austin-startup
(27)
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.
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.
Gary Garofalo
Gary Garofalo is the CEO and co-founder of LoudCrowd, an Austin-based software company that turns brand creators and influencers into measurable revenue channels. His platform builds native creator storefronts on a brand's own e-commerce site, aiming to make social commerce as mainstream as third-party tools like LTK or TikTok Shop. A former Deloitte consultant with an economics degree from Wesleyan, Garofalo has led LoudCrowd to work with brands including Gymshark, Boohoo, Kyte Baby and Dolce Vita.
Jaimal Soni
Jaimal Soni is the co-founder and CEO of Insight Health AI, an Austin-based healthcare startup building AI agents that handle clinical busywork - referrals, intake, scheduling, fax processing, and note-taking - so clinicians can spend more time with patients. A University of Waterloo engineer and former Y Combinator founder, he spent six-plus years at Segment leading global sales engineering ahead of its $3.2 billion Twilio acquisition, and co-led R&D on Twilio's CustomerAI. He founded Insight Health in 2023 with a cardiologist, a neurosurgeon, and a former Twilio infrastructure leader; the company raised an $11 million Series A in April 2026 led by Standard Capital.
Jason Dorfman
Jason Dorfman is the co-founder and CEO of Orum, a live conversation platform that uses a parallel dialer and speech recognition to help sales reps skip busy signals, voicemails, and dead numbers so they reach live prospects faster. He built the idea out of a problem he lived through as the first sales hire at Rubrik, where reps dialed 100 times a day to get a handful of pickups. Since founding Orum in 2019 with Karthik Viswanathan, he has raised more than $50 million and grown the company into a widely used tool across outbound sales teams. He is based in Austin, Texas.
Joe Wolfel
Joe Wolfel is the co-founder and CEO of Terradepth, a Cedar Park, Texas company building an ocean data ecosystem that pairs autonomous underwater robots with a cloud platform to turn fragmented subsea readings into decision-ready intelligence for commercial and government customers. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former Navy SEAL, Wolfel started the company in 2018 with fellow SEAL Judson Kauffman after concluding that humanity's ignorance of the ocean was a solvable data problem. He frames Terradepth less as a robotics maker and more as an 'Ocean Operating System,' shifting the maritime industry from buying platforms to buying the intelligence those platforms generate.
Justin Sacks
Justin Sacks is the co-founder and CEO of Nexus, an Austin-based platform that helps live service video games build and run 'Support-a-Creator' programs at scale. After 15 years in gaming as a competitive player, content creator, and business development lead, he now builds the infrastructure that pays creators for driving discovery, engagement, and in-game sales for titles like Sonic Rumble, Bloons TD, and Town of Salem.
Katherine Allen
Katherine Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Flo Recruit (branded as Flo), an Austin-based vertical SaaS company that builds recruiting and hiring software for the legal industry. She started the company as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, went through Y Combinator in 2019, and left school to build Flo full time with co-founder Atreya Misra. Today Flo partners with more than 125 law firms, including close to 70% of the AmLaw 100, and over 100 law schools serving 25,000-plus students, and has raised roughly $5.5 million-plus across seed and a 2025 Series A round.
Khaled Bitar
Khaled Bitar is the co-founder and CEO of Avtal, an Austin-based fintech building a white-labeled, AI-powered digital collections platform for third-party debt collection agencies. In March 2026 the company announced $24 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by S3 Ventures. Before Avtal, Bitar co-founded and ran LeftLane Software, a subprime auto lending platform, led Supply Operations at ServiceChannel (acquired by Fortive for $1.2B), and spent four years as a consultant at Bain & Company. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Kim Lalande
Kim Lalande is the founder and CEO of KEY.co, an Austin-based hospitality marketplace that pairs vetted luxury vacation homes with in-home concierge services such as private chefs, grocery stocking, and in-home massage. Drawing on years of business-heavy travel and hotel stays, she built KEY to close the gap between the space of a private home and the service of a five-star hotel. Since founding the company in 2014, she has grown it to thousands of curated homes across dozens of destinations in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, raising roughly $16-18M in venture funding along the way.
Luke Fischer
Luke Fischer is the co-founder and CEO of SkyFi, an Austin-based Earth intelligence platform that lets businesses and governments order satellite imagery and analytics on demand, the way you'd hail an Uber. A former U.S. Army Special Operations aviator with 16 years on active duty, Fischer went on to lead flight operations at Uber and government operations at Joby Aviation before becoming an entrepreneur-in-residence at Shield Capital. He teamed up with investor Bill Perkins, who was frustrated that buying satellite imagery could take three to six months, and together they built a marketplace connecting more than 50 imagery providers. In January 2026 SkyFi raised an oversubscribed $12.7 million Series A to push deeper into AI-driven analytics.
Tyler Payne
Tyler Payne is the founder and CEO of Vellum Health, an Austin-based company that sends clinicians to draw a line, hang an infusion, or run a blood transfusion at a patient's bedside in a skilled nursing facility or living room instead of an emergency room. He rolled up a set of regional vascular-access businesses, wrapped them in a single brand and an AI platform that reads a facility's EMR to find patients who need care, and closed a Series A in mid-2025 led by FCA Venture Partners. Before Vellum he helped build CVS Health's nationwide clinical-trial infrastructure and worked at Elligo Health Research and ePatientFinder. He holds a molecular biology degree from Colorado and an MBA from UT Austin's McCombs School.
Zach Dell
Zach Dell is the co-founder and CEO of Base Power, an Austin battery-and-electricity company he started in 2023 with former SpaceX and Anduril manufacturing leader Justin Lopas. Base sells homeowners a leased backup battery for a one-time $695 plus a $19 monthly membership and retail electricity, then knits those household batteries into a distributed grid that charges on cheap overnight power and discharges at peak. In under three years the company raised a $1 billion Series C at a roughly $4 billion valuation and, by mid-2026, was in talks to raise again near a $12 billion valuation. The son of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, Zach traces his energy obsession to college experiments that included trying to lease a Hawaiian lava field for solar and building anaerobic digesters in India.
Ashley Rose
Ashley Rose is the co-founder and CEO of Living Security, the Austin-based company that turned dull compliance-checkbox security training into a data-driven discipline it helped name: Human Risk Management. She built the company in 2017 with her husband Drew, starting with in-person cyber escape rooms and scaling into an AI-native platform used by enterprises like Mastercard, Verizon, CVS Health and JPMorgan. A product-obsessed entrepreneur who once funded a kids' snap-change swimwear line on Kickstarter, Rose argues the industry has the human problem backwards: people are not the weakest link, they are the largest attack surface worth investing in.
Guillermo Cornejo
Guillermo Cornejo is the co-founder and CEO of Riders Share, the largest peer-to-peer motorcycle rental platform in the U.S. A Peruvian immigrant who never drove a car before he learned to ride, he crashed a Kawasaki Ninja 250 at 80 mph at age 23 and walked away with a hand full of pins and an obsession. After years analyzing high-risk auto loans at Nissan, GM and Hyundai, he built a marketplace that lets motorcycle owners rent out idle bikes to vetted riders, using credit and driving data to price crash risk. He started it during a full-scholarship MBA at UCLA Anderson, moved the company to Austin, and grew it to thousands of listings and hundreds of thousands of registered riders.
Allen Tsai
Allen Tsai is an Austin-based serial entrepreneur and engineer who spent roughly two decades shipping connected consumer electronics for Sony, Microsoft Xbox, Panasonic, Sonos, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments before turning his attention to water. After a month spent building water wells in a Nepali village, he founded Pani, the maker of the Pani Source - a tech-enabled water personalization system often described as the 'Keurig for water.' The device filters, remineralizes and customizes tap water with compostable pods, paired with an app that tracks quality and usage. Pani is Tsai's sixth startup.
Andrei Stefan
Andrei Stefan is the co-founder and CEO of Oveit, an Austin-based event technology company that bundles smart ticketing, online bookings, access control and cashless payments into one platform. A Romanian operator with two decades in general management and finance, he moved from corporate boardrooms into startups, helped build a live-shopping and streaming platform during the pandemic, and pushed Oveit early into NFT and blockchain-based tickets through partnerships with Crypto.com and Polygon. Oveit was named by the UN World Tourism Organization in 2019 as one of the five most disruptive startups in tourism.
Christian Wiens
Christian Wiens is the founder and CEO of Loman AI, an Austin-based voice AI platform that answers the phone for restaurants. A former restaurant worker who started in a Southern California BBQ joint in sixth grade and later spent a decade in B2B SaaS go-to-market roles, Wiens built Loman to recapture the orders restaurants lose every night when no one can get to the phone. Since launching in 2024, Loman has processed millions of calls and tens of millions in order volume, raised a $3.5M seed round led by Next Coast Ventures, and partnered with SpotOn, OpenTable, Toast and Square.
Diego Asenjo
Diego Asenjo is the CEO and co-founder of Mesh, an Austin-based B2B identity startup that verifies the legitimacy, licensing, insurance, and compliance of small businesses and sole proprietors in real time. A former Amazon product leader who built Business Prime into a multi-billion-dollar program, Diego left to fix a problem he 'could not unsee': the broken data infrastructure that quietly penalizes new, small, and micro businesses. His mission is personal, rooted in watching his father's small auto-parts shop in Argentina lose access to fair credit and opportunity as commerce went digital. Mesh raised a $5.7M seed round led by Greycroft and reports 99%+ satisfaction from the businesses it verifies.
Michael Green
Michael Green is the CEO and co-founder of Athena Security, an Austin-based company that builds AI-powered concealed weapons detection systems for schools, hospitals, casinos, and other public spaces. A Harvard-educated former family-business operator turned compliance-software builder, Green pivoted into physical security after surviving a close encounter with gunfire. He leads a roughly 110-person company that has raised $18.6 million to keep guns out of the places where people gather.
Nick Whalley
Nick Whalley is the co-founder and CEO of Nutiliti, a utility management platform that handles the unglamorous but expensive work of turning power, water, and gas on and off across rental portfolios. A Dartmouth-trained engineer who spent three years on Goldman Sachs's electronic trading desk before leaving in 2020 to build software for property managers, Whalley runs a company whose pitch is blunt: manage properties, not utilities. Nutiliti automates activations, deactivations, bill payment, and accounting reconciliation, and exposes it all through a REST API so single-family rental and build-to-rent operators can stop drowning in utility paperwork.
Shaun Moore
Shaun Moore is the co-founder and CEO of TERN, an Austin-based startup building an Independently Derived Positioning System (IDPS) that locates vehicles using onboard sensors and map data alone - no satellites, no GPS, no cellular. Before TERN, he founded Trueface, which became one of the world's fastest facial-recognition platforms before its 2021 acquisition by Pangiam. A two-patent inventor, global keynote speaker, and World Economic Forum contributor, Moore builds companies that challenge foundational assumptions across technology, policy, and capital.
Shawn Dastmalchi
Shawn Dastmalchi is a serial healthcare-technology entrepreneur and the CEO of Gratia Health, an Austin-based startup that uses behavioral science and incentive design to keep nurses on the job. A UC Berkeley PhD in vision science, he co-founded and led Apixio, a clinical big-data company later acquired by Centene, then built Ark.one Health out of an entrepreneur-in-residence stint at Sutter Health. Across 25-plus years in life sciences, medical devices and health IT, his throughline is turning messy clinical data into decisions - and, at Gratia, turning the daily grind of a hospital floor into reasons for nurses to stay.
Chris O'Dowd
Chris O'Dowd is the co-founder and CEO of WIN Reality, an Austin-based virtual reality training platform for baseball and softball hitters. A former professional catcher who played six seasons in the minor leagues after starring at Dartmouth, he built WIN Reality with his father, longtime MLB executive Dan O'Dowd, to close the gap between practice speed and real game speed. The Meta Quest-based product lets players face game-speed pitching from a library of thousands of real pitchers, and is now used by youth players, more than 200 colleges, and a majority of MLB franchises. The company raised a $45M+ round led by Spectrum Equity in June 2022.
Joselyn Lai
Joselyn Lai is the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Energy, an Austin-based climate-tech company drilling deep, autonomous geothermal wells to heat and cool large commercial buildings for a fraction of conventional cost and land. After a decade across sustainable agriculture, transportation, and consulting, she paired up with oil-and-gas drilling scientist Silviu Livescu to repurpose upstream drilling techniques for the half-kilometer of free thermal energy sitting beneath every building. In January 2025 the company raised a $12M Series A led by Titanium Ventures to scale projects across Texas and the Mountain West.
Micah Green
Micah Estis Green is the founder, president, and CEO of Tailos, the Austin robotics company behind Rosie, an AI-powered commercial robot vacuum that cleans the floors of hotels, senior-living communities, and multifamily buildings. He started the company (originally Maidbot) in a Cornell dorm room in 2015 after a class assignment put him to work as a hotel room attendant, and built it into a fleet deployed across 12 countries. A 2017 Thiel Fellow and 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he has been assembling robots from kits since age five.