How 10 Austin Companies are Growing the City’s Tech Ecosystem

Protecting native plants in downtown Austin might seem like a small thing, but the effect reaches thousands of different ecosystems across North America. 

When most people think of a Texas ecosystem they likely picture colorful desert dust, tumbleweeds and cactus covering the state’s planes and plateaus — but Austinites might have a different answer. 

The city of Austin is an oasis of green. The lush plant life is partially due to city planners slowing the flow of the Colorado River in Austin to form lakes and creeks, which in turn create pockets of green. The city also established “grow zones” along creeks that are intended to help native plants thrive without interruption. 

One of Austin’s native plants, known as the antelope horn milkweed, plays a critical role in one of nature’s greatest phenomena — the migration of monarch butterflies. This species of milkweed, according to the organization Keep Austin Beautiful, is a host for monarch caterpillars. Once those caterpillars become monarch butterflies, they take flight and cover up to a hundred miles a day on their way to the high-mountain oyamel fir forests of central Mexico. 

Creating a small protected pocket of native plants has an impact on ecosystems over a thousand miles away. 

Built In Austin took a pause from butterfly migration maps and identifying plants along the river to find nine local tech companies that have a global impact and are important parts of Austin’s tech ecosystem.  

 

Wise is a fintech company that helps users send money internationally. 

Austin Growth: The fintech company settled in Austin in 2022; since then it has doubled its Texas employee base. The company is set to grow again in Austin alongside an office move to Domain Tower II on Alterra Parkway. “As our North America business continues to grow, having a full-stack operation based in Austin has allowed us to move swiftly to build an innovative and collaborative team dedicated to creating the products and services to meet the needs of our customers,” said Harsh Sinha, chief technology officer and interim CEO in a press release. 

Global partnership: Swift and Wise announced last year that the two companies would join forces to create better “cross-border payment options for financial institutions and their customers, enabling payments sent securely via Swift to complete seamlessly over Wise with end-to-end transparency,” according to the Wise website.  

 

LogicMonitor is a SaaS company that created an observability and IT operations data collaboration platform to help IT operators, developers, managed service providers and business leaders. 

Built for AWS: As companies turn a corner into what is becoming a generative AI marathon instead of a race, many are in need of cohesive cloud visibility. LogicMonitor is ready and waiting to help, especially through a recent partnership with Amazon. Now IT teams that use Amazon Bedrock can integrate the insights of LogicMonitor. This combination allows teams to speed up their pace with generative AI.  

AI assistant: A big part of enterprise IT is scouring the tech to find what could go wrong before it does. LogicMonitor released Edwin AI, a generative AI assistant that helps IT operations teams search through enterprise data, analyze what is wrong and provide recommendations on how to fix it. In a press release, CEO Christina Kosmowski said this is “the opportunity to have a teammate that quickly makes sense of raw data and gives it to you in a single unified view is exactly how Edwin AI helps your organization excel.”

 

SailPoint is an identity security company that uses the power of AI and machine learning.

Giving back: SailPoint partners with a number of local Austin-based organizations to support the city’s growing tech ecosystem, including Social Venture Partners Austin, which provided pro bono advice and resources to nonprofits and social enterprises in Central Texas, and Code2College, a program that increases the proportion of historically underestimated high school students who enter and excel in STEM undergraduate majors and careers. The company also partners with nonPareil, an organization that seeks to empower students with autism to find and pursue their interests in the tech field.

Every year, SailPoint’s crew hosts a fundraising event with Extra Life, where tech lovers raise money for local children’s hospitals by playing video games for over 24 hours. Another annual tradition is its #GiveBackTuesday event where SailPoint matches crew donations to charities of their choice in Austin and beyond. The SailPoint Gives Back Foundation, which was initially personally seeded by Mark McClain, its CEO and founder, drives meaningful financial support to SailPoint’s communities. The foundation also enables SailPoint crew members to have their philanthropic contributions stretch even further with donor matching. 

In addition to these partnerships, SailPoint runs its annual Sail-U internship-to-new-hire program to expand the pool of emerging talent in the tech industry.

Open learning: SailPoint started “Identity University” last year as an online educational platform around cybersecurity. According to the company’s website, “Identity University offers customers, partners, and now, aspiring SailPoint experts, a variety of ways to broaden their identity security skill set and knowledge, including over 160 on-demand courses for busy professionals to train at their own pace, on their own schedule, from wherever they choose.”

 

Workrise is a software company built to streamline the way that the oil and gas industry manages vendor relationships. 

Vendor management: Workrise Vendor Management recently was released as a “source-to-pay solution encompassing tools for vendor discovery, onboarding, safety and compliance, payments and invoicing as well as data and insights,” as we reported at Built In Austin.  

Best place to work: Workrise, previously known as RigUp, was named an Austin “Best Place to Work” by Built In for six years in a row from 2019-2024. When we interviewed Workrise Manager of People Operations Rachel Lewis, she noted, “At Workrise, the mission of the People Team is to create an inspiring culture of belonging. We prioritize our employees’ well-being with our ‘People Come First’ philosophy and go above and beyond to support their well-being.”

 

CertifID is a wire fraud protection company. 

How it started: Tom Cronkright and a classmate from law school started a title company after they graduated. A decade later, an employee wired $180,000 to a fraudulent account. “We dealt with spoofed emails, compromised accounts and targeted attacks,” said Cronkright on the company’s website. “We even had a couple more near-misses.” After a long legal battle, the company created an app to use internally and saw that it had potential to be shared with the rest of the world. This was the origin story for CertifID. 

Growing fast: In 2023, CertifID was added to the Inc. 5000 list. At the time, the company landed at number 23 as the fastest-growing software company and as the seventh fastest-growing company overall in the Austin area. 

 

2K develops and publishes interactive entertainment for video game consoles, personal computers and mobile devices.

Early-career training: The video game company has two new training programs for early-career game developers and producers to get hands-on experience. Each program is 21 months long and is intended to help recent graduates pack a lot of experience into just under two years of work. 

Games for days: The company has global offices that are all hard at work creating the next big, bingeable game release. 2K is known for critically-acclaimed franchises such as Battleborn, BioShock, Borderlands, The Darkness, Mafia, NBA 2K, PGA TOUR 2K, Sid Meier’s Civilization, WWE 2K and XCOM. 

 

Zello is an app development company that is known for an app that turns phones into walkie-talkies. 

Emergency communication: A Zello blog shares the story of how the company’s walkie-talkie app wasn’t well-known in the United States until hurricanes Harvey and Irma. It explains that, “A grassroots effort started by the Louisiana rescue group named the ‘Cajun Navy’ catapulted Zello into the public eye during Hurricane Harvey, making it the ‘go-to’ app for civilians to use during search and rescue, recovery and rebuilding efforts.” 

Secure and strong: Being the source of critical communication during a disaster is no small task. The product team at Zello is making sure that every aspect of communication for frontline workers stays secure. In February, the company announced the launch of the Zello Trust Center, which displays security and compliance records, like the recent Service Organization Control 2, Type II audit.

 

Lansweeper is an IT asset management software provider helping businesses better understand, manage and protect their IT devices and network.

New partners: Lansweeper is now partnered with TeamViewer, a provider of remote connectivity and workplace digitalization solutions. A press release on the company’s website notes, “For Lansweeper, the partnership means that [TeamViewer’s] technology can reach a whole new audience — an audience that has needs that their technology can solve, but that otherwise may not fit in Lansweeper’s chosen strategy.” 

Tree-mendious work: Money might not grow on trees but a sustainable future sure does. Lansweeper has planted over 4,500 trees as a member of Go Forest. The project focuses on reforestation and agroforestry in Peru.

 

OJO Labs is an Austin-based real estate technology company preparing more people to be successful homeowners. 

Acquisition: OJO has brought The LEAD Syndicate into the company fold. The result of the acquisition is the launch of Lever by Movoto, which the company website calls “the first platform to bring together point solutions in a holistic way that provides support for individual agents and will benefit real estate agents and brokerages in their pursuit of profitability.”

“We are ecstatic to partner with [The LEAD Syndicate] and combine our resources to launch Lever, an innovative new platform and network for real estate agents,” said Chris Heller, president of OJO, in a press release. “Lever will change the game for individual real estate agents who want to spend less time on back-office work and more time on building relationships and helping clients realize their home buying and selling goals.” 

An A+ find: An OJO acquisition, Movoto, a residential real estate website, announced a partnership in April to provide home listing data with GreatSchools.org, a school information website. “GreatSchools is a nonprofit that unequivocally shares our vision for transparency in data and, as a real estate company with a large audience, we have a responsibility to not misrepresent our communities,” said John Berkowitz, Movoto CEO and co-founder, in a press release. “GreatSchools understands the importance of providing high-quality, data-powered educational insights.”

 

Invoice Home is a fintech company that creates billing and invoicing services for small businesses and freelancers. 

Mental Health Research: Invoice Home conducted a “State of Small Business Mental Health” survey that was released in May 2024. The company found that 59 percent of respondents think that the American economy doesn’t support small businesses. The survey also showed that 52 percent of Gen Z and Millennial small business owners report feeling depressed, and 17 percent of all respondents reported not being able to afford groceries. 

New In Town: In 2023, Invoice Home changed its name from Wikilane to match the name of the company’s early website. As the business quickly grew, the team decided to make the name change and move the headquarters from Las Vegas to Austin the same year. The new growth is a key part of the company’s mission while settling into life in Texas. As noted on the company website, the workplace culture will remain the same though: “Invoice Home strives to maintain a small business environment with a startup feel. We want to encourage our team members to be creative and independent while also kind and motivated.”