Want to stay up to date on the latest startup fundings, launches, and expansions in Austin? Startup Over Coffee’s weekly roundup of startups to watch in Austin will keep you in the loop on the latest Austin tech news. 

Radical Girl Gang

Austin startup, Radical Girl Gang, founded in November 2019, is seeking to help expose more individuals to women-owned brands. The online marketplace curates products from female-owned brands in the clothing, accessory, home goods and wellness spaces. CEO and founder, Bre Cruickshank was inspired to jumpstart a business that was focused on supporting women entrepreneurs after experiencing firsthand how difficult it is for women founded businesses to succeed in a male dominated marketplace. 

According to Austin Inno, Radical Girl Gang currently has 50 brands and plans on onboarding 500 more in the next 18 months. The women empowered startup takes about 20-30% commission of every sale that’s not it’s own in-house brand. As of now, Radical Girl Gang is focused on an age demographic of customers 18-34. 

Bold Commerce

Bold Commerce, an Austin and Winnipeg based company, recently raised a $27 million Series B funding round led by OMERS Ventures. The new funding round brings the startup’s total amount raised to $44 million. Bold Commerce is planning to use the capital investment to bring on over 100 new members to their team. 

Bold Commerce’s platform offers omnichannel retailers and direct-to-consumer brands the capability to add transaction capabilities like tools for checkout, subscriptions, and price rules to that retailer’s existing platform. According to Built In Austin, the platform-agnostic e-commerce solution already works with over 90,000 names over 170 countries including brands like Vera Bradley, Harry Rosen and Humanrace by Pharrell Williams. 

In the year ahead, Bold Commerce is aiming to enable retailers to convert shoppers at their highest point of interest. To do so, the Austin startup plans to expand its network of payments, tax fraud, order fulfillment and marketing partners into a consolidated marketplace. The marketplace will be full of plugins and integrations in order to address all aspects of the transaction experience. 

Quali

After raising a fresh $54 million capital investment led by investment firms Greenfield Partners and Jerusalem Venture Partners, Israeli-based startup Quali will be moving their North American headquarters to Austin. The startup plans to use the new funding to develop new products and to build their teams across several locations including Austin, Tel Aviv, California, Europe and Asia, according to Austin Inno.

Quali is a software platform that helps developers test and deploy apps and other products in the cloud. Quali’s flagship product, CloudShell, was designed to help teams replicate full-stack tech environments to test products. CloudShell’s purpose is to perform the same duties that someone with expertise in cloud animation would perform when testing a product. Not only does Cloudshell perform the testing process but it also simplifies it. 

Loop

Austin insurtech startup Loop recently secured a $3.25 million seed round. The funding was led by Freestyle VC. Other investors include Blue Fog Capital, Fontinalis Capital Partners, Concrete Rose, Uprising Ventures, and Backstage Capital. Angel investors that participated in the funding include Kristen Dickey, Steve Schlafman, Songe LaRon, Craig J. Lewis, Gerard Adams, and Joshua Dorkin, according to a press release.

Loop uses an AI-based approach to pricing within the auto industry. The auto insurance industry currently prices the plans based on demographic factors such as credit score and zip code. Loop founders, Anne Nadeau and John Henry, found this pricing system to maintain structural bias against vulnerable communities. Therefore, Loop was created to combat this structural bias by pricing using AI technology that measures road safety and customer driving behaviors on those roads. Customers’ auto insurance policies are based not on their credit score, but on their ability to drive reasonably and safely.

About Savannah Burns: Savannah is a Business Development Associate for Swyft, which is a tech PR firm in Austin and Houston and a top digital marketing and PR agency in Denver since its founding in 2011. Swyft recently opened a satellite office where it offers tech PR in San Francisco. Swyft was also listed as one of the top tech PR agencies in Texas by the B2B services review site, Clutch.co.