Sneak Previews
Hey, have we mentioned CED's Venture Connect Summit? Well, we’re going to continue to do so right up until it kicks off a week from Tuesday. Today we’ve written features about two more of the startups that will be presenting at the March 17-19 event. The first is Apex-based Caarmo, which enables companies with fleet vehicles to better monitor and manage their four-wheeled money-makers. Read the story here.
Next up is Durham’s RelayOne, a SaaS platform for hospital systems to schedule surgeries so that medical staff and surgical device representatives—who need to make sure the right tools are on hand at the right time—can all get on the same page, remotely. Read our full feature here.
Veteran Move
“Muster” is a noun, a verb, and also the name of the nationwide series of conferences put on by Bunker Labs, an organization that supports entrepreneurship among military veterans. The Muster Across America tour makes a stop in the Triangle with a full-day event a week from today, March 12, at the MetLife campus in Cary. The day will be capped by a pitch competition worth $10K to the winner. Last year’s winner was D’Shawn Russell, a military spouse with a candle business called Southern Elegance that's now available in more than 300 retail locations.
You can read our full preview of the Muster event and more about D’Shawn here.
Deal Time
Jurassic Capital has made its first deal by investing $2.8M into Raleigh-based Corevist, which develops and sells a B2B e-commerce platform to manufacturers worldwide. Loyal readers will recall that Jurassic is the new growth investment firm —think of it as a small PE outfit focused on B2B SaaS startups—from the dinosaur-branding GrepBeat Godfather (aka Joe Colopy) and Bronto alum Kevin Mosley, which we wrote about here. Kevin cited Corevist's dynamic Founder/CEO Sam Bayer and the company's consistent profitability as a bootstrapped startup as some of the key motivations for the deal. The Jurassic blog post is worth clicking on if only for the picture of the principals toasting the deal.
Coming Together
Two Raleigh-based HR tech companies are joining forces to create a new employee referral software called Text2Refer. Cadient Talent, which helps companies like Costco and Genesco hire talent for their “distributed workforces,” is partnering with local startup EmployUs, which specializes in helping hiring managers find the most qualified candidates by tapping into referrals from current employees. Here are the full details from Cadient and EmployUs, while TechWire also covered the news. And here’s a hot scoop: the GrepBeat Godfather is an EmployUs investor.
Viral Effect
Tuesday’s announcement of the first coronavirus case in the Triangle is just the most concrete example of what has already been clear—the nasty worldwide bug is going to affect us all in some way, even if it’s just a hopefully temporary case of 401k-dropitis. Here are some news items about the impact on the local and broader tech community:
A) Chapel Hill startup Terra Dotta is among those helping universities deal with the novel health challenges faced by students studying abroad, especially in countries that have been hit hard such as China, South Korea and Italy. B) RIoT’s Tom Snyder writes in TechWire about how IoT could help us deal with our next global health crisis, and hopefully the current one as well. C) Red Hat has called off the IRL version of its annual Red Hat Summit, which had been scheduled for April 28-29 in San Francisco, and will instead hold a “virtual” summit. D) WASH YOUR HANDS!
No End In Sight
WeWork’s recent stumbles aside, the coworking market continues to explode both locally and globally. In the Triangle, the homegrown Loading Dock is planning two new locations—a West Raleigh outpost slated to open in late 2020 and a Wake Forest location in the first half of 2021. Meanwhile a new report from Morningstar and Pitch Book forecasts that in the U.S., coworking square footage will increase from 80M square feet in 2018 to 360M sf in 2028. That’s a lot of kombucha.
Space Program
The coworking concept is a cousin of the peer-to-peer model of Airbnb and its ilk, in which physical spaces are brokered on a user-friendly platform. That’s the method of event-planning platform Peerspace, which makes it easier to book meeting and event space. The San Francisco-based Peerspace has been increasing its Triangle and North Carolina presence, offering access to such primo spaces as Raleigh’s Union Station. TechWire has more details.
Goodbye, For Now
Eagle-eyed readers might notice that lately I haven’t been linking to the NC Business News Wire. NCBizNews (as its friends called it) was launched in 2016 by then-UNC journalism prof Chris Roush and has been produced by a specific UNC journalism class that focused on making the site hum. Unfortunately, the class isn’t being offered this semester because fewer than 10 students signed up, so NCBizNews has gone dark. Though Roush has moved on to become the Dean of the Journalism School at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, here’s hoping that NCBizNews will return to life next semester.
Extra Bits
1) The only way to improve what’s already the single best day of the year—i.e. St. Patrick’s Day—is to cap it with the GrepBeat After Party that will immediately follow the first night of CED’s Venture Connect Summit. The event, which is an easy walk from the Raleigh Convention Center at Trophy Brewing Tap + Table (225 S. Wilmington St.), will be brought to you by our loyal sponsors Cherry Bekaert, TriNet and Vaco. Please RSVP so we can make sure you’ll be properly fed.
2) Colopy Ventures is seeking a Director of Marketing. Bonus/warning: a majority of your time will be spent working on GrepBeat. Please come help me out! This link has all the info.
3) If you can’t wait that long to see me, you’ll get a chance at 1pm tomorrow at the information session for RIoT’s Accelerator Program being held at City Hall Plaza in Durham. You can RSVP here. I’ll be talking about how startups can get (good) media coverage. Pro tip: I liked baked goods, especially anything chocolate.
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