Texas Startup Incubator Receives $6 Million And Takes A Name Change

A startup accelerator in Texas has just received a huge cash infusion and changed it’s name to honor it’s donor. Texas Venture Labs at the University of Texas, Austin, has just received $6 million dollars from Texas millionaire entrepreneur Jon Brumley.

Brumley made his fortune in energy, having founded six publicly traded oil and gas companies in the oil rich state of Texas. He also led the merger of Fort Worth Children’s Hospital and Cooks and was the chairman of the Texas state board of education in 1985. In 2005 Forbes named Brumley and his son, Johnny, “Enrepreneurs of the Year”.

“Texas Venture Labs is a gem in the Texas entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Brumley told The Statesman. “It provides critical, hands-on experience for aspiring entrepreneurs who learn as students the effort required to get a new venture through the financing process. For me, this gift is an opportunity to build our capacity to grow the economy of Texas, while giving a leg up to young entrepreneurs.”

Brumley is a University of Texas Alumni. Texas Venture Labs, which is part of the McCombs school of business, hopes to expand the program to other UT campuses with Brumley’s gift.   UT has renamed the accelerator the Jon Brumley Texas Venture Lab.

The announcement comes on the heels of the annual “Global Venture Labs Investment Competition” which was held on the campus this week.

Linkage:


More on The Jon Brumley Texas Venture Lab here at their site

Source: The Statesman

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” get your startup featured email us here

We’re on a nationwide sneaker-strapped startup road show, for more on that and to help click here

 

Startups Cincinnati: UpTech Accelerator Announces Inaugural Class Of 8 Startups

Cincinnati area,  UpTech is a rather new accelerator. It was formed in January of 2012 and they’ve been working diligently over the past 5 months to build their business, their space and solidify their inaugural round of startups. Each of the 8 startups selected will receive an investment of $100,000, along with mentorship, support services and research assistance from Northern Kentucky University.

“We are thrilled to finally announce to our region UpTech’s first round of winners,” said Bill Scheyer, President of Vision 2015 and an UpTech co-founder. “Our ultimate goal is to fund 50 of the best and brightest early-stage informatics companies from the United States and abroad. These eight companies will complement the foundation of a growing informatics cluster in our region, an important business sector in a 21st-century economy.”

The contest was judged by a panel of business analysts, executives and investment experts from companies like CBS, Dell, Proctor & Gamble and more.

Some of the ideas the selected startup companies are working with are untapped markets.

7 Moose games, founded by Brett Carter and Susie D. Roth, specializes in the gamification of complex and sometimes dangerous business training simulations. For example they may produce vide game style training modules for the public safety sector that could include fire safety, or even hostage negotiations. They also have had interest from oil and gas companies that can’t provide real world training on some of the more risky aspects of their industries.

Our goal is to use game engine technology to create extremely effective simulations which illustrate inherently complicated and/or dangerous subjects,” the company said in its UpTech application. “Oil and gas, public service and health, armed forces and game industry professionals are a few examples of the industries which have expressed interest in our products.”

Citilogics, founded by Jim Uber and Stu Hopper, is developing realtime data fusion software for water utilities. Their software will help reduce energy costs, reduce water leakage, improve service reliability and the quality of tap water.

Founder Jim Uber has had twenty years of experience in the water industry including developing water security software and a multi-species water quality simulation package.

“We develop models, analytics and software that help our clients better operate and manage their large-scale urban water infrastructure investments, and deliver a wide range of services from complex engineering and data analyses, to full functional software custom software solutions,” the company said in its UpTech application. “Our current focus is data fusion software that will revolutionize efficiency and effectiveness in the water industry by reducing energy costs, controlling leakage, improving service reliability and enhancing water quality.”

More after the break
Read More…

We Are At CityGrid Hackathon LA All Weekend Long

This weekend, we’ll be at the CityGrid Los Angeles Hackathon which brings together people of all different backgrounds, in a move to make local discovery better via both the Web as well as the Mobile space. From Friday the 27th of April till Sunday the 29th individuals who’ve never meet will take part in build products for the future.

Read More…

New DC Accelerator Acceleprise Embracing Enterprise Tech Startups

Acceleprise is a new Washington DC based accelerator that is targeting new startups in the Enterprise space. TechCrunch  recently said that Acceleprise wants to be the “500 startups for Entreprise”

Acceleprise has great DC based founders in Sean Glass, Allen Gannett and Collin Gutman. They also have some great mentors that include well known founders, executives, venture capitalists and experienced operators. Their mentor list includes Scott Case, head of Startup America, Katharine Weymouth CEO of Washington Post Media, Maria Thomas former CEO of Etsy, Sonny Ganguly CMO at wedding wire and many more.

Their website says they are “The Enterprise Technology Accelerator”.  Enterprise was a natural sector to pursue, Glass told TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez that he started thinking about how he wanted to do his personal angel investing. He found while evaluating his portfolio that he had the most success with and was able to help the most in early stages, were all enterprise focused.

Washington DC is also the perfect location for an enterprise focused accelerator. Of course the federal government is the largest enterprise customer in the country. In their immediate surroundings you have most of the largest defense companies and contractors in the world. Accelleprise is also a quick 4 hour drive to New York City and not to far from Atlanta as well.

More after the break
Read More…