Texas Roundup: Filament Labs, LiveOak, Capital Royalty, Alafair

Here is the latest innovation news from Texas:

—Austin, TX-based Filament Labs announced Thursday that it has raised $1 million in seed funding to develop an app that creates digital patient self-care programs with task reminders and educational information and videos. The round was led by Mercury Fund in Houston.

—LiveOak Venture Partners closed Tuesday on its inaugural $109 million venture fund aimed at early-stage technology companies. The Austin-based firm began raising money in December and has so far invested in CS Disco, a Houston-based legal IT firm; StepOne, an Austin startup that has developed customer service software; and Veros Systems, which has predictive analytics software.

—Capital Royalty in Houston also announced Tuesday that it and New Zealand-based Milford Active Growth Fund have collectively invested $14 million into AFT Pharmaceuticals, which is also based in New Zealand. Capital Royalty will also provide additional capital of up to $30 million in a structured loan facility to the 17-year-old drug company.

—Alafair Biosciences last week received a $2 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund to further the development of the firm’s internal wound-healing devices. Alafair, which is based in Austin, licensed the technology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Author: Angela Shah

Angela Shah was formerly the editor of Xconomy Texas. She has written about startups along a wide entrepreneurial spectrum, from Silicon Valley transplants to Austin transforming a once-sleepy university town in the '90s tech boom to 20-something women defying cultural norms as they seek to build vital IT infrastructure in a war-torn Afghanistan. As a foreign correspondent based in Dubai, her work appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek/Daily Beast and Forbes Asia. Before moving overseas, Shah was a staff writer and columnist with The Dallas Morning News and the Austin American-Statesman. She has a Bachelor's of Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and she is a 2007 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. With the launch of Xconomy Texas, she's returned to her hometown of Houston.