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. 

Nuclien

Austin based health tech company, Nuclien, recently raised $14 million in a Series B funding led by Southlake based venture capital firm Trinity Private Equity Group. The health tech company has raised a total of $20 million to date. According to Austin Inno, they plan to use the new funding towards expanding their team, finding a new office space and getting their product through the Food and Drug Administration approval process. 

Nuclien has developed an at-home diagnostic tool, a canister the size of a soda can, that is capable of analyzing samples and detecting disease. While Nuclien’s product has gained significant traction due to the global pandemic, the company actually came to fruition several years prior. Co-founder and CEO Alan Blake first had the idea in 2017 when the Zika virus, a disease transmitted by mosquitoes, was a larger threat. 

Blake turned to friend Dr. Richard Crockett whom he had previously founded a startup with years prior and sold. Blake and Crockett developed their disease detecting technology and founded Nuclien. In January of 2020 the team completed the prototype. Since then, the need for their product has skyrocketed along with their potential for growth. 

Pandemic Insights

Last week, Pandemic Insights announced a $5 million tranche-based Series A funding led by Convergence Ventures. Pandemic Insights is planning to use the funding to accelerate the development and go-to-market release of their products for all target markets including consumers, businesses and public health agencies. 

Pandemic Insights’ technology combines AI and data with human behavior dynamics to create software that displays personal risk insights, location risk indexes, and behavior modification messaging that are unique to each user. According to the press release, Pandemic Insights’ technology is currently being developed using Amazon Web Services (AWS). To avoid common tech startup growth pitfalls, AWS is helping the health tech startup by providing a highly reliable and scalable infrastructure capacity, tech services and support. 

Harmonate

Harmonate, a San Jose founded company, announced March 23 that they will be relocating their headquarters to Austin. Harmonate’s relocation announcement does not come as a surprise as many companies choose to relocate to lower cost states in the wake of the global pandemic. According to Austin Inno, Harmonate marks the 15th startup to relocate to Austin, and is hardly the first to relocate from California. CEO, Kevin Walkup, said Harmonate chose Austin due to its tech talent and experienced financial leaders. 

Harmonate leverages technology to accelerate private capital document processing and data analysis. To do this, they combine machine learning with data that they automatically pull from general ledger systems and other documents. While the tech startup will move their headquarters to Austin, they will continue to have a presence in California.

Vyopta

Vyopta is an Austin based startup that provides monitoring and analytics tools to assist IT teams improve workplace collaboration essentials. The SaaS monitoring platform specialized in areas such as video, voice, web conferencing and messaging technologies. If a tool or a platform has an issue or just breaks, Vyota will send a notification to an IT person who can fix it. 

According to Built In Austin, the SaaS startup recently received an $8 million Series A funding from Vancouver based venture capital firm, Vistara Capital Partners. Vyopta is planning to allocate a portion of fresh capital to support go-to-market activities such as research and development. Another portion will be dedicated to expanding cloud coverage into federal and regulated organizations. 

KdT Ventures

According to Silicon Hills, KdT Ventures, an Austin based capital firm with offices in Houston and Raleigh-Durham, recently raised a $50 million fund which they will use to back early age startups. So far, KdT Ventures has made a total of 24 investments in seed-level startups since its founding in 2017. Typically, KdT prefers to focus their investments on science-focused companies in the gene and biological circuit fabrication, novel delivery technologies, biomaterials innovation, and consumer biology industries. 

This is the VC firm’s second fund. Their first fund was in 2018 for the total of $15 million. With that first fund, KdT invested in a total of 18 companies including PathAI, 54Gene, Checkerspot, Dyno Therapeutics, Terray, and Solugen. While the second fund is relatively recent, the Austin VC firm has already invested in a few science based startups including Elegen, Xilis, STRM, Abridge, Dimension Inx, and Andes. 

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.