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Happy Thursday!
We hereby pledge an entirely unredacted newsletter no matter the reputational damage to unrelated third parties or, well, me.
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After some two decades working in tech, Megan Sumrell left the corporate world in 2014 and began to grow a business in a network-marketing health and beauty company. Frustrated by the lack of quality tools to help manage her business, Megan teamed with former colleague Jennifer Turnage to build their own solution. Thus was born myBeeHyve, a contact-management software startup based in Raleigh and Wilmington. It’s also one of a plethora of local startups with “bee” in the name, including Bee Well (we met Co-Founder Dr. Alden Parsons earlier this week) and Bee Downtown, the literal-not-figurative-bees company led by wunderkind Leigh-Kathryn Bonner.
Megan sat down with our own Tricia Lucas for the latest edition of the Meet... series. Among other things, you’ll learn why Megan is likely super-stoked that NC State grad Christina Koch is set to break the record for the longest single spaceflight for a woman. Read the full Q&A here.
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Don’t worry, Ben Franklin: no matter how much we talk about “alternative energy,” nothing is going to replace electricity anytime soon as the primary means of powering the vast majority of industrial machines. (As for electric cars, meanwhile, go Tweet @ Elon.) That’s why 3DFS’s software-defined electricity technology has so much potential. The company’s Chapel Hill-based spin-out, SAM Controllers, is applying 3DFS’s tech to the specific commercial application of more efficiently controlling the electrical use of air compressors, water pumps, conveyors and other industrial machines.
Our Rebecca Ayers caught up with Chris Doerfler, the Co-Founder of both 3DFS and SAM Controllers, for a shocking (get it?) report from the front lines of efficient electricity. Read it here.
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If you hurry, you can still catch the end of the three-day East Coast Game Conference that’s taken over the Raleigh Convention Center. The 11th edition of the event has drawn about 2,000 attendees and helps cement the Triangle’s status as key hub of the game development world, led by—all together now—Cary’s Epic Games, the maker of a little diversion called Fortnite. WRAL TechWire has an interview with Walter Rotenberry, co-president of the Triangle Game Initiative and the event’s organizer.
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Durham-based health and safety data company Biospatial has raised $500K in equity, according to the nosy folks at the SEC. Biospatial, which raised $1M a year ago, works with partners—including 17 U.S. states as of February—to use data to support public health preparedness, better treatment of opiod dependency, traffic safety, emergency response, and other health and safety concerns. Let's hope they do something about the public menace of pedestrians walking aimlessly with their eyes glued to their phones.
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Attendees of February’s CED Tech Conference will recall the fireside chat between Pendo CEO Todd Olson and John Stewart, the CEO of Charlotte’s MapAnything, which offers location-based intelligence solutions for the Salesforce CRM (customer-relationship management) platform. Yesterday, Stewart announced that MapAnything had been acquired by Salesforce, which had already been a MapAnything investor and partner. Terms were redacted, but we’re trying to get a subpoena to see them. Stay tuned!
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While MapAnything’s employees are likely (understandably) apprehensive today about how the company might change now that it’s been acquired, perhaps they can look to the example of Raleigh’s Junxure for some hope. Junxure, which makes CRM software for financial advisors, was swallowed up last year by New York-based fintech AdvisorEngine.
Now AdvisorEngine is so pleased with the Junxure’s performance, TBJ reports, that it plans to grow its Raleigh headcount by 30 percent in the next 18-24 months. The clincher: AdvisorEngine’s COO was standing in the hallway at a Junxure conference when he saw financial advisors coming out of a session “all hugging.” While work-related hugging seems like a risky strategy these days, in some cases it can obviously still pay off.
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Because too much news is never enough
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See our full, ruthlessly curated calendar of Triangle tech events here.
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