austin-startups
(25)
Handraise Is Trying to Measure the Moment a Story Becomes a Belief
The Austin company began by helping PR teams amplify a good article. Then AI changed the more interesting question: not who saw the story, but what the machines learned from it.
The $3,000 Website That Learned to Drive Exits
Treble began with a bootstrapped website and a bet on Austin. Thirteen years later, it has turned the awkward moments around funding rounds, category shifts and acquisitions into a repeatable PR business.
The $74 Million Bet on the People Who Keep America’s Pools Blue
A software engineer rode along with a pool pro drowning in paperwork. Nine years later, Skimmer is stitching routes, chemicals, payments, parts and construction into an operating system for an industry that still runs on truck rolls and trust.
Red Oak’s $51 Million Bet: Turn Compliance’s Biggest Bottleneck Into a Growth Engine
Red Oak started by untangling one miserable workflow: the review of financial marketing. A $51 million investment and three strategic combinations later, it is trying to govern the whole journey from first draft to permanent record.
Josh Sabol Made 546 Cold Calls Before the Door Opened
Before Y Combinator said yes, the HealthKey founder logged 727 days, five product iterations and one memorably stubborn sales campaign. His story is a study in turning rejection into operating data.
Dropoff Built a Serious Business by Fixing the Least Glamorous Part of Delivery
The Austin company skipped the food-app frenzy and built for packages that cannot shrug off a late arrival. Its real product is not speed alone - it is a digital chain of custody, a professional handoff and fewer frantic phone calls.
ProspX Raised Millions to Fix the Awkward First Five Minutes of Commercial Insurance
Before insurtech became a category, ProspX tried to make brokers, carriers and underwriters act like they shared a brain. The clever bit was not another giant CRM - it was knowing which useful fact should show up just before a sales conversation.
The Parent Volunteer Who Turned a 200-Swimmer Headache Into Team Topia’s Sports-Software Playbook
Mason Hale did not set out to digitize youth sports. He volunteered to be the ‘computer guy,’ found a thicket of spreadsheets and aging software, and built his way out - one swim team, one meet and eventually one stubborn niche at a time.
System Surveyor’s $50 Bet: Turn the Messy Security Site Walk Into a Living Map
Security projects used to shed context at every handoff - from yellow pad to PDF to spreadsheet to technician. System Surveyor built a visual record that follows the cameras, doors and decisions from first walk to final maintenance call.
The Launch Box Wants Founders to Skip the Back-Office Tax
The Austin firm gives specialist consultants capital, software and an instant back office. Its wager is that the dull machinery of company-building can become a founder's unfair advantage.
Cayce Ullman
Cayce Ullman is the CEO and co-founder of ListingSpark, an Austin-based real estate technology company that lets homeowners list, market, and sell their properties for a flat daily fee instead of a traditional agent commission. Before ListingSpark he spent more than two decades building software and engineering teams, including co-founding the media platform Plex, leading product development at security firm AlienVault, and holding engineering roles at Cisco's IronPort division and E*TRADE. He holds a computer science degree from the University of Southern California and blends deep technical experience with a consumer-first approach to selling homes.
Dan Lievens
Dan Lievens is the CEO and founder of Share One, an Austin-based platform that turns real customers into on-camera storytellers through human-led, verified video testimonials. A serial entrepreneur who has started 11 companies across technology, finance and wellness, he built Philadelphia's first coworking space before turning to the question of how brands earn trust. Share One closed a Series A round in September 2025 to expand its engineering and editing capabilities.
Ganesh Padmanabhan
Ganesh Padmanabhan is the co-founder and CEO of Autonomize AI, an Austin-based healthcare intelligence company that builds agentic AI to cut the administrative load carried by health plans and providers. After more than a decade at Dell and a growth role at enterprise-AI pioneer CognitiveScale, he launched Autonomize in 2022 to point AI at problems that actually matter in care delivery. He also hosts the Stories in AI podcast, interviewing more than 100 innovators a year, and in 2026 Autonomize was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
Jean Belanger
Jean Belanger is the co-founder and CEO of Cerebri AI, an Austin- and Toronto-based artificial intelligence and data engineering company he started in 2016. A serial entrepreneur with a career spanning finance, semiconductors, and software, he previously ran Metrowerks (maker of the CodeWarrior developer tools acquired by Motorola) and Reddwerks (a supply-chain data science firm serving Walmart, CVS, Best Buy, and Lowe's). At Cerebri AI he created Cerebri Values, a system that quantifies a customer's commitment to a brand and predicts the next best action, and has more recently focused the company on analytics for corporate travel spend and ESG reporting.
Jim Johnson
Jim Johnson is the CEO of Gembah, an Austin-based product development and manufacturing platform that helps brands and entrepreneurs design, prototype, and source physical products from a vetted global network of factories and experts. A veteran hardware and technology operator, he earlier founded and ran uControl, a pioneer of interactive home security and smart-home platforms, then became a leader at iControl Networks after the two companies merged - scaling the business to more than 300 employees and deployments in over 3 million homes before its 2017 acquisition by Comcast and Alarm.com. An electrical engineer by training, Johnson pairs deep technical fluency with a track record of building, merging, and exiting technology companies.
Jonathan Swerdlin
Jonathan Swerdlin is the co-founder and CEO of Function Health, an Austin-based membership platform that gives consumers direct access to comprehensive lab testing and AI-generated reports. A serial entrepreneur and investor who previously built and chaired Thinx and founded the video app Portal, Swerdlin has advised or backed more than 100 companies through his firm Wisdom VC. Since launching Function in 2023, he has grown it to hundreds of thousands of paying members, raised a $298M Series B at a $2.5B valuation, and drawn backing from Andreessen Horowitz and celebrity investors including Matt Damon and Kevin Hart. Goldman Sachs named him one of its Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs of 2025.
Katie Fang
Katie Fang is the founder and CEO of SchooLinks, an Austin-based education technology company whose college and career readiness platform serves millions of K-12 students across U.S. school districts. Born in Shanghai and educated across four countries, she taught herself to code and built the first version of the product with $5,000 in savings, then grew it from a student-facing app into an enterprise SaaS platform that school districts use to track and improve student outcomes. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, she has taken SchooLinks onto the Inc. 5000 list three years running and raised roughly $90 million in venture funding through a 2024 Series B.
Mark Floreani
Mark Floreani is the CEO and co-founder of FloSports, the Austin-based streaming company he started in 2006 with his brother Martin and Madhu Venkatesan on roughly $10,000-$20,000 and a van. A former All-American runner at the University of Texas, he filmed the company's breakout moment - Ryan Hall's U.S. half-marathon record - from the back of a noisy pickup truck. FloSports now streams around 50,000 events a year across more than 25 sports that mainstream broadcasters overlook, built on the bet that passion, not audience size, defines a great sport. Floreani took over as CEO in 2018 and has pushed the company deeper into college sports, hockey, motorsports and, more recently, AI-powered production and dubbing.
Matt Lhoumeau
Matt Lhoumeau is the cofounder and CEO of Concord, a contract lifecycle management platform used by over 100,000 companies. A French entrepreneur who founded his first company at 17, wrote speeches for Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 campaign, and once spent six months manually renegotiating 500 contracts for a French telecom giant, Lhoumeau built Concord to make contract management as ordinary as sending an email.
Steve Elliott
Steve Elliott is the founder and CEO of Dotwork, an AI-driven platform that connects corporate strategy to execution. He previously founded AgileCraft, which Atlassian bought in 2019 for $166M and rebranded as Jira Align, after which he ran product for the tool inside Atlassian. He co-founded The Uncertainty Project, a community for product leaders, and wrote The Decisive Company, a #1 Amazon bestseller. Dotwork, founded in 2022 and based in the Austin area, raised a $12M Series A in November 2023 with backing that included Houston Astros owner Jim Crane.
Gregory Price
Gregory (Greg) Price is the CEO and co-founder of Shipwell, an Austin-based logistics technology company building a connected, AI-driven transportation management platform. A blue-collar Houston kid turned MIT-trained engineer, he spent seven years building hardware and algorithms for the U.S. Department of Defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, then applied machine learning to Fortune 100 supply chains at McKinsey before founding Shipwell in 2016 to bring automation, visibility, and intelligence to the notoriously opaque freight industry.
Katie Spies
Katie Spies is the founder and CEO of Maev, the direct-to-consumer brand that made human-grade raw food for dogs a subscription. An MIT-trained engineer who quit tech to spend nearly a year as a full-time dog walker, she built Maev after her rescue dog's health turned around on a raw diet. Since launching in 2020 she has shipped millions of meals, raised roughly $19 million in venture funding, and grown the company by wheat-pasting posters across New York before scaling to paid channels.
Kory Kelly
Kory Kelly is the co-founder and CEO of Legal Karma, an Austin-based legal tech company that lets banks and credit unions sell wills, trusts, and powers of attorney to their members as easily as opening a checking account. A farm-town Texan turned university lecturer turned founder, Kelly has grown Legal Karma from a rejected idea pitched to skeptical lawyers into a B2B2C platform powering estate planning for over 100 financial institutions.
Cyrus Khajvandi
Cyrus Khajvandi is the co-founder and CEO of Humata, an Austin-based AI startup often described as 'ChatGPT for all your files.' A Stanford biology graduate and serial entrepreneur, he built Humata after struggling to keep up with scientific papers, turning that personal frustration into a tool that lets people ask questions of their documents and get cited, fact-checkable answers. The company launched in early 2023, grew to millions of users processing tens of millions of pages, and raised $3.5M led by Google's Gradient Ventures with ARK Invest and M13.
Cheryl Sew Hoy
Cheryl Sew Hoy is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Tiny Health, an Austin-based microbiome science company that raised an $8.5M Series A in 2024. Born in Malaysia and trained as an engineer at Cornell, she sold her startup Reclip.It to Walmart Labs in 2013, then was recruited to run MaGIC, Malaysia's national innovation agency. She co-founded the #MovingForward campaign for diversity in venture capital and was named one of Time's 2017 Silence Breakers, the magazine's Person of the Year.