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Apr 27, 2025
First Off Announcements and the like. Brent: Happy hour? More like happy days. Today, Texas made permanent a pandemic-ear rule that lets restaurants and bars offer alcoholic beverages to-go. As it was before, those sales must be made in conjunction with a food order and be served in sealed containers.
Cheers to that! Now, let's sip on a lil local tech news... The Big One A breakdown of the day's biggest Inno story. AlertMedia sealed a big deal when the lights were out
Brent: AlertMedia was built to help other companies keep their employees and assets as safe as possible and maintain the flow of business despite disruptive events ranging from whether to crime to a viral outbreak.
So there's no way a multi-day power and water outage during a historic winter storm amid a global pandemic was going to stop Austin-based AlertMedia from continuing its mission – or delay the close of a private equity investment worth hundreds of millions. The startup had already initiated its investment discussions with Austin-based Vista Equity Partners when Winter Storm Uri arrived in Texas in mid February, leading to widespread electricity and water failures.
"We were in the middle of closing," said founder and CEO Brian Cruver. "That might have been enough to disrupt other deals, but not us – because we are built for this."
Fourtune reported Vista invested $400M into AlertMedia in early March to obtain a majority stake. Cruver declined to confirm that figure. But he and his team have big plans to put the new funding to use right away.
The company plans to hire 90 new employees this year, bringing its total headcount, nearly all of whom are based in Austin, to the lower 300s, he said.
But even being flush with cash won't make that easy.
"There's just a lot of excitement, and we're going to need a lot of people to join our company," he said. "That's the thing I lose sleep over ... how can I get all this talent to join us over the next eight months?"
Learn more about AlertMedia's return-to-work plans and where it plans to grow next. Making Moves Inside the people, companies and organizations making moves in Austin. Report: Austin was No. 7 for tech job postings
Austin ranked No. 7 for tech job growth between 2020 and 2021, according to a new report by tech jobs site Dice.com. The report showed Austin had nearly 20K job postings in Q1 2020 and it had about 16.5K in Q1 this year. It trailed No. 1 New York, as well as Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. But we topped Los Angeles Dallas and Charlotte. Meanwhile, Austin also ranked No. 7 in job growth between February and March this year, the report said, noting 29% growth. Richmond was in the No. 1 spot, followed by Atlanta suburb Alpharetta and Salt Lake City. The report said top hiring companies in Austin included VMWare, Dell, Apple and Facebook.
Oracle's new 3D ad tech
Austin-based tech giant Oracle today announced it has developed measurement tech for in-game advertisements. That will help advertisers understand how much 3D gamers are seeing their ads on PC, mobile and web-based games. It will also help detect fraudulent ads.
Kestra adds security leader
Austin-based wealth management platform Kestra Holdings recently named Kyle Weckman as its head of cybersecurity and technology risk. Weckman was most recently executive director of security services for Options Clearing Corporation in Chicago. Before that, he worked in security at Accenture and Deloitte & Touche.
HID Global's news investment
Austin identity management company HID Global announced this week it has made an undisclosed investment in San Francisco-based Paravision, which develops facial recognition technology. The deal will help HID accelerate its development of biometric and facial recognition products. HID's investment was part of a $23M funding round led by J2 Ventures. Featured Jobs Below are featured jobs from our Careers Directory. To feature a job in this newsletter, read more.
In the Know The local startup and innovation stories you need to read today.
Elsewhere in Inno Stories from around the Inno network we think you'll dig. In the Community The events and happenings to know in the ecosystem
For more upcoming events, be sure to check out this month's Inno-approved events calendar or browse the Inno events directory. May Keeping Austin Weird & Wired The fun stuff. What starts here, changes the animated world
UT has churned out plenty of talented filmmakers over the years. Now we can add James Romo to that list. The 2013 UT grad is a production supervisor on Disney's animated film "Raya and the Last Dragon," according to a new story in The Austin Chronicle.
If you're curious what goes into that type of role on a major film, this one is worth your time.
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