AustinStartup

It’s been almost two years since we first saw Smooth-Stone pitch their business at the Rice Alliance venture forum. The company has been making steady progress, culminating in a huge round of financing. The company announced it is raising $48 million from a unique syndicate of investors comprising industry leading venture capital firms and semiconductor [...]

We first wrote about Caringo two years ago with their first very quiet and secret raise of funds. Today they are putting out a press release announcing their $5M in funding. It’s hard to say if this is in addition to their previous money, or if they’re finally announcing that they’ve raised $5M over the past few years and they’re lumping it all together to call it a Series A.

I think it’s safe to say that early stage funding is going strong in Austin in 2010. It seems that not a week goes by without a notable seed round or A round invested in Austin companies. Back in April we wrote about Workstreamer, a business listening platform, launching their public beta. At the time they had 350 people in their private beta, and hoped to gain momentum and real customer insights from a larger public beta.

Click Forensics, a leading provider of online advertising and audience verification solutions, today announced that it recently closed a $6 million Series C funding round led by Austin Ventures with participation from Sierra Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The funding will help support Click Forensics as it expands development and marketing of new offerings designed to help brand advertisers and agencies verify online audiences and optimize investments for display advertising campaigns.

The idea of office hours for venture capital organizations is catching on, and DFJ Mercury in Houston is holding theirs next week. If you’re an entrepreneur in Houston, consider a visit with DFJ. If you’re unfamiliar with DFJ Mercury, they recently provided early stage funding for Macheen, and Graphicl.ly.

Conformity, creators of the first suite of on-demand solutions to enable organizations to centrally govern and manage users of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud applications, today announced it has secured an additional $3 million in Series A financing led by Guggenheim Venture Partners.  The new funding is in addition to the $3 million [...]

Everyone in town wonders where the Superstar is: the tech company that starts in Austin, is funded by Austin, and whose successful exit brings the cache that will solidify Austin as the Silicon Valley of the 21st century. (And make no mistake, that is in our grasp.)

Doesn’t it seem like we’re perpetually *almost* there, standing on a precipice with our toes hanging off? Are we waiting on some nebulous event to occur? Or can we propel ourselves into that elite status on our own terms? My hope is the latter but my fear is the former.

Next Thursday is the Central Texas Funding Symposium at the Norris Conference Center. I will be speaking at 3pm in the Capital Factory track on the topic of “Grooming Your Exit.” Other speakers in our track include Chuck Gordon from Sparefoot on “What I learned from being in a tech accelerator” and Josh Baer on [...]

MyEdu, the definitive online source to increase success and save money in college, today announced $5.5 million in series B funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of Bain Capital, one of the largest and most respected private investment firms in the world. Bain Capital has a long history of funding successful [...]

Santé Ventures, an early-stage life science venture capital firm, announces a $2.6 million Series A investment in TVA Medical, Inc. (TVA), a medical device company developing minimally invasive therapies for End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD). Santé formed the new company in partnership with TVA Founder, William (Billy) Cohn, MD, a cardiovascular surgeon and the Director of [...]