosworth. And the CEO and co-founder of TeVido BioDevices isn’t talking about a silicon attachment for a baby bottle, her startup aims to 3-D print human tissue.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but making it a reality may not be far off: Bosworth estimated that if TeVido secured the necessary funding ($7-8 million), they could be ready for clinical trials in as little as two years.

Bosworth started TeVido with Dr. Thomas Boland who is one of the foremost researchers of live-cell tissue printing. Boland is the inventor of a patent for inkjet tissue printing. He first tried modifying an inkjet printer to print with human cells in 2000, when he was working at Clemson University. He is now based at the University of Texas at El Paso where he is the director of biomedical engineering.

Bosworth retired in 2008 after spending a decade each at Dell and IBM. An engineer by training, Bosworth worked in manufacturing engineering, corporate strategy, product development and marketing over the course of her career. Finding that the leisure life was not for her, Bosworth began working with startups in 2009 at the suggestion of one of her old mentors from Dell.

The dean of engineering at UTEP called on her to advise their commercialization office. Volunteering at the university is how Bosworth met Boland and learned about his work. She was immediately enthralled.

“This is so amazing, and has the potential to really change certain aspects of medicine,” she said. Bosworth volunteered to take on the CEO role and help bring bioprinting to market.

TeVido was founded in 2011. After going through a couple different ideas and investigating the market, they decided to focus on nipple-areola reconstruction. Structurally, nipples are fairly small and simple, comprised mainly of fat and skin cells. The trick with bioprinting anything thicker than .1mm layer of skin is that it needs a vascular structure to deliver oxygen to the tissue, otherwise it will die. Bosworth says their technology is unique in that it has the capability to deliver that capillary structure.

Serial entrepreneur Scott Collins, who has a PhD in biomedical engineering, is the chief technology officer

In 2012, TeVido brought on serial entrepreneur Scott Collins who has a PhD in biomedical engineering to be chief technology officer. Boland remains based at UTEP, while Collins oversees the company’s ongoing research and development. From July forward, TeVido is targeted to move into the Texas Life Sciences Collaboration Center in Georgetown, though the relocation depends on securing funding. Collins says one of his goals is to someday bioprint a human heart. But it’s not only the relative simplicity of nipples that make them a good starting point, there’s a clear need for better solutions in post-cancer breast reconstruction.

“The plastic surgeons we’ve talked to see the need for this,” Collins said.

Presently, there are several imperfect options for approximating a nipple in reconstruction surgery. A common one is to create the protrusion by sewing skin together and tattooing it for color, but this solution very often does not last.

Bosworth recounted interviewing one woman who’d had 15 surgeries over seven years. “They don’t look great,” the woman told her, and as for the nipples, “flattened and faded.” There is a substantial amount of research about the trauma and distress of losing nipples to cancer. For many women, reconstructed nipples are an important part of the psychological healing process.

Presently, funding is a major challenge. TeVido has received less than $1 million to date, mostly through government grants, and Bosworth has heard a lot of “you’re too early” and “it’s too risky.” “People don’t want to fund you until you’re in human tests,” she said, but there is a lot of expensive work to be done before reaching that stage. In the best-case scenario, their product could be on the market in five years, but it may take much longer. TeVido applied for a $750,000 National Science Foundation grant in January. If they get it, they’ll have the opportunity to apply for further funding.

One of the reasons 3-D printing human tissues makes sense is that the source cells will come from the patient, and the printing process will be tailored to her precise dimensions. How TeVido’s printing will likely work is the plastic surgeon who is performing breast reconstruction will take a sample of skin and fat from the patient and send it to TeVido’s labs. The doctor will coordinate his surgery, scheduling with TeVido so that the nipple is printed and delivered at the right time. Since TeVido will be using the patient’s own cells, they are optimistic about the longevity of their product, especially in comparison to the nipple reconstructions that are on the market now.

Perhaps in a couple decades, printers like TeVido’s will be producing full, complex human organs and save some people from lingering on a lengthy list awaiting organ donors. Bioprinting solutions may one day supersede mechanical ones because bioprinted human tissues will grow with the patient, unlike synthetic solutions, which sometimes need to be replaced as the patient’s body grows and changes.

If TeVido is successful, it could clear the path for other 3-D printed, human-tissue products.

“Sometimes people say, ‘why did you pick something so hard?'” Bosworth says. “I tell them, ‘it picked me.'”

Editor’s Note: Laura Bosworth is one of the featured speakers at Voice & Exit on Saturday at Austin Music Hall. The company also recently won TechCrunch’s pitch off contest in Austin and it will present at TechCrunch Demo in the fall.