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Happy Thursday!

Get a good night’s sleep for tomorrow morning’s (9 a.m.) Ask The Expert, in which we’ll put Jason Caplain (Managing Partner at Bull City Venture Partners) in the virtual hot seat to field your questions via Zoom. Jason is one of those Zoom pros who mutes when he’s not talking, then drops the knowledge when he is. Register now!


Binge-worthy

Yes, it would have been more fun to go to CED’s Venture Connect Summit in person back on March 17-19, if only for the would-be highlight of the GrepBeat After Party. But our own Suzanne Blake did a deep-dive of the online version of the summit and discovered your next binge-worthy “show.” CED is dropping three “episodes” in total, the first of which was released this past Monday, to be followed by a new episode on each of the next two Mondays. This week’s batch includes pitches from 19 tech startups and 13 life science companies. We’d already profiled 11 of the 19—we don’t do life sciences, natch—but Suzanne brings you news from the others. You can read our full “review” here, and it's not too late to register to get all the exclusive content for $200.

Speaking of CED, Ravila Gupta gave an interview to WRAL TechWire in which she explained stepping down as CED’s CEO (though she’ll stay on as Board Chair) to take a new position as CEO of the Chapel Hill-based Bagchi Group.

 


Big Draw

Raleigh’s Téa Blumer was barely a teenager when she joined iScribble, a collaborative drawing platform for aspiring artists. She was an NC State student when iScribble suddenly shut down in 2018. Now she’s the CEO of iScribble after acquiring the rights to the site with plans to turn it into a freemium SaaS platform. iScribble is currently in pre-launch for a Kickstarter (it needs 3,000 sign-ups to go live) and is separately trying to close a seed round in the $250-$500K range. Read our full story here.

 


Head Launch-er

As we mentioned on Tuesday, Launch Chapel Hill will host a virtual Pitch Night next Wednesday for the 13th cohort of its four-month accelerator, its first under its new-ish director, Velvet Nelson. (We’ll be “there.”) Today TechWire has a Q&A with Velvet, who before moving to the Triangle when her husband got a position in the area served as the program manager for the Queen City Fintech startup accelerator and was the co-founder of the edtech startup ProctorFree. Welcome to the Triangle, Velvet!

 


Military Cover

LCI, the Durham-based company that’s one of the largest employers of blind people—and the parent of LCI Tech, which we wrote about in December—has landed a contract to distribute more than 576,000 face masks to the U.S. Air Force. Six other nonprofits are responsible for manufacturing the face masks, while LCI will handle their purchase, storage and delivery. TechWire and TBJ have more details.

 


Dropping In

Causey Aviation, which is testing drone delivery of meals and packages, has joined the Wake Forest-based Advanced Mobility Collective, a nonprofit that fosters autonomous transportation innovation. Causey Aviation COO Jeff Causey, who is also the Founder/CEO of Causey Aviation Unmanned (i.e. its drone initiative), is joining the Collective’s Board of Advisors. Hey, some human-touch-less drone delivery sounds pretty good right about now.

Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!


Carolyn Sparano is this week’s winner for emerging victorious from the random number generator among the 15 who correctly guessed that I was at Viceroy in downtown Durham. The former GM at Bronto Software writes: “I’m sheltering in place and celebrating my GrepBeat win up in Boone, N.C. Readers should know that I have now worn the same sweatpants for a week, don't know what day it is anymore, truly miss the chaos of work... but Happy Hour now starts early on the Sparano porch!” No judgment here on the sweatpants front, and Happy Hour sounds great right about now!

 

Because too much news is never enough

                      
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