Get details below on recent funding deals. Last week, two Austin companies and a university reported a combined $73 million in fundings and awards. Plus, in a deal we missed earlier in the month, a local venture capital firm signaled plans to raise a $100 million second fund.
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Albedo, a satellite imagery startup that's co-headquartered in Austin and Denver said Sept. 7 it raised a $48 million funding round. The series A round was led by Bill Gates' investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is focused on startups helping lead the way to net-zero emissions.
Also in on the round were Silicon Valley-based Shield Capital, Republic Capital, Giant Step Capital, C16 Ventures, Initialized Capital, Joe Montana's Liquid 2, Kevin Mahaffey and other angels.
Albedo Space Corp., which previously raised $10 million after finishing the Y Combinator accelerator last year, has now raised $58 million total. The startup is developing low orbit satellites that produce 10 centimeter optical imagery and 2 meter thermal infrared imagery for the commercial market. Such images, particularly the optical images, can be used for agriculture, mapping, insurance, real estate, planning and other applications. The infrared images, meanwhile, add more insight to the optical and has applications in climate change science.
When new companies move to Austin, they often cite the University of Texas' business, tech and research talent as one of the primary reasons. UT announced Sept. 8 yet another win on that front, securing the leading role in a four-state training program funded by the National Science Foundation.
UT's newly named research commercialization group, called Discovery to Impact, secured a five-year, $15 million investment to help researchers take new discoveries to market. The new organization is called the Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Southwest Region Hub, and it will involve researchers, grad students, inventors and others from Louisiana State University, New Mexico State University, Oklahoma State University, Rice University, Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The group will be led by Christine Dixon Thiesing, associate vice president for Discovery to Impact at UT Austin and principal investigator on the Southwest Region I-Corps Hub.
It's a meaningful new program for UT to lead, in part because it connects Austin and its startup scene to innovators from neighboring states and in part because UT has already had success with a similar regional NSF project.
Back in 2014, UT led an I-Corps Node that led to a laparoscopic camera cleaner used during surgeries. That became Clearcam, which has two products and nearly $5 million in funding.
Austin database technology startup Molecula Corp. has rebranded with the name of its flagship product — FeatureBase. And, along with its new name, the company announced it has raised a $10 million extension to its $17.6M series A funding round led by Ohio-based venture capital firm Drive Capital last year.
The new round was led by Drive and other existing investors, and it brings total funding to $33.6 million.
FeatureBase uses bitmaps to accelerate and simplify analytical data. The product, which took 18 months to develop, is now open source to the public.
“The existing data architectures and solutions that enable real-time analytics are overly complex, require high-cost resources, and still don’t meet the requirements of real-time data access," FeatureBase CEO H.O. Maycotte stated. "... As AI and ML workloads become the norm, data must be AI-ready from the get-go, which means features can be served directly from our operational databases."
Maycotte told me via email that FeatureBase now has about 40 employees, about half of whom are in Austin with the rest operating remotely. It plans to add roughly 10 employees in the next 12 months as it grows its open source community.
Investment firms
Austin-based venture capital firm Ironspring Ventures on Sept. 1 filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicating it plans to raise a $100 million venture fund. The firm, founded in 2019 by Adam Bridgman, Ty Findley and Peter J. Holt, invests largely in startups with technology targeted at the construction, manufacturing, transportation and logistics and energy and renewables sectors. The firm has invested in Austin-based 3D printing startup Icon, San Antonio-based Plus One Robotics and Dallas-based Mercado Labs, although most of its portfolio companies to date are outside the area.
The firm closed its first fund at a total of $60 million in 2021. With that fund, the firm had planned median investment of about $2.5 million and ranging from $1 million to $4 million.
Get ABJ's latest list of local venture capital firms here, and see the list of angel investors here. A list of local startup incubators can be found here.
