As Austin's technology sector evolves by the day, so does its startup scene, constantly producing a host of interesting new ideas being worked on by an ever-growing class of fledgling and repeat founders. Here, we take a glance at seven new tech startups to keep an eye on this year.
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"From employee training to business associate agreements, HIPAA can get pretty confusing," says Austin-based startup Accountable. "This is why we created Accountable, to make HIPAA compliance easy."
Indeed, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act isn't particularly easy to comply with, and it's not just medical professionals who have to wrestle with its regulations; many other types of organizations are affected as well. Accountable has raised a reported $158K in two rounds from two investors since its founding in March 2013.
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Teachers today are finding it harder than ever to focus on lesson plans and find time to actually teach, thanks to the increasing administrative duties placed on their shoulders each year and the expectation that they'll maintain contact with parents on a consistent basis. That's where TeacherGraph comes in, hoping to help make communication with parents easy via its SMS text and email tool. It's been active this past year at edtech meetups and conferences as it further develops its offerings.
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One of the latest startups to enter the thriving e-commerce environment is ShopSnap, which offers a multi-tiered, API-based platform to help online retailers serve and interact with customers. Founded in December 2014, the brand says of its offerings, "Unlike existing platforms that were designed for the traditional desktop experiene with an added mobile skin, ShopSnap was built from the ground up for all platforms, utilizing dedicated in-house-grown frameworks."
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The cloud-based expense management platform known as Paybook aims to help individuals and businesses alike manage their budgets in a way that helps them "save time, make smart decisions and focus on what matters most." Founded back in 2011, it's since raised $700K in an ongoing round.
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Promising "workflow happiness for field reps," the aptly-named Outfield offers a mobile tool that makes the mobile workplace a more hospitable one, helping employees on the go keep details of store visits, in-person meetings, emails, notes and reports in their pockets, accessible at all times. Founded in February 2014, it boasts increased productivity, streamlined account onboarding and increased field sales among its perks.
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"No paper, no problem" could easily be the motto of Scrypt Inc., the brand that's emerged from the joining of Austin-based Scrypt and San Diego-based Axacore. Once serving the medical and lending industries separately, the companies have merged to expand their client base and transform document management and delivery through its cloud-based and on-premise document management and delivery tools. Together, the formerly-separate companies boast 34 years of experience between them.
Last but certainly not least, there's PlanPages. Calling its service offerings "business process management for the rest of us," the brand builds BPM and workflow software that's less "bloated, expensive, hard to install and hard to use" than its competitors' SaaS offerings. Currently in beta signup mode, the brand hopes to offer help to the 90 percent of small businesses it says currently use Excel to perform everyday tasks since so many other software platforms are so unwieldy.
