Here’s the startup innovation news from Xconomy Texas this week.
—Neos Therapeutics announced Wednesday it has secured a $20 million loan facility with Hercules Technology Growth Capital (NYSE: [[ticker:HTGC]]) and that it raised $18 million in a recent Series C funding round, an increase from the $15.5 million initially reported. The suburban Dallas company makes a controlled-release technology for use in ADHD medications.
—See Forge, a cleantech company from Australia, has raised $1 million in venture capital from Houston-based Mercury Fund. The company, which recently moved to Houston, makes an app that digitizes reporting paperwork for safety inspections and other reviews that take place at remote industrial sites such as oil and gas platforms. See Forge, which is part of the third class at cleantech accelerator Surge, will be one of 11 companies that will debut at Surge’s demo day on May 21.
—Ilumi, a Dallas-area startup, appeared on the ABC-TV program Shark Tank last week and came away with a $350,000 investment from entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. The company, founded by a pair of classmates at the University of Texas at Dallas, makes LED “smart bulbs” for which lighting levels and colors can be controlled through a mobile app. Ilumi previously raised about $175,000 in crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
—M-87, an Austin mobile technology firm, raised $3 million in venture capital from individual investors in the telecom industry and the University of Texas. The company’s technology enables smartphones to organize themselves into mesh networks using wi-fi to create a cluster of devices that could identify which phones have the strongest signal. All of the traffic in that cluster would then be routed to those devices.
—Austin food-tech company Food on the Table was acquired Monday by the Food Network. The company sells a subscription-based service where people input the sort of dietary plan they would like—low carb, vegetarian—and the company sends back a week’s worth of recipes, including grocery lists that are primed to find items on sale at local grocery stores. Users can purchase plans for three to 12 months and interact with Food on the Table’s app. Company founder Manuel Russo declined to comment on the purchase.
