Roundup: Qentelli, Health Wildcatters, Fannin, & Texas Disruptors

Let’s get caught up with the latest innovation news from Xconomy Texas.

Qentelli wants to make the quality assurance process in software development more agile by bringing in modern methodology to testing practices. The Dallas startup has built a process that will test QA during the development process rather than after the software has been written.

Health Wildcatters has welcomed its latest class of startups that are seeking to innovate in mental health, medical imaging, clinical trial processes, and others. Each of the 10 startups receive $30,000 in funding in exchange for 8 percent equity. So far, the Dallas accelerator companies have raised $16 million from investors in total.

—The Texas Disruptors conference is coming to Houston October 27. The daylong forum, which will be held at the Texas Medical Center’s TMCx accelerator, will feature some of the most forward-thinking executives, founders, investors, and scientists who are leading innovation in Texas. Among them are Nick Kennedy and Joseph Kopser, two entrepreneurs who are bringing technology to the transportation sector.

—Oilfield operations are increasingly loaded with sensors and other technologies. Arundo Analytics wants to help energy companies make sense of all the data. The Houston startup was founded a year ago and recently raised a $4.9 million Series A round of funding.

—Houston’s Fannin Innovation Studio has named its latest set of biotech fellows, who will work alongside the executive leadership of companies in Fannin’s portfolio. The fellows will be given managerial roles and participate in discussions on product commercialization, market analysis, and regulatory requirements. The hope for Fannin is that, once they complete the fellowship, they will stay in Houston and help to form management teams of the local ecosystem’s life sciences startups.

—Sure, venture capital and angel investors are an important part of growing a startup. In San Antonio, many local institutions are also getting into the investment game to give even the youngest of companies a chance to prove out their innovations.

—A technical school affiliated with cloud computing company Rackspace is starting a new program on cybersecurity and is targeting veterans for it. The Rackspace Open Cloud Academy will host a 12-week course for workers with highly technical training, especially in Internet security.

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.