The Download
Capitol Broadcasting and the Goodmon family seem to own half of the Triangle, with its holdings ranging from media (WRAL, WRAL TechWire) to sports (the Durham Bulls) to the startup-y (American Underground, American Tobacco Campus, Big Top). Adam Klein has been a key part of the Capitol team for years, previously as the head of American Underground and currently as the company’s Director of Strategy. Today, Adam is the subject of the latest edition of The Download from Brooks Malone. Trivia: Adam was a two-time Academic All-American at what college and in what sport? Click here to find out!
Making Room
Did you know that one in three American adults share housing with a roommate or roommates? Or that shared housing is the No. 1 housing arrangement for millennials? Well, Durham-based Alcove knows those facts, which is why it offers a platform for individuals to find inexpensive, private rooms to rent in furnished homes or apartments. The startup originally targeted Duke undergrads and grad students looking to find roommates in off-campus housing, but after $2.7M in venture funding, Alcove has broadened its offering. Read our full story on Alcove here.
Last Call
Friday brought the surprising news that MATI Energy, which was launched by Tatiana Birgisson in her Duke dorm room with an origin story as tasty as the healthy energy drinks themselves, is shutting down. On the one hand, it shouldn’t be a huge shock because the beverage industry is brutally competitive and requires very deep pockets to play on the national level. Still, MATI raised $2M in 2018 on top of $5M in 2017 and its newish CEO Eric Masters—a former Coca-Cola exec whom we profiled in November, 2018—had experience at the highest levels of the Beverage Wars. It was only 12 months ago that the company launched a full line of new flavors, including zero-calorie options. So it was the seemingly sudden timing that was the surprise.
But the fight for shelf space and the flood of other beverage options (sparkling water, anyone?) meant MATI needed to raise still more money—and pronto—but this time it couldn’t land the checks. It’s yet another reminder of how tough the startup game is, even for those companies that already seem to have “won.” TechWire and TBJ have more details.
Going Strong
Last week we mentioned that the annual reports of both American Underground and HQ Raleigh showed those local coworking stalwarts were both growing despite increasing encroachment from international giants like WeWork. Now TechWire is diving deeper into the local coworking and entrepreneurial-community scene with Q&A’s with RTP’s science-focused First Flight Venture Center, The Frontier RTP, and Loading Dock Raleigh.
Speaking of coworking: General Assembly, which started as a coworking space in New York in 2011 and has now morphed into a “global tech school,” is launching a “pop-up campus” at the HQ Gateway location in Raleigh. It will kick off with an event on Thursday, Feb. 13, that will include local boldface names like Clark Rinehart (Loading Dock Raleigh’s Director of Community), HQ Raleigh’s Jess Porta, and Innovate Raleigh’s Bridget Harrington.
Wearing It Best
Two data points that the Triangle is on the cutting edge of health-monitoring wearables: 1) Raleigh’s Valencell is teaming with RTP-based SunTech Medical to create a line of wearables to measure blood pressure. Valencell’s tech has already been integrated into more than 50 different wearables and hearables (which go into your ear) that have come to market around the world. 2) Looking to the future, an all-teen-girls STEM team at Sallie B. Howard School in Wilson has won $15K from Samsung for its prototype of a medical device that, when miniaturized, could detect low oxygen levels through a patient’s skin.
Now Hear This
Do you wish you had your own podcast? Well, sure, you’re only human, right? You’re in luck: Angela Connor, the CEO of Raleigh-based PR firm Change Agent Communications, is opening the Triangle Podcast Studio in April. The studio will be based in Office Evolution, a coworking space in Cary.
More podcast news: UNC’s Entrepreneurship Center and Innovate Carolina are co-sponsors of the podcast “On the Heels of Innovation.” (Get it?) The show features local and national “entrepreneurial thoughtleaders” and the “#nextgen” ones feature student or recent-grad entrepreneurs.
New Blood
Jim Triandiflou, whom we featured as a speaker at November’s Software Growth and Investment Symposium, is stepping down as the CEO of Morrisville-based Relias, a healthcare analytics and e-learning platform. Jim will be replaced by Kay Krafft, who is the current CEO of Bertelsmann Education Group. The German conglomerate Bertelsmann acquired Relias from the PE firm Vista Energy Partners in 2014.
Good Advice
If we wrote an item for every Triangle startup that says it deals with “analytics,” I’d never get to lunchtime. But just one more today: Raleigh’s Cymatic, which provides “user and entity behavior analytics,” has launched an advisory board that includes cybersecurity experts from Netflix and Freddie Mac.
Though the Netflix exec is actually from Netflix DVD, which reminds us of a simpler time when Netflix was all about mailing you DVDs like a message in a bottle. Or the movie version of North Carolina resident Nicholas Sparks’ tear-jerker, Message In a Bottle. (Note to Wikipedia: you might want to edit the movie’s page, which includes lines like this: “Theresa goes to [the] Outer Banks to research it further but when she meets him, they are attracted to each other and start lusting after each other's bodily presence.”)
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