Happy Thursday!
We’re glad to see NCSU and Duke researchers help unravel one of life’s great mysteries: why puppy-dog eyes are so irresistible. Except to monsters, and cat people. Which is redundant. |
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Jesse Lipson is a serial entrepreneur who’s seen and done pretty much everything in the startup game except raise money. He changed that this week as his Raleigh-based Real Magic—whose product Levitate helps insurance brokers, real estate agents and other smallish businesspeople stay top-of-mind with their current and potential clients—closed a $6M Series A with three investors, including Durham’s Bull City Venture Partners. Lipson had bootstrapped his first company, ShareFile, to a $93M acquisition by Citrix in 2011, then stuck around at Citrix for five years while building out the company’s substantial Raleigh presence.
Read our full story here to hear from Jesse and BCVP’s Jason Caplain with complete details on the transaction, and you can also read our Real Magic feature from last August for proof that the company is actually ahead of schedule. Plus, check out WRAL TechWire’s Q&A with Jesse.
And sorry to bury the lede, but Jesse also reports that his wife, Brooks Bell—the founder of her eponymous website analytics and optimization company—has been recovering well from treatment for colon cancer. We wish both halves of the Triangle tech community’s reigning Power Couple all the best.
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Raleigh’s Feedtrail, an app that improves patient satisfaction with quickie real-time surveys that typically get filled out when the patient is still in the hospital, is going places both literally and figuratively. On the figurative side, last month the company closed on $600K in new funding. Starting last week, the Cofounders Capital-backed startup is soaking up the sun in Los Angeles as part of the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator Program through September. The program includes a $100K investment from a major strategic player in the healthcare industry.
You can read our full Feedtrail feature here. And be sure to see the cool graphic cooked up by our own Rachel Shaw, a GrepBeat intern from the North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM).
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Another Raleigh startup, K4 Connect, is continuing its up-and-to-the-right growth by announcing a new investment from/strategic partnership with Chicago-based Ziegler LinkAge Ventures, which focuses on the senior living and healthcare spaces. That’s tailor-made for F. Scott Moody’s K4 Connect, which provides technology for “smart” senior living communities to more than 75 facilities and 15,000 residents.
The terms of the investment weren’t disclosed, natch, but K4 Connect did reveal that it’s now raised more than $27M. This sounds like a perfect fit, though I question the placement of a bullet point in the middle of “LinkAge,” which I have been unable to replicate on deadline via Mailchimp after (successfully) going deep down the Microsoft Word Wingdings well. People, regular letters are plenty.
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Durham’s FoodLogiQ has been putting its recent $10M funding to good use, planning to add 50 employees this year and 100 over the next 18 months, primarily in engineering. FoodLogiQ helps restaurants and other food providers better track their supply chain, which can be a matter of life and death if, for example, it’s contaminated with the likes of E. coli. The company has added glitzy clients like Chick-fil-A, Five Guys Burgers and Fries, and the Panda Restaurant Group (parent of Panda Express) over the last few months, and suddenly I’m very hungry.
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Triangle tech entrepreneur Steve Malik, the founder of Cary-based medical patient portal Medfusion, is laying down a major marker to help his goal of luring a Major League Soccer franchise to Raleigh. Malik—the owner of the North Carolina FC of the United Soccer League and the Courage of the National Women’s Soccer League—has teamed with top Triangle real estate developer John Kane to unveil plans for a $1.9B soccer complex just south of downtown Raleigh that will also include offices, hotels, retail and residences.
Well, technically the public unveiling won’t be until next Tuesday, but TBJ has a thorough look at some early details, while TechWire talks to other Triangle tech boldface names (including serial entrepreneur Scot Wingo, BCVP’s David Jones and Cofounders Capital’s David Gardner) who all laud Malik’s tenacity.
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Active “social impact” angel investor Steve Monti’s Solidarity Capital has raised $565K. That will give him a little more dry powder to invest in companies like Raleigh’s WasteZero (which we mentioned in Tuesday’s edition) and Chapel Hill’s Spotlight Solar, which (SPOILER!) we’ll be featuring at some point in the next few weeks.
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Durham’s American Underground and Google For Startups have announced that applications are open (through July 10) for the fourth annual Black Founders Exchange. The program will run from Sept. 22-27 at AU and will conclude with a cool Demo Day. Last year’s winner, Durham’s Optimal Solar, was last seen in Hollywood at the Backstage Capital Accelerator, which originated directly out of the Black Founders Exchange (a Backstage Capital exec was a Demo Day judge).
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Mark Bavisotto and Keith Washo have announced the date for the second annual Startup Summit: Thursday, Oct. 10, at the RTP Conference Center. Last year’s inaugural event was a cool one (see our story), and this one looks to be even bigger.
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Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!
This week’s mug winner, Feodor Mejouev, also gets the (new) award for Most Determined. Feodor, like our own Rachel Shaw (see No. 2 above), is a NCSSM student who’s part of the new startup summer internship program that GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy has helped launch. Feodor is interning at Durham’s Pattern Health, and here’s what he thinks so far: “The days here never become anything less than wonderful.”
Sure, Pattern Health is great and all, but let’s hear Feodor talk more about us: “I love to read GrepBeat and I thought that having a mug would be great.” Our take: Feodor saw Rachel's GrepBeat mug, and quite reasonably made pursuit of said mug his highest life goal. So on Tuesday night, Feodor painstakingly looked up coffee shops in the Triangle on Google Images until he found the piece of art that matched the one in the background of the photo. (Which was at downtown Raleigh’s 42 & Lawrence, the favorite spot of Lewis Sheats, who runs NCSU’s Entrepreneurship Clinic.) Feodor, congrats on the outstanding hustle, and enjoy the mug!
Finally, we hope that Feodor's example can inspire Jesse Jones, the founding partner of startup-focused Fourscore Business Law, as his three fruitless guesses so far have actually gotten further from the target each week, including one submission that Joe C. called "maybe the worst guess I've ever seen." Ouch! Sounds like Jesse needs his own NCSSM intern. |
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Because too much news is never enough
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Extra Bit
We’d really like to cover the WE Pitch event tonight at Durham’s Carolina Theater (sorry, no more public tickets available) but haven’t had any luck in tracking down an organizer to see if we can get media passes. If you know anyone who fits that description, email me! |
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