Our long national nightmare is over—the Friday Nooner is back from its summer hiatus! Join co-hosts Pete, GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy and TechWire’s Chantal Allam tomorrow as they recap the week in tech in the Triangle and beyond. They’ll welcome guest Ryan Bethencourt, an entrepreneur and investor (especially in the future of food) who has been a welcome ball of energy since moving to the Triangle from the Bay Area during the pandemic. You can watch live at noon tomorrow on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterward on those same platforms or in its podcast form.
Free Advice
While much free advice really is worth what you paid for it—for example when Netflix emails me “Don’t forget to finish Seinfeld!” as if I haven’t already seen every episode multiple times—that’s not the case with the Startup NC Law Clinic. Operated by UNC’s School of Law, the clinic offers free legal advice to entrepreneurs, with no UNC connection necessary. The clinic is staffed by law students (who earn credit) and overseen by professor Marjorie White. Read our full story on the clinic here.
Oh, Canada!
Ontario, Canada-based insurtech ProNavigator has opened a new U.S. HQ in Durham, Founder and CEO Joseph D’Souzatells TBJ. ProNavigator offers a SaaS knowledge management platform for the insurance industry. The startup currently has about 50 employees and is looking to increase that by about 50%, thanks in part to a recent $10M investment. D’Souza says he’s going to commute to the Triangle for now, but might end up moving here in the future. Hey, let’s ask him again after another Canadian winter.
Mo' Canada
Startup-focused CIBC Innovation Banking—a subsidiary of Toronto-HQ’d megabank Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC)—has opened a new office in Durham. The Triangle office will be led by Walt Sparks, a veteran of Square1 Bank (now part of PacWest) and PNC. CIBC Innovation Banking focuses on providing venture debt, lines of credit and other debt financing to growing tech and life sciences companies. It was also part of the $10M financing round in fellow Canadian native and new Durham neighbor ProNavigator mentioned in the previous item. Welcome to all our friends from the North!
Dropping Knowledge
Two top execs from Raleigh-based startup Allstacks have been invited to speak at DevOps World 2022 in Orlando on Sept. 27-29. The speakers will be CTO Jeremy Freeman and Adam Dahlgren, the Senior VP of Product and Growth. Allstacks is a predictive forecasting and risk management platform to help unclog bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle. We first profiled Allstacks in 2019 and CEO Hersh Tapadia was our Friday Nooner guest on June 24, the last episode before our summer hiatus. (Hey, have we mentioned that the Friday Nooner is back tomorrow?!) See more on the Allstacks news here.
New Product
Durham-based adtech Kevel (formerly Adzerk) has launched a new product called Relay, an API solution to help publishers build custom programmatic ad capabilities. It’s almost hard to believe that Kevel CEO James Avery has never been on the Friday Nooner, considering he’s been a Download subject, has appeared on not one but two GrepBeat podcasts (Exit Storiesand For Starters) and once gave me a Adzerk T-shirt at a GrepBeat Happy Hour. Nevertheless, here's more on the Kevel news.
C-Suite Shuffle
In late July, we wrote about the $100M Series C raised by Durham-based FlexGen, the energy management software and hardware startup. The company has done some shuffling in its C-Suite to help manage the growth. This week FlexGen announced Diane Giacomozzi as its COO and Hugh Scott as CTO. See TechWire for more.
Follow-ups
Here are some more takes from our local media friends on items that we mentioned in Tuesday’s newsletter: 1) TBJ/Triangle Inno has more on Raleigh-based Diveplane’s $25M fundraise, including its plans for a new HQ in downtown Raleigh and a profile of the lead investor, Silicon Valley-based Shield Capital; 2) Both TechWire and Triangle Inno has more info on BrooksBell’s LEAD FROM BEHIND initiative with celebs Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny in which the latter pair (who both recently turned 45) filmed their colonoscopies as a way to encourage more young people to undergo the procedure that can catch colon cancer before it starts.
It's A Vibe
Triangle tech bellwether Red Hat has decided that the majority of its employees don’t have to return to the office if they don’t want as part of its “office-flex” plan. Chief People Officer Jennifer Dudeck informed Red Hatters of the new policy in a blog post in which she also said that “the office is a vibe,” which I’m totally going to steal. See TechWire for more.
Build Great Software
Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Dualboot is a software and business development company. Their clients include tech and non-tech founders as well as Fortune 500 companies, so they can start small or scale fast depending on what you need. Every client is assigned a U.S.-based Product Director with years of experience bringing products to market, and they can manage the entire development process. They focus on how the software fits into your company to drive revenue and build the business. At Dualboot, they don’t just write your software—they help you grow your business. Intrigued? Email them here.
Extra Bit
Wilmington-based TRU Colors, a brewery startup from serial entrepreneur George Taylor that employed (active) gang members as a way to reduce violence and improve the community, has closed down. See TechWire for more, but you should really read the recent New Yorker piece on the company. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but it’s a gripping read that upon finishing, you might well wonder how it stayed open this long.
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