Roundup: Nomad Health & Blinker Arrive in Texas, SourceDay, & More

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

In the last week, two startups announced they’re now offering their services in the Lone Star State.
Nomad Health, an online market for healthcare jobs, has started offering placements for short-term nurse vacancies in Texas, and plans to roll that service out nationwide, according to a press release. New York-based Nomad began in 2015 as a doctor marketplace and is now in 14 states, including Texas. Nomad says its online platform cuts down on costs and inefficiencies of current third-party recruitment brokers.
Blinker, an app that allows users to buy, sell, and refinance cars without going to a bank or dealership, is now available in Texas, the company says. The startup was founded last year in Denver and says its technology can verify ownership, handle payment and lien transfers, and do title transfers—all from a user’s smartphone.

A couple of Austin startups reported new investment rounds in the last week.
SourceDay, which makes purchase orders software for the manufacturing sector, has raised $3.5 million, the Austin American-Statesman reported.Investors included Austin-based Silverton Partners, ATX Seed Ventures, and Draper Associates in California. The money will be used to make hires and for product development, including automating the payment process for vendors, the newspaper reported.
Continuum Analytics, which makes data analytics software, has raised $10 million in equity financing, according to an SEC filing. Investors were not named and Austin Inno reported that it was unclear if the $10 million was a new round or part of a previously announced $24 million round. (Investors in the 2015 round were BuildGroup and General Catalyst Partners, the publication stated.)

And there was some M&A activity.
Upland Software (Nasdaq [[ticker:UPLD]]), which makes work management software, acquired Waterfall International, a mobile messaging company based in San Francisco for $24.4 million, the Austin company announced. Upland was founded in 2013 and has pursued a growth strategy by acquisition. In addition to Waterfall, Upland bought Omtool, a Massachusetts software company, in January for $19.2 million.

Lastly, in case you missed any of our coverage the first time around, here are some highlights:
—Hail storms, persistent drought conditions, and other destructive weather patterns can mean a loss of income for businesses, say, in the logistics or agriculture sectors. Austin-based Riskpulse says its analytics software, which combines weather-monitoring services with risk-assessment data analysis, can give its customers key information on how weather events can impact their business.
—Seattle-based angelMD’s Houston office aims to help bring needed funds to Texas-based biotech innovation. Dan Parsley, angelMD’s senior vice president for corporate development, says his first priority has been educating Texas investors to get them comfortable with funding health care-related projects. Today, angelMD has 4,200 members—half are physicians in 35 specialties—in 48 states and 20 countries that can invest in a portfolio of 850 startups.
—An Austin data analytics software company has been acquired by global consultancy Accenture. (NYSE: [[ticker:ACN]]). Clearhead’s customers include companies such as USAA and CVS Pharmacy, which get personalized digital tools aimed at their e-commerce customers. Clearhead sets up A/B or multivariate tests to check whether those tools are working as intended and, if not, it redesigns them. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
—Our latest “Five Questions For … ” is with Laura Bosworth, CEO and co-founder of TeVido BioDevices in Austin. Bosworth previously had engineering and product development roles at Dell. She had been mentoring tech founders when she met her co-founder Thomas Boland, who had developed TeVido’s technology at the University of Texas at El Paso.

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.