austin-texas
(62)
Austin Talley Put the Checkout Counter Inside a Text Message
The Everyware founder spent two decades turning awkward business processes into software. His wager now is simple: the most useful payment terminal may be the phone already in your hand.
Enrique Tapia Built Cisco's AI Marketing Team From Zero
He walked into Cisco with a mandate and no team. A few years later, marketing strategy at an 87,000-person company runs on the AI group he built out of nothing.
The Company That Taught Radio to Talk Back
Futuri spent a decade helping radio stations listen to their audiences. Then it built a robot that could do the talking - and pointed the same AI at the ad-sales desk.
The Company That Turned "Prove It" Into a Business
For 20 years, ActiveProspect has sold one unglamorous promise to marketers: keep the receipt. In a regulatory minefield where a single unwanted robocall can cost $500 to $1,500, that receipt is the whole business.
The Man Who Sold United Capital Is Back to Buy a Piece of Everybody Else's
Joe Duran built United Capital, sold it to Goldman Sachs, and could have retired. Instead he raised $250 million to bet on the advisors most consolidators overlook - the ones who want a partner, not a buyer.
Joli Kindler Built a Brand Inside the Quietest Corner of Finance
A marketing coordinator who never left, and spent fifteen years turning insurance brokerage into a brand people could actually feel.
The egg company that put a farm's name on every carton
How a 20-hen Texas farm turned radical transparency and 108 square feet of pasture per bird into a $759 million business - one carton at a time.
Summer Moon Coffee
How a family auction bid on a 19th-century roaster turned into Texas' original oak-roasted coffee - and a Moon Milk cult that now stretches across a dozen states.
SolarWinds
The unglamorous software that keeps 300,000 networks from falling over - and the Austin company that learned to rebuild trust after the most talked-about hack of the decade.
IgniteTech
The company that buys aging enterprise software, wires it up with AI, and rents the whole library for one flat fee - and famously rebuilt its own workforce to get there.
Bloomfire
Bloomfire sells companies a cure for their own forgetfulness - an AI knowledge layer that makes video, PDFs and buried Slack answers searchable, and then quietly tells you which of them have gone stale.
Krista Dalton
Krista Dalton is Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Tecovas, the Austin-based western wear brand built on handmade cowboy boots that has grown into a lifestyle label with more than 50 US stores. She spent nine years at Target, where she moved from allocating plus-size and maternity apparel to becoming the first person the company shifted from stores to Target.com in 2013, then seven years at Overstock.com (now Beyond Inc), ending as Chief Customer and Merchandising Officer with a team of over 1,300 and an $800M-plus P&L. At Tecovas she has pushed the brand into work boots and women's workwear, run TV blackout tests to prove what awareness actually buys, sent her team into customers' closets, and built a custom AI agent to chew through the roughly 16 reports she used to read by hand. Footwear News named her to its Women Who Rock class of 2026, where she argued that authenticity is the new competitive advantage.
Tecovas
Tecovas is an Austin, Texas-based western brand that set out to be the "Warby Parker of cowboy boots" - selling handmade, León, Mexico-crafted leather boots and western apparel directly to consumers at attainable prices. Founded in 2015 by Paul Hedrick, it grew from an online-only startup into an omnichannel retailer with more than 50 stores, roughly $300 million in expected sales, and a loyal community drawn to its blend of heritage craftsmanship and modern retail.
Tony Rogers
Tony Rogers is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Dollar General, where he leads brand, media, personalization and the DG Media Network across the retailer's roughly 20,000 stores. A University of Texas graduate who started in accounting before turning to marketing, he built a 25-year career at consumer brands and retailers including Pillsbury, Frito-Lay and Gateway before spending more than 17 years at Walmart, where he rose to Chief Marketing Officer of Walmart U.S. and later Chief Member Officer at Sam's Club. He joined Dollar General in June 2024 after a stint as CMO of Signet Jewelers, bringing a philosophy built around purpose, evolution and keeping the customer at the center of every decision.
Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Kion, a cloud governance and management software company based in Columbia, Maryland. He was appointed CEO in October 2025 after more than two decades leading SaaS, observability, and customer experience companies, including roles as CEO of Monetate, COO of Kibo Commerce, and Chief Customer Officer at Zenoss. At Kion he is driving a 'FinOps+' strategy that combines cloud cost management, governance, and policy automation for multicloud and AI-driven workloads. He is based in Austin, Texas, and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
4M Analytics
4M Analytics is an AI-powered utility mapping company that compiles millions of scattered public utility records, satellite imagery, and legacy blueprints into a single continuously updated digital map of what lies above and below ground. Its Utility AI Platform gives civil engineers, contractors, and departments of transportation instant, verifiable subsurface data to plan safer, faster infrastructure projects and avoid costly excavation strikes.
Everyware
Everyware is an Austin, Texas-based payments and customer-engagement company that lets businesses collect money and communicate with customers over text message. Founded in 2015 by Larry "Austin" Talley and Scott Orlinsky, its Pay By Text platform turns a mobile phone number into a payment method - customers receive an invoice by text or email and pay by replying, without downloading an app or logging in. Everyware combines two-way SMS messaging, online and in-person payments, recurring billing, and identity-verification tools for merchants in healthcare, travel, automotive, nonprofit, retail, and utilities.
HealthGrowth Pharmacy Solutions
HealthGrowth Pharmacy Solutions is an Austin, Texas company that gives independent community pharmacies a single ecosystem for capital, purchasing, and advisory support. Through direct lending (HealthGrowth Capital and PharmLine credit lines), a fast-growing group purchasing organization (HGRxGenesis), health-benefit programs (HGRxPreferred), bookkeeping, valuation, and buy/sell services (HealthGrowth Transitions), the firm helps owner-operated pharmacies improve margins, access working capital, and navigate programs like 340B and LTC@Home so they can compete against national chains.
Illumine-i
Illumine-i is a power and design engineering firm that provides turnkey engineering support for solar PV, battery storage, EV charging, substations, and grid infrastructure. Founded in 2015 by former Tesla and Sunrun engineers, the company works with EPCs, developers, independent power producers, and lenders - handling everything from preliminary feasibility to construction-ready permit packages, plus independent and owner's engineering. It has engineered more than 3 GW of clean energy across 200,000+ projects and complements its solar roots with construction-focused BIM/VDC and MEPF design services.
Infinitum
Infinitum is an Austin, Texas company reinventing the electric motor. Founded in 2016 by Ben Schuler, it replaced the century-old iron-and-copper stator with a printed circuit board (PCB) stator, producing air core motors that are roughly 50% smaller and lighter, use 66% less copper, and consume about 10% less energy than conventional motors. Its Aircore EC motor system integrates a variable frequency drive and targets HVAC fans and pumps, data center cooling, industrial equipment, power generation and mobility. Backed by more than $385M in funding and partners such as Rockwell Automation, Infinitum was named to Fast Company's 2025 list of the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies, ranking No. 1 in energy.
Iris Telehealth
Iris Telehealth is an Austin, Texas-based telepsychiatry company that partners with hospitals, health systems, community mental health centers, and federally qualified health centers to deliver virtual behavioral health care. Founded in 2013 on the belief that every community deserves timely access to quality mental health care, Iris supplies vetted psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and licensed therapists on both scheduled and on-demand bases, plus an AI-enabled analytics platform. It is the only virtual mental health company to earn The Joint Commission's behavioral health care accreditation twice, and it works with roughly 200 partner organizations across the United States.
Performance Kitchen | Food Is Medicine®
Performance Kitchen | Food Is Medicine® is an Austin, Texas company that produces chef-crafted, dietitian-approved Medically Tailored Meals designed to help manage chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and renal disease. Founded in 2011 as a healthy consumer food brand sold in more than 10,000 retail stores, the company pivoted to lead the Food Is Medicine movement, delivering ready-to-eat meals that are increasingly paid for by health insurers and delivered directly to members' homes. Led by Chairman and CEO Mark Walker, a CPA and founder of athlete-backed Dugout Ventures, Performance Kitchen operates nationwide production and distribution reaching roughly 98% of the U.S.
SeekOps Inc.
SeekOps is an Austin-based climate-technology company that mounts a NASA-derived laser methane sensor, the SeekIR, onto enterprise-grade drones to detect, locate, quantify, and report methane emissions for energy, renewable natural gas, and waste operators. Spun out of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2017, its drone-agnostic Leak Detection and Quantification (LDAQ) systems help operators meet regulatory frameworks such as OGMP 2.0, EPA rules, and the EU Methane Regulation, and have been deployed onshore and offshore for majors including bp, Shell, TotalEnergies, and Equinor.
Televero Behavioral Health
Televero Behavioral Health is an Austin, Texas physician-led virtual behavioral health practice that delivers online therapy, psychiatry, medication management, and neurotesting for conditions like anxiety, depression, ADHD and autism. Built as a licensed medical practice rather than an app or marketplace, it pairs same-day and same-week access with clinical oversight from MDs, nurse practitioners and licensed counselors, and accepts commercial insurance, Medicare and Medicaid so cost is not a barrier to care.
VORAGO Technologies
VORAGO Technologies is an Austin, Texas fabless semiconductor company that designs radiation-hardened and extreme-temperature microcontrollers and microprocessors for aerospace, defense and industrial systems. Its patented HARDSIL process hardens standard commercial silicon against radiation and heat using conventional high-volume manufacturing, letting spacecraft, satellites and downhole tools run Arm Cortex-based compute in environments that would destroy ordinary chips.
Jeff Cardenas
Jeff Cardenas is the co-founder and CEO of Apptronik, an Austin-based robotics company building Apollo, a general-purpose AI-powered humanoid robot. He spun the company out of the University of Texas Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016 and has since raised close to $1 billion, secured a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics, and positioned the company among the small handful of credible US humanoid players. He frames the race to build practical humanoids as the 'space race of our time.'
Jessica Reeves
Jessica Reeves is the CEO and a board member of AxonIQ, the Utrecht-based company behind the Axon Framework and a unified platform for building event-driven, AI-native applications. She came up through HR and operations rather than engineering, spent roughly eight years at Anaconda where she rose to COO and helped scale the company into a $1.5B unicorn with $150M+ in ARR, and now argues that AI's lasting value will sit in its infrastructure layer - specifically in explainability, the ability to trace exactly why an intelligent system did what it did. Based in Austin, Texas, she frames event sourcing as the memory foundation that AI agents need to be auditable and trustworthy in the enterprise.
Joss Leufrancois
Joss Leufrancois is the co-founder and CEO of Visage, an AI-and-human recruitment platform that crowdsources qualified, ready-to-interview candidates for large employers. A French-born entrepreneur who learned recruiting across London, Dubai, and the US, he previously co-founded and ran the recruitment agency Aldelia before selling it, then launched Visage in Dubai in 2015-2016. Today he runs the fully remote company from a ranch near Austin, Texas, blending a global sourcer network with data science to build candidate pipelines in 24-48 hours for clients that have included Tesla, Adecco, GoDaddy, and Virgin.
Justin Smith
Justin Smith is the CEO of SamCart, an Austin, Texas based e-commerce and checkout platform that has helped more than 75,000 creators and entrepreneurs sell over $3.5 billion in products and services online. He rose through the company from Head of Product to Chief Operating Officer before stepping into the CEO role, and he has become a frequent voice on the future of the creator economy, the shift from awareness to conversion in online selling, and how AI is reshaping how small businesses sell. Before SamCart he worked in marketing and business development at high-growth SaaS companies including Curalate and LivePerson.
Karl Kipke
Karl Kipke is the founder and CEO of HealthGrowth Pharmacy Solutions, an Austin, Texas company that gives independent and community pharmacies a single ecosystem of lending, advisory, group purchasing, and transition services. A former Wall Street banker who spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns before turning to venture investing, Kipke built HealthGrowth Capital into a direct lender for pharmacies and closed a $16.8 million debt-and-equity financing package in April 2020 to expand its reach to independent pharmacy owners across the United States.