Austin Inno's 2024 Startups to Watch (2024)

Startup founders are inherently problem solvers. Whether it's identifying a pain point deep inside an esoteric industry or building a better mousetrap, almost every successful founder out there is building a startup to make someone's life a little easier, more efficient or more fun.

Austin has become a magnet for these curious and motivated technologists, giving the city one of the highest concentrations of startups per capita in the world. It's an idea city. A founder's playground. And, increasingly, a hub for venture capitalists hoping to ride the next rocket ship to a big acquisition or IPO.

At Austin Inno, we cover the local tech startup scene every day through out daily newsletter, the Beat, and dozens of stories about interesting founders and groundbreaking ideas. Then, near the start of each year, we try to identify a batch of relatively new companies that seem poised to accelerate their growth, launch new products and raise new funding rounds in the year ahead.

We've been creating lists of startups to watch since 2016 and have highlighted dozens of companies that went on to raise big rounds or get acquired. And plenty of others have dissolved, which, many venture capitalists will remind us, happens all the time in startup land and often helps prepare founders for their next attempt. (See last year's startups to watch list here.)

This year, we've included a variety of technologies in our startups to watch list. Of course, you'll find a lot of AI. But we've also given nods to startups and nonprofits tackling tough problems, including diversity and inclusion in the workplace and climate change.

With that in mind, let's check out Austin Inno's 2024 Startups to Watch.

Blackdot

When Blackdot emerged from stealth mode last year, it certainly raised some eyebrows. The automated tattooing startup, founded by Joel Pennington, aims to create higher definition artwork and lessen the pain from the tattooing experience, plus it pays artists a royalty for their artwork. Blackdot's machine starts by injecting a small number of concealable test dots in a person's skin and compares the depth of those dots with a database of different skin types to select the optimal depth for the tattoo ink. It’s currently operating out of a studio east of downtown Austin, but the plan is to set up a full retail storefront here, and in the long-term it aims to open shops in several other big cities, such as New York, Miami and Los Angeles. Blackdot has raised about $4.6 million in venture funding and plans to seek out angel investors to help fuel future rounds.

Portalis.AI

Many of us have toyed with AI apps such as ChatGPT. But it's largely a text-based conversation that can feel pretty dry. Portalis.AI brings AI to life through its digital people. The Austin startup was developed by J. Todd Coleman and Josef Hall, both serial entrepreneurs with experience with multiplayer online role play games, including Wizard101, which was published by KingsIsle Entertainment. This new startup came out of stealth mode in November 2023, and the young company has brought on Dan Graham, co-founder of Notley and BuildASign, as a co-founder and chief operating officer. The Portalis.AI platform lets creators design, customize and engage with AI-powered digital avatars that have fully integrated voice, video and memory.

Kinjo

Startup veteran Charles Thornburgh, known for co-founding Civitas Learning and educational-technology angel investing, has teamed with co-founder Laura Malcom on a new venture to watch in the education realm. Kinjo Learning Inc., launched last year, has raised $6.5 million in seed funding to support an app kids can download to access educational content and earn rewards. It’s already being used by about 20,000 kids, and Kinjo wants to expand to new gaming and media platforms and develop a version that lets parents see what skills their kids are building.

Quimby

Sumedha Ganjoo had everything in order, except her emotions. As a software engineer and product owner at NI, she approached things logically. But when her emotions overtook her, she had to find a new way to train her mindset to continue to succeed. That's grown rapidly into a new career path and her Techstars-backed startup, Quimby. The startup, which is backed by Halp co-founder Andrew Homeyer and former Insights Group Head of Product Suresh Sundarababu, is focused on mental health for individuals and workplace teams. Its platform, which can tie into Slack and Calendar, helps people check-in with their emotions each day and provides insights and recommendations that can help them navigate their changing emotions. Essentially, it helps encourage a lot of small moves people can make that amount to big changes. It has also graduated from startup accelerators DivInc and Mass Challenge.

Autonomize

Autonomize wants AI to help make the health care system experience easier. Co-founded by Ganesh Padmanabhan and Kris Nair, the startup emerged from stealth last year and raised $4 million in seed funding. Its AI copilots help organize and summarize unstructured data in the health care space to improve patient outcomes, and it’s already released several AI products. Autonomize’s Pixel is designed to quickly vet patients who may be eligible for potentially life-saving treatments through clinical trials, and its Wizard product helps doctors with clinical decisions by generating deeper chart-based insights. Autonomize was recently named a finalist for the 2024 SXSW Pitch, which means it may get the chance to showcase its tech to hundreds of investors and fellow innovators. It has a remote team with people in Austin, Florida, California and India.

Pearl

Lawrence Humphrey, a former IBM software designer and strategist, laid the groundwork for his startup, Pearl, when he co-founded Tech Can [Do] Better in 2020 to help underrepresented tech employees connect with each other, share experiences and advice and help the industry better understand what underrepresented employees experience in the workplace. He launched Pearl to help overqualified and overlooked people on their job search journey. And he brought on Brad Neal, a senior director of UX design at Expedia Group, to assist with product. The platform matches vetted job candidates with employers based on their experience and preferences, while also helping tech companies find new candidates for open roles. The startup, which went through the DivInc accelerator, has arrived at a time when many companies have cut back on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, despite the ongoing need for the vast majority of companies to develop workforces that better reflect the communities they serve. Pearl was initially bootstrapped and has starting fundraising recently. In March, it's teaming up with the State of Black Design conference.

GovSide

Plenty of people are scared of the potential threats posed by AI, but entrepreneur Peter Khalil and his startup GovSide Inc. are aiming to harness it to improve democracy. The company, which came out of stealth late last year with $100,000 in pre-seed funding led by Austin-based Berch Capital, has launched a nonpartisan, AI-driven app to help people cut through the political noise and find accurate information that matters most to them. As users swipe through content, the app learns about their political leanings and the issues they care about. Khalil was an early team member and revenue operations director at Dosh, an Austin-based company that developed a cash-back app and was acquired in 2021 by Cardlytics Inc. for $275 million in cash and stock. He co-founded GovSide with fellow former Dosh employees Bryan Ellis and Barrett Wuerch.

Scorability

Scorability is aiming to improve recruiting in college athletics by becoming the go-to platform for college coaches and recruiters seeking to sort through, and connect with, the millions of college-bound youths seeking sports scholarships each year. Co-founders Brian Cruver and Brett Andrew are well aware of the inefficiencies, lack of transparency and even dishonesty endemic to the recruiting process, because both have experience steering young athletes through it. Scorability emerged from stealth in October with $11 million in seed funding, the bulk of which came from local firms Next Coast Ventures and Silverton Partners. The startup boasts a world-class recruiting engine designed to efficiently identify, engage and attract the best players to programs, while also benefiting prospective student athletes through a more direct and transparent process.

Measure

Meme Styles founded nonprofit startup Measure in 2015 to provide free data and anti-racism evaluation tools to help organizations and individuals fight structural racism. In 2019, it launched the Innocence initiative to address adultification bias where Black children are perceived as less innocent and more adult-like at an early age. Styles, a former news anchor and privacy officer at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, is also a co-founder of The Black Fund, which was developed in partnership with Austin Community Foundation to provide grants to the Black community. The startup was co-founded by Houston-based Precious Azuree, who is founder and CEO of Houston-based Precious Azuree Group.

Verosint

When young companies are seeking startup investments, it’s often the founders’ track records that matter most. And in that sense, fraud-fighting startup Verosint is well prepared. The company was founded in 2021 by CEO Steve Shoaff and CTO Mark Batchelor. Shoaff was co-founder and CEO of Austin-based UnboundID Corp., which was acquired by Ping Identity in 2016. He went on as chief product officer at Ping Identity from 2016 to 2020. Batchelor, meanwhile, climbed the ranks at Ping Identity where he was chief solution architect until 2020. The ID and security vets then launched 443ID, later called Verosint, which secured $8 million in seed funding from local VC firms Silverton Partners and Bill Wood Ventures in 2022. Verosint fights online fraud using verifiable open-source intelligence, machine learning, behavioral analytics and user fingerprinting.

Perigon

Serial entrepreneur Joshua Dziabiak took a strong interest in news and media products after leaving his day-to-day role at The Zebra, the insurance comparison startup he co-founded in 2012. That led him to co-found Perigon with Josh Rickel, who previously co-founded JobSiteCheck and was a partner at Notley, an Austin-based social good investing organization. The AI-powered Perigon platform contextualizes and brings new insights to emerging news stories to help companies, researchers and government connect dots across a wide variety of news and data content on the web. It has several APIs, including its real-time news API that plucks content and data from more than 130,000 sources, categorizes them as news, opinion or otherwise and then draws connections between them to create AI generated summaries with links to sources. That helps media monitors, financial analysts, crypto investors and AI developers more quickly get to the insights they’re looking for. The startup on Feb. 8 announced it has raised a $5 million seed round led by LiveOak Ventures.

Heading Health

Over the past several years, alternative treatments to mental health issues, such as depression and trauma, have quickly emerged. That’s led to a rise in ketamine clinics and expanded research into the use of psychedelic-assisted therapies. Heading Health is taking a tech-enabled approach to the market by combining several newly emerged treatment paths, including ketamine, transcranial magnetic stimulation, Spravato nutrition, psychiatry and other modalities. The startup, founded in 2020, integrates new research with real-time patient measurements to find better outcomes that lower the cost of care. Heading, led by founder and CEO Simon Tankel, raised a $4.5 million series A in 2023 led by Gron Ventures and Jam Fund. It also announced plans to expand from Austin to Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.

Humata

Humata is harnessing the power of AI to help organizations and individuals extract insights from their own data and files. Describing its tool as “like ChatGPT for all your files,” the startup founded by Cyrus Khajvandi and Dan Rasmuson announced $3.5 million in seed funding in October. Using AI-powered queries, the platform is designed to help people make decisions and gain insights from single or multiple PDFs simultaneously. Users can ask questions across all of their documents and then automatically get answers, the company said. Its seed funding was provided by Google's Gradient Ventures, Cathie Wood's ARK Invest, M13 and other prominent angels.

Contoro

This AI robotics startup was founded last year after spinning out of Harmonic Bionics, a medical device company commercializing robotics for rehabilitation. It has raised $6 million in equity funding. It’s led by founder and CEO Youngmok Yun, who was previously co-founder of Harmonic Bionics Inc. Contoro’s AI-powered robots are used to automate shipping container unloading at warehouses. Its initial pilot project was with Calendar Holdings LLC, an Austin company that operates retail brands, including Go!, Calendars.com and Fuego. Its investors have included Village Global, an investment firm with partners including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Dell, as well as South Korean firm SV Investment, which invests in deep-tech startups globally.

Zelus Analytics

There’s no shortage of data in sports, but harnessing it effectively for player assessment and in-game decisions can be overwhelming. Enter Zelus Analytics. The startup’s advanced data and analytics platform is designed to evaluate, predict and improve player and team performance. Founded by Doug Fearing, Luke Bornn and Dan Cervone, it completed the first tranche of its series A funding round in October. And in November, it acquired fellow Austin-based startup TourIQ Golf, which had an analytics platform for PGA golfers. The deal added to Zelus Analytics’ targeted sports of baseball, basketball, hockey, football, cricket and soccer. Its funding round included participation from Teamworthy Ventures, Gametime Capital, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman's 35V, Billy Beane and others, who joined existing investor RedBird Capital.

MedScout

MedScout is an Austin-based revenue acceleration platform for medical-technology and life sciences companies. It was founded in 2021 by Skylar Talley, a former product management leader at AT&T Cybersecurity and AlienVault, and Casey Shattuck, a former intelligence analyst in the Marine Corps. Its platform helps medtech companies with medical claims intelligence and customer relationship management integrations. That, in turn, helps salespeople prioritize opportunities, access referral data and align sales and marketing efforts. In 2023, MedScout raised a $5 million seed investment round led by Stage 2 Capital, with participation from Austin's LiveOak Ventures, as well as Alumni Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz’s Scout Fund.

Paradigm Robotics

Siddharth Thakur has the rare distinction of having two startups on this year’s list. The young founder’s first startup is Paradigm Robotics, which is developing advanced, reliable and safe robotics to mitigate risks and solve problems for firefighters and civil workers in dangerous environments. Its FireBot, which we first saw at SXSW in 2022, is a high-temperature resistant unmanned search-and-rescue robot designed to search burning buildings for human life and identify hazardous situations to help firefighters with mission-critical information.

Gazelle Ecosolutions

This startup, founded in 2022 and led by co-founder and CEO Amod Daherkar and CTO Siddharth Thakur, spun out of a partnership with the Digital Landscapes Lab to commercialize decades of critical research on carbon. Its mission is to increase transparency in carbon markets and encourage conservation projects in southern Africa. With the beta platform it's developing in partnership with Shell, users can create and model data from nature-based projects across methodologies to assist in grassland-based carbon projects. Its co-founders pitched their idea to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at Capital Factory in 2023. And last year it secured new funding from Genesis, a University of Texas-based startup investing organization.

Spritz

Spritz got its start in Seattle, when CEO Kwame Boler and Claudius Mbemba pivoted their startup Neu. The initial idea was to connect homeowners with housecleaners at vacation rentals. But in 2022, it became Spritz, which provides business tools to help house cleaners manage taxes, pricing, scheduling and other back-end administration. Boler is a former lead mentor with Techstars Austin and was a co-facilitator for Venture Out Austin. Mbemba, meanwhile, appears to be based in Seattle, where he’s also venture investment director at Startup Haven.

Eve Vehicles Corp.

Drones have nearly endless applications. But perhaps one of their most compelling use cases is in public safety where eyes in the sky can help protect first responders. This is where Eve Vehicles Corp. comes in. The startup, led by former Pensa Systems drone engineer Roger Pecina, is developing drone networks that it hopes to be able to have on the scene of an emergency within three minutes of a 911 call. Eve Vehicles has secured a $75,000 contract with AFWERX, as well as a $15,000 grant for placing in the NSIN Power Play Hackathon in 2021. It has also set up collaborations with Army Research Labs and secured letters of intent from first responders in Travis and Williamson counties.

Axial Shift

A tech startup born from the owner of the popular El Arroyo restaurant and bar Cain and Abel's expects to find traction in the coming year. Axial Shift, started when Ellis Winstanley couldn't find the software he needed for his operations, raised $4 million in seed funding late last year to help it expand its platform and build out its sales team. Axial Shift's SaaS platform ties together data from a variety of points in restaurants, including point-of-sale machines and third-party ordering platforms. It gives real-time visibility into sales, orders and other operations and is accessible to servers, managers and business owners. With that, Axial creates gamified experiences for servers that allow them to compete for higher tip rates or earn badges for arriving on time or selling particular menu items. For example, a restaurant could quickly create a contest to see who can sell the most queso and then reward the top-selling staffers. The platform also displays labor actuals versus forecasts, tip percentages in real time and enables tip pooling and online scheduling.

Handraise

TrendKite co-founder Matt Allison is reuniting the core of his former team as the foundation for his new startup Handraise Inc., which operates in nearly the same public relations and media space as TrendKite did. TrendKite, whichsold to PR giant Cision for $225 million in 2019, helped analyze readership after a news announcement had been made. Handraise, meanwhile, uses new AI capabilities to help companies target ideal audiences and boost earned media on the front end by amplifying the highest-quality news coverage of an announcement to curated audiences across social media channels. Its primary customers are PR agencies and B2B brands – basically anyone interested in boosting the impact of media coverage.

Keep Aware

Keep Aware Inc. emerged from stealth last summer with $2.4 million in initial funding led by Austin-based LiveOak Ventures. It’s led by founder and CEO Ryan Boerner. He was previously a cybersecurity expert at IBM and Darktrace. Keep Aware said the investment will accelerate its product development and go-to-market programs. The startup is focused on web browsers, which is where many of us increasingly operate nearly full-time across a variety of sites and browser-based apps. "The web browser has become the new operating system for most of our work, yet security teams have near zero visibility into what happens within it and employees continue to face a barrage of threats," LiveOak Partner Creighton Hicks stated.

Dotwork

Dotwork, the latest startup from entrepreneur Steve Elliot, is designed to, well, connect dots. The company, which announced a $12 million series A funding round in November after forming in 2022, is developing a platform that leverages AI to make sense out of seemingly unstructured data, software stacks and key metrics. It’s a tool to give executives and employees comprehensive views of projects in development and how they align with a company’s overall goals, similar to what a third-party consultant might do but in a more automated and ongoing way. Elliot’s last startup, AgileCraft, raised about $10 million before being acquired by Atlassian in 2019 for $166 million. Dotwork’s series A funding round came from Elliot himself and a group of investors that also helped fund AgileCraft prior to its acquisition.