Reporter’s picks: Austin’s biggest tech, startup stories of 2019

By Mike Cronin  – Staff Writer, Austin Business Journal

The most significant stories of 2019 played out over a period of months, rather than hit hard with a single breaking-news event.

That being the case, I’d like to highlight five Austin stories that have had major impacts on Central Texas.

  1. Venture capital floods Austin: There hasn’t been this much venture capital available to Austin startup founders since before the dot-com bubble burst. By the end of November, more than $1.5 billion in VC had been invested in Central Texas startups. Some have pointed to WeWork’s spectacular fall as a cautionary tale but Austin VCs such as Sara Brand, founding general partner of True Wealth Ventures, don’t see a bubble in Austin: “I don’t think Austin-based VCs or companies are having the same issues as the traditional Silicon Valley based VCs are.”
  2. Data devours real estate: 2019 was a year when the tech and real estate sectors firmly collided. The iBuyer model — where a data-savvy startup delivers a cash offer for your home quickly — swept the residential sector. Disruptive startups such as Zillow, Redfin, Opendoor and Perch swooped into the market. Even Austin-based Keller Williams Realty partnered up with Offerpad as co-founder Gary Keller continued to toil with exclusive tech in his lab. On the commercial side of real estate, startups such as Austin-based RealMassive continued to gain steam by delivering digestible big data to brokers, and industry pros warmed up to new technology such as virtual real
  3. More headquarters move here: The Texas capital is becoming more of a headquarters destination for big companies. Resideo Technologies Inc. opened a startup-vibed HQ in East Austin and Zoho Corp., a California-based software and information technology company, announced Austin as its new U.S. headquarters in April. It plans to build a 100,000-square-foot campus on 375 acres on the southeast side of town. More than 60 Zoho employees already work in Austin and ultimately will have between 400 and 500.
  4. AMD’s continued success: Chip shortages at Intel Corp. and increasingly better performing processors have helped Advanced Micro Devices Inc. improve its reputation and share value. Though based in California, AMD is the 14th-largest tech employer in Austin and CEO Lisa Su is based here. AMD’s share value was above $42 as this paper went to press — up from about $20 at the start of the year. The company’s stock has climbed about 1,419% since Su became president and CEO in October 2014.
  5. Firefly rises like a phoenix: CEO Tom Markusic has guided Firefly Aerospace Inc.’s emergence from bankruptcy in August 2017 and rise to be one of the major players among the nation’s commercial spaceflight companies. It won the “Turnaround of the Year” award from Space News, a space-industry news publication, on Dec. 10. Also in 2019, one of its subsidiaries, Firefly Black LLC, was one of eight companies selected by the U.S. Air Force to compete for up to $986 million worth of launches during a nine-year span. Firefly also sealed a deal with Israel Aerospace Industries to build a new version of the Beresheet lunar lander that would fly atop Firefly’s Alpha rocket.

These are some of the articles we deem most impactful of the past year. To see the most-read tech stories of 2019, see this article.

See original article here.