Good Buy
Many who aspire to live a life of social and environmental responsibility want their purchases to reflect their values. But how can you tell how ethical a retailer is before you hit “buy”? That’s the problem that Raleigh-based, father-and-son startup ImpactKarma has set out to solve. ImpactKarma offers a free Google Chrome extension that rates retailers on their social responsibility, and last week it launched a marketplace that gives in-depth info on brands that are taking their social responsibility seriously. Read our full story on ImpactKarma here, and feel free to contact them directly here.
Coach 'Em Up
We could all probably benefit from a little life coaching, but it turns out that coaches could use some coaching of their own to build their businesses. That’s why longtime coach Nichole Lowe has created SoleLife, which plans to launch its beta version on May 1. Fun fact: Nichole was once a music producer who worked on multiple projects with Prince. Now she’s hoping to make it easier for people to find digital coaches for everything from professional guidance to nutrition advice, while charging coaches to take care of the back-end and funnel more clients their way. Read our full story on SoleLife here.
Venture Connect
It feels like a million years ago, but CED was scheduled to hold its Venture Connect Summit on March 17-19 in the Raleigh Convention Center before the coronavirus scotched those plans. (Which also canceled the GrepBeat After Party that was to cap the first day of the Summit; sad face.) Now, starting next Monday (May 4), CED is ready to launch the Summit in a completely virtual form as Venture Connect Online.
For $200, attendees get three weeks of exclusive content—much of it live—that will include pitches from about 90 startups and discussions with investors from the likes of Bull City Venture Partners, IDEA Fund Partners, Cofounders Capital, Excelerate Health, Hatteras Venture Partners and Pappas Capital. WRAL TechWire has more details, and you can register here.
Deal With Bite
Durham’s CureMint, which makes software for the dental industry, has closed on $1.25M in new funding led by Cary’s Cofounders Capital. The founders recently moved the startup, which was founded in 2017, to the Bull City from Los Angeles. Bonus: a little birdie tells me that GrepBeat is working on a feature story on CureMint. Stay tuned!
Reveal-ing
Raleigh’s Reveal Mobile—a leader in location-based analytics, audiences and attribution for mobile advertisers—has closed a Series A that includes Durham-based Bull City Venture Partners and IDEA Fund Partners. (Reveal wouldn’t, well, reveal the dollar amount even when we asked all nice-like.) The company has also been awarded a new patent for a system that determines the quality score of a mobile device’s location data. That could benefit not just mobile advertisers but also, say, scientists hoping to study and stop the spread of infectious diseases like Covid-19.
Grant-ed
NC IDEA has announced the 16 recipients of its $10K MICRO grants, with six of the 16 hailing from the Triangle. It also announced the 12 finalists for the 29th cycle of the $50K SEED grants, which include seven Triangle startups. See all the details here.
Who's Up
Pendo has grown like a rocket ship because so many companies use its software to help improve their own software applications. That increased scale also means that Pendo has a lot of insight into how the public is using software these days. Pendo just released a study that shows that while most companies have seen their online usage return to a normal range after some early declines (or jumps) at the start of the pandemic, about five percent have experienced a large and sustained spike.
Among those surging sectors: edtech and telehealth. Banking platforms also saw a major spike, likely related to the loan applications for the Paycheck Protection Program. TechWire has all the details.
A Puzzling Time
With so many of us cooped up at home, these are the salad days for the makers of jigsaw puzzles. That’s true for online jigsaw puzzles too, it turns out, which is great news for Durham’s Jigsaw Explorer. To meet the increased demand, Jigsaw Explorer has launched a free custom puzzle platform to make it easy to create and embed a puzzle on another website based on a chosen image. So if you’ve ever wanted a virtual jigsaw puzzle of your dog, now’s the time.
Fast Learn-ers
Dualboot Partners only launched two years ago, but the three members of its founding team were already old hands in the tech industry. Take Ben Gilman, who was the founding CTO for Raleigh-based LearnPlatform (which we've written about here, here and here). Ben teamed up with Todd Buelow and Daniel DelaCruz to form Dualboot Partners in Charlotte in February, 2018, but continued to work with LearnPlatform as a consultant. Dualboot helped develop LearnPlatform’s product and is now augmenting the company's engineering efforts while LearnPlatform continues to build out its full-time engineering team in Raleigh.
One key to Dualboot’s success is its hybrid approach—North Carolina-based customer and business success teams plus a squad of highly skilled overseas developers who are fulltime team members, not contractors. And by “North Carolina” we also mean the Triangle, as Dualboot Partners opened a Raleigh office in January led by familiar local faces Wade Minter and Tina Cochrane. Tell Tina we said hi when you email her!
Extra Bit
Durham-based Growga is offering free mindfulness courses for startups. There will be a guided meditation followed by a group discussion. You can find more details and sign up here.
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