Let’s catch up with the latest innovation news in Texas.
—Houston-based human resources software maker GoCo has raised a $7 million Series A round led by ATX Seed Ventures and the investment arm of UpCurve, a maker of technology for small- to medium-sized businesses, the startup reported in a press release. This latest funding brings GoCo’s total investment raised to $12.5 million since its inception in 2017. GoCo’s previous investors include Salesforce Ventures; Corp Strategics; GIS Strategic Venture, the venture arm of Guardian Life Insurance; and Digital Insurance. The four-year-old GoCo aims to create “paperless” human relations functions related to employee onboarding, eSignature workflows, time-off tracking, and others.
—MassChallenge is opening a boot camp-style accelerator in Houston. The Boston-based startup program works with early-stage companies that have less than $1 million in revenue in the past year and have raised no more than $500,000 in equity funding. MassChallenge does not take an equity stake in the startups it incubates, as is common with other accelerators. Houston is the second program for MassChallenge Texas, which launched an Austin program last August.
—CherryCircle Software, an Austin-based maker of pharmaceutical process development software, has raised $2.3 million in seed funding, the company said in a press release. The round included participation from ATX Seed Ventures, PLH Business Ventures, Hudson Park Capital, and others. “Modern drug manufacturing is becoming increasingly more complex,” Yash Sabharwal, CherryCircle’s president and CEO, said in the statement. “Novel data management and visualization tools are required to collect and interpret data from multiple sources. … Our software lets you capture development knowledge over time and manage risk in multiple dimensions with data, not documents, driving development decisions.”
—WP Engine has increased its annual recurring revenue to $132 million from $100 million in the year since it received a $250 million investment from private equity giant Silver Lake Partners, the company announced Tuesday. The company also said that its customer count has increased to more than 90,000 from some 75,000 businesses around the world, which operate their websites on the WordPress platform. WP Engine hosts and manages WordPress websites for those businesses, helping them with anything from technical issues when building pages to the website’s security. With the Silver Lake investment, WP Engine planned for international growth, new hires, and developing its product. The company said Tuesday it also increased its global employee count by 37 percent.
—Phynd Technologies in Dallas has raised a Series B funding round of more than $8 million, according to a press release. Participating investors include the MemorialCare Innovation Fund, Rex Ventures (the investment arm of UNC Health Care), Orlando Healthcare Ventures, and Dallas Venture Partners. Phynd says its technology enables health systems to build a searchable database on all providers that interact with a health system—60,000 providers on average—that can be embedded into their electronic health record (EHR), internal provider directory, public-facing website, and partner search pages.
—Hive9, which makes business-to-business marketing software, has raised $2.3 million in funding, according to a press release. Trousdale Ventures, which has offices in Austin and Los Angeles, joined existing investors LiveOak Venture Partners and Silverton Partners in the round, the Hive9 said.
Xconomy National Correspondent David Holley contributed to this report.
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