austin-startup
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The Breach Was Someone Else’s. The Problem Was Yours.
HackNotice began by telling people when their data had escaped. Today it sells companies a more uncomfortable service: evidence that trouble at an employee account or distant supplier may already be heading their way.
Nicholas Barbara Is Building for the Other 167 Hours
A product operator and a speech therapist built Expressable around a stubborn idea: progress depends on what happens between appointments. Nicholas Barbara's job has been turning that insight into a company that can travel.
The Godfather of Revenue Recognition Is Not Done Yet
He built the first revenue recognition software in 2009, sold it to Zuora, then walked away to do it again - properly this time. A story about second acts in an unglamorous corner of accounting.
The Austin Startup That Put a Real Subwoofer in a Lunchbox
Brane Audio spent nine years and 100-plus prototypes trying to break a century-old rule of acoustics. The result is a portable speaker that reviewers keep describing as impossible.
The Watch That Talks Back: How a Retired Chip Engineer Built a Medical Alert Seniors Actually Wear
Jean Anne Booth sold two chip companies to Texas Instruments and Apple, then un-retired to solve one stubborn problem: her 80-year-old mother would not wear anything that looked like a call-for-help button.
The Company That Turned Corporate Security Into a Single Screen
Corporate security teams drown in tabs, feeds and spreadsheets. Ontic bet that connecting all of it in one place - now with AI - is worth $287 million to investors and the attention of the Fortune 50.
How a Weed From Bangladesh Became a Plastic That Refuses to Cost More
Most green materials ask you to pay more and change everything. Applied Bioplastics bet the opposite - that plant-based plastic only wins if it drops into the machines factories already own, at a price they already pay.
The Speech Therapist Who Bet the Parents Do the Real Work
A speech pathologist got tired of watching kids wait months for care they could barely access. So she built a company on an uncomfortable premise: the therapist is not the one who fixes your child's speech - you are.
Adam Azzara
He turned a fiddly, high-stakes moment in spine surgery into a business - and put a small Austin device company on shelves next to Medtronic.
HealthKey
HealthKey is an AI-powered patient identification platform for clinical trial sites. It connects directly to a clinic's electronic health record system, reads every patient chart - including scanned and faxed PDFs - and scores each patient against a trial's eligibility criteria. Doctors get a ranked list of likely-qualifying candidates with the supporting evidence highlighted, replacing slow manual chart review. HealthKey charges success fees per enrolled patient, so sites pay only when it works. Founded in 2025 by Josh Sabol and backed by Y Combinator (W25), the company is based in Austin, Texas.
Romi Gubes
Romi Gubes is the co-founder and CEO of Sensi.AI, an Austin-based company that turns ambient audio into around-the-clock care intelligence for seniors aging at home. A former Fortune 500 software engineer, she started the company in 2019 after a personal experience with vulnerability in care redirected her career toward protecting people who can't advocate for themselves. Under her leadership Sensi has raised more than $98 million, grown revenue 400% in a year, and expanded into what she describes as an AI operating system for senior care.
Dan Hnatkovskyy
Dan Hnatkovskyy is a Ukraine-born, Austin-based PropTech entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of Jome (formerly NewHomesMate), an AI-powered real estate marketplace built to help buyers find, compare, and purchase new construction homes. A serial founder whose earlier ventures included Preenster and Brainify, he launched the company in 2020 and grew it despite a pandemic, recession, and the war in Ukraine, reaching 16 U.S. markets and more than 100,000 buyers. He was named to Forbes' inaugural Austin 30 Under 30 list in 2023, and in December 2024 the company raised a $9.8M Series A and rebranded as Jome.
Autonomize AI
Autonomize AI is an Austin-based healthcare technology company building an AI-native platform - the 'Autonomize Intelligence Platform' - that embeds governed, agentic AI directly into clinical and operational workflows for health plans, providers, and life sciences organizations. Founded in 2022 by Ganesh Padmanabhan and Kris Nair, the company turns mountains of unstructured healthcare data into structured intelligence, deploying pre-built AI agents and copilots for tasks like utilization review, prior authorization, care management, and clinical chart review. It says its systems save roughly 36,000 clinical hours per month across Fortune 100 healthcare customers, and it raised a $28 million Series A in June 2025 led by Valtruis, The Cigna Group Ventures, and Tau Ventures.
Base Power Company
Base Power is an Austin-based energy company that installs large-capacity home batteries and sells electricity to homeowners as a licensed Texas retail electric provider. Founded in 2023 by Zach Dell and Justin Lopas, it pairs whole-home backup with low fixed rates, using its growing fleet of distributed batteries as a virtual power plant that charges when power is cheap and discharges when the grid is strained. The company raised a $1 billion Series C in October 2025 at a $4 billion valuation and is building its own battery factory in Austin to scale nationally.
Cerebri AI
Cerebri AI is an Austin-based data engineering and artificial intelligence company that builds purpose-built AI agents for corporate travel, expense (T&E), and indirect procurement. Founded in 2016 by Jean Belanger and Steve Harter, the company originally pioneered a customer-experience metric called Cerebri Values before pivoting to become a leader in AI-powered analytics for the $1.5 trillion corporate travel market. Its AIQ Data Foundry unifies fragmented TMC, corporate card, expense, and HR/ERP data into a finance-grade foundation, on top of which its CAI Agents - a 'digital employee' workforce - automate hotel RFPs, air contract compliance, trip cost reconciliation, and ESG reporting while measuring ROI on every action.
Closinglock
Closinglock is an Austin-based fintech that helps title companies, real estate attorneys, and agents prevent wire fraud and modernize the closing process. Its platform moves wire instructions, payments, identity verification, document signing, and payoff retrieval out of insecure email and into a single secure portal. Founded in 2017 after a co-founder watched a client nearly lose their life savings to a phishing scam, Closinglock says it has protected more than 1 million home sales worth over $500 billion and raised $34M in Series B funding in January 2025.
Coro Health
Coro Health is an Austin-based healthcare technology company that delivers clinically proven therapeutic music and multi-faith spiritual programming through a fully licensed streaming service built specifically for care settings. Its flagship MusicFirst platform uses a patented Music Prescription Builder - designed by music therapists, neuroscientists, and music designers - to generate individualized programs shown in peer-reviewed trials to reduce depression and agitation in dementia and long-term care residents. The company also offers FaithFirst multi-faith content and EnrichFirst entertainment, reaching more than a million annual users across thousands of senior living communities and hospitals in the U.S. and Canada.
Flo
Flo (formerly Flo Recruit) is an Austin-based software company building the talent platform for the legal industry. It connects law firms, law schools, attorneys, and search firms through a connected suite of recruiting and performance-management tools - including an applicant tracking system, the Flo Forward career platform, pipeline building, and Flo AI. Founded in 2017 by University of Texas students Katherine Allen and Atreya Misra, the company works with roughly 70% of AmLaw 100 firms and 85% of the top 50 U.S. law schools.
Function Health
Function Health is an Austin-based membership platform that gives consumers direct access to 100-plus lab tests, optional full-body MRI scans, and AI-generated insights for a flat annual fee. Founded in 2021 and led by CEO Jonathan Swerdlin with physician co-founder Mark Hyman, the company sells a data-first, preventive approach to healthcare aimed at helping members catch problems early and track their biology over time. After a $298M Series B in November 2025 at a $2.5B valuation, Function has become one of the fastest-growing consumer health companies in the US.
Gembah
Gembah is an Austin-based product development platform and marketplace that helps entrepreneurs, e-commerce sellers, and small-to-midsize businesses take physical products from idea to shelf. It connects creators with a global network of vetted designers, engineers, and supply chain specialists, and manages design, prototyping, factory sourcing, and production across regions including China, Vietnam, India, Mexico, and Eastern Europe - aiming to demystify and democratize the process of bringing new consumer products to market.
Insight Health AI, Inc.
Insight Health AI is a physician-built healthcare technology company in Austin, Texas that builds voice-first and chat-based AI agents to automate routine clinical and administrative work - from patient intake, phone triage, and fax and referral processing to ambient clinical documentation. Founded in 2023 by a former Segment sales-engineering leader and two practicing physicians, the company sells its Lumi care assistant, Aura AI scribe, and specialty-specific agents to clinics and regional health systems. It raised an $11M Series A led by Standard Capital in April 2026, and reports more than 3 million autonomous patient interactions and roughly $50 million in annualized administrative savings across its customers.
KEY.co
KEY.co is an Austin-based luxury travel company that reimagines the vacation rental as a hotel-grade service experience. It curates design-forward homes and pairs them with in-home services - pre-arrival grocery stocking, private chefs, in-home spa and massage, and a dedicated guest-services team - across dozens of destinations in the U.S., Caribbean, Mexico and Canada. Founded in 2014 by Kim Lalande, the company operates as a three-sided marketplace connecting travelers, property managers and local vendors, and has raised roughly $15.8M to date.
Liquibase
Liquibase is an Austin-based software company behind the widely used open-source database change management tool of the same name. It automates, versions, and governs how database schema changes move from a developer's laptop into production, bringing the same CI/CD discipline that software code enjoys to the database. Its commercial platform, now sold as Liquibase Secure, adds policy checks, drift detection, and compliance reporting for enterprises in regulated industries like banking and insurance.
LoudCrowd
LoudCrowd is an Austin-based software company that helps direct-to-consumer brands turn creators and customers into a measurable sales channel. Its all-in-one creator commerce platform runs influencer, affiliate, ambassador, and user-generated-content programs, spins up branded on-domain creator storefronts, and layers on AI agents that automate discovery, outreach, and program management - shifting the focus from reach-based vanity metrics to attributable revenue.
Method
Method is a financial connectivity platform that lets developers link, read, and repay a consumer's credit and liability accounts - credit cards, student loans, auto loans, mortgages and more - through a single API. Using only a phone number, Method connects to 20,000+ financial institutions, surfaces real-time balances, payoff quotes and due dates, and moves money directly to creditors. It powers embedded lending, refinancing, balance transfers and debt payoff for fintechs and lenders including SoFi, Aven, Bilt, Happy Money and Figure.
Mia Labs
Mia Labs is an Austin-based AI company building Mia, a voice-first conversational platform for automotive dealerships. Marketed as an 'AI super employee,' Mia answers inbound and outbound calls 24/7 across a dealership's sales, service, reception, and parts departments, syncing with dealer management systems, CRMs, and scheduling tools to capture leads, book appointments, and handle routine customer conversations. As of early 2026 the platform served more than 350 franchise dealerships and had raised a $20M Series A, bringing total funding to roughly $29M.
Neurophos
Neurophos is an Austin-based photonics startup building an Optical Processing Unit (OPU) that uses light instead of electrons to run AI inference. Spun out of Duke University and the Metacept incubator, the company packs more than a million micron-scale metamaterial optical modulators - roughly 10,000x smaller than conventional photonic elements - onto a single chip to perform the matrix-vector multiplication at the heart of large AI models. It positions the OPU as an energy-efficient, drop-in alternative to GPUs for data-center inference, and raised a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier in January 2026.
Nexus
Nexus is an Austin-based software company that helps video game publishers build and run native Support-a-Creator programs. Its platform gives live service games a 'creator program in a box' - API-driven creator codes, sales attribution, creator storefronts, and managed global payouts and taxes - so studios can reward the streamers and content creators who drive in-game purchases, engagement, and retention. Customers include Capcom, Hi-Rez Studios, and Another Axiom, and the company raised a $10M Series A in January 2023 led by Griffin Gaming Partners.
NODA AI
NODA AI is an Austin-based defense technology company building an AI reasoning engine that orchestrates fleets of autonomous systems across vendors and domains. Founded in 2024 by Marine Corps veterans, its platform lets operators command desired effects rather than individual machines, coordinating mixed fleets of manned and unmanned assets from air to subsurface. NODA raised a $25M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners in February 2026, with backing from Booz Allen Ventures, and works with the U.S. Department of War, the UK Ministry of Defense, and defense primes.
Nudge Security
Nudge Security is an Austin-based cybersecurity company that helps organizations discover and govern the SaaS and AI applications their employees adopt, often without IT's knowledge. Founded in 2021 by Russell Spitler and Jaime Blasco, the platform combines Day One SaaS and AI app discovery, security posture management, identity governance, third-party risk, and spend management, then reaches employees directly with 'security nudges' via browser, Slack, and Teams to guide safer choices without blocking work. It raised a $22.5M Series A in November 2025 and serves nearly 200 customers.