School Ties
Many of us want to keep up with our collegiate alma mater and help its current students, but we also want—and need—to go to work, spend time with our families and binge Netflix. (BTW have you seen Mindhunter?) That’s why Raleigh startup Protopia makes it easier for schools to connect with its alumni. Rather than introducing yet another platform or app, Protopia aims to meet alums where they already prefer to communicate: email, Slack, or SMS texting. Read our full story on Founder/CEO Max Leisten and Protopia here.
PE Push
If it seems like private equity firms are playing a growing role in the Triangle’s startup ecosystem, that’s because they are. While large VCs have trended toward making investments later in a startup’s life cycle, PEs have started to move earlier in the process. One key difference is that PEs generally buy a majority interest, including providing liquidity to founders and early investors. Often they’ll push in some serious growth capital with the hopes of making the company surge forward so that within a few years an even bigger fish might buy them out, or mostly out.
On Tuesday, UNC’s Kenan Institute and Austin-based PE firm Vista Equity Partners hosted the inaugural Software Growth and Investment Symposium. The event brought together tech executives and investors to discuss how tech startups can scale and, eventually, exit, and how PE firms can play a role in achieving those ends. The afternoon included a session with CEO Jim Triandiflou of Cary-based Relias, a healthcare analytics and e-learning platform that Vista bought in 2012 before selling to German media giant Bertelsmann two years later, all while Relias still continues to crank along in the Triangle. GrepBeat was there, and we’ll hopefully post the story later today (apparently Vista first wants to make sure we didn’t make fun of Austin too much).
Spreeding Ahead
Hey, were we talking about PE firms making growth equity investments in Triangle-based startups? Here’s another to add to the list: Durham-based fintech Spreedly yesterday received a $75M investment from Spectrum Equity, which has offices in Boston and San Francisco. While CEO Justin Benson retains a “meaningful” stake in the company, it’s a safe bet that Spectrum purchased a majority stake. And in a much-appreciated moment of semi-transparency, Spectrum’s Adam Margolin told TBJ that some of the $75M went to paying out early investors and the founders, while the rest will inject more fuel into the Spreedly rocket ship. (Here’s more from TBJ, with a nice analysis from Lauren Ohnesorge, and TechWire.)
BTW, in the very first week that I moved to the Triangle last May, I attended the inaugural Big Top Startup Crawl at Spreedly’s then-new offices on Foster Street. Well, Spreedly has already outgrown those digs and is moving to the Durham.ID building, and now has an extra $75M in its bank account. How time flies!
Goodbye, Again
What’s the record for buying and selling your own company? Because Steve Malik has to be close. Steve founded the Cary-based medical data platform Medfusion in 1996, sold it to Intuit in 2010 for $91M, reacquired it in 2013 for a number that we presume is significantly less than $91M, and then this week sold Medfusion again to California-based NextGen Software for $43M. Though Steve’s not exactly done with the space, or even the company, as he’s spinning off a new startup called Greenlight Health Data Solutions that already has 27 employees and builds on Medfusion’s Data Services group.
Steve also tells TechWire that the deal gives him more “flexibility and leverage” to help push through his planned $2B Downtown South project in Raleigh, which includes a new stadium. You’ll likely recall that Steve is the owner of North Carolina FC and North Carolina Courage pro soccer teams. (TBJ also weighed in.)
Very Interesting...
Raleigh AI startup Pryon has been named to CNBC’s Upstart 100 List for 2019. Which reminds us: in late September, we featured Pryon Founder and CEO Igor Jablokov in The Download, and the Q&A was so entertaining that I dubbed Igor “one interesting cat.” Clearly, CNBC reads GrepBeat. Just like you!
Picture Perfect
Cary’s Epic Games is buying Quixel, a Swedish company that has expertise in helping create photo-realistic 3D content. While the characters in Fortnite and Epic’s other blockbuster titles like Gears of War have tended toward the super-muscular and cartoony, lots of other game developers who build on Epic’s Unreal Engine may prize the tools. Plus Epic raised $1.3B last year so they can do pretty much what they please.
Serious Game
Epic Games isn’t the only game (company) in Cary. TechWire has a profile on Kronoverse, which has raised $1M to build a 3D role-playing game called CryptoFights. The major twist is that Kronoverse is using blockchain technology to help create a marketplace within the game itself where players can buy, sell and trade—and make real money. Or is it "real" cybercurrency? Hmm.
|
