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An important fixture in Austin’s tech startup scene, Capital Factory refers to itself as “Austin’s entrepreneurial center of gravity.” In fact, that’s essentially its mission statement.
It’s certainly been working hard to earn those bragging rights — it’s responsible for 308 companies and 620 members, and its executive director, Joshua Baer, was named the 2013 Austin Community Leader of the Year by the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas for “his contributions to Austin’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.” Baer had a hand in forming the incubator/accelerator hybrid and coworking space in 2009 and since then it’s built a roster of well over 100 affiliated mentors.
Here, we take a look at five Capital Factory companies to keep tabs on:
Stormpulse provides a storm-tracking application that helps supply chain leaders make decisions based on accurate predictions of extreme weather events as they develop. Stormpulse constantly aggregates data from the National Hurricane Center, Joint Typhoon Warning Center, The National Weather Service, and more, keeping users updated with sixteen detailed “spaghetti” models displayed in an overlay. As climate change quite literally changes the way we go about our lives, reacting to more severe weather patterns than in decades past, storm-tracking aggregators’ implications are far-reaching into multiple industries’ infrastructures.
Perfectly placed in the live music capital of the world, Groundswell brings together musical artists and the professionals they need to help record and produce their music, as well as make music videos to promote it. Connecting music pros for the purposes of music production, live studio recording, mixing, mastering, photography, graphic design and video production, an indie artist without a corporate budget to burn can bootstrap or kickstart a single, video, EP or album with more ease than ever before.
Jackrabbit Mobile offers web development, lean UX, mobile app design, and iOS and Android app development. Its early clients include SalesForce, LIVESTRONG and Birds Barbershop — not a bad start, partnering with highly successful local partners and securing their buy-in from the beginning. It also developed an ATX Startup Crawl app for the biannual event -- a smart move, considering the amount of potential clients reached through each crawl.
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Also seeking to make life easier for professionals wanting to do big things, Pivot Planet offers an easily-accessible advice platform for people thinking of pivoting their careers and transitioning into something new, starting a business from scratch, or perhaps diving deeper into their current professions and simply looking for a bit of expert guidance. It also offers a promotional (not to mention paying) platform for those in a position to give that advice.
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On the B2B end of things, Capital Factory also boasts Enlyton, the first cloud-based enterprise search and content discovery company. Without aggregation and without placing a burden on a company’s processing infrastructure or storage capacity, Enlyton makes cross-referencing a snap and helps digital asset managers inventory and organize internal and external content, and then deliver it to the appropriate end user(s) cleanly in an article browser, topic page, or web or mobile app.
As Capital Factory closes in on the second half of its first decade, it is entering into progressive partnerships, such as the one it announced in May with Google for Entrepreneurs, connecting Austin’s entrepreneurs to the global Google Tech Hub Network and offering other perks as well. We’ll be keeping an eye on the startups listed above, as well as the rest that make up the Capital Factory portfolio, in the months and years to come.
