In the latest Friday Nooner, Raleigh-Durham Startup Week co-chair Chris Heivly stopped by to share the backstory and some highlights of the inaugural four-day event that took over downtown Durham last week. We also learned that Pete Tweets as an (allegedly) obscure 19th Century President and that being elected President as a Whig was basically a death sentence.
Tech Culture Club
Can you believe we’re already up to Episode 4 of our Tech Culture Club podcast, sponsored by Vaco? It’s true. This week, host Melissa Phillippi (CEO of Durham-based WorkDove) welcomes Joanna Cox, the Human Resources Manager of Durham-based ServiceTrade. You’ll likely recall that ServiceTrade landed an $85M growth investment in December and that CEO Billy Marshall has been both a Friday Nooner guest and a Download Q&A subject.
Yet being flush with funds doesn’t exempt ServiceTrade from needing to battle to attract and retain talent in today’s tight talent market, where cash is only one thing that employees value. Read some show highlights here, then listen—and subscribe!—here.
NC IDEA Grants
Fifteen early-stage North Carolina startups woke up this morning with $10K in their bank accounts after NC IDEAannounced the winners of its $10K MICRO grants. A little more than half of them hail from the Triangle: Raleigh’s Animal Cancer Dx, Calico Sol and LabRunner; Apex-based anyBODY Clothing and Ashanti Styles LLC; Durham’s DivySci Software; Carrboro’s Holy Smokes! Food; and Chapel Hill’s ROSA Technology. Look for GrepBeat feature stories on most of them in the weeks ahead. These 15 winners were selected from 139 applicants, and the cash—and recognition/validation—can be a big help at the very early stages that these startups mostly find themselves. Congrats to all the winners!
NC IDEA also announced the 12 finalists for the Spring 2022 cycle of its $50K SEED grants, of which it will award 5-7 in May. The lone Triangle rep is Holly Springs-based Nurtured Nest, which we wrote about in October.
Flower Power
While NC IDEA has never written GrepBeat a check—not that we’d turn it down—they certainly help us significantly by surfacing new, promising startups that deserve to have their stories told more widely. The NC IDEA pipeline brought us the next two feature stories. First up is Durham-based Information Patterns, which was a semifinalist for the Spring 2022 $50K SEED grants. Information Patterns actually started in 2003 as a location-sharing technology to help during emergencies, before making a dramatic pivot in 2017 to make sensors to help farmers grow flowers. You read that right.
Fun fact I learned from this story: Colombia produces 70 percent of the flowers sold in the U.S. Related fun fact: Information Patterns Founder Gabriel Coch hails from Colombia. Read our full story here.
Good Dates
Raleigh-based Spring & Mulberry first came across our radar screen last September when it was named a semifinalist (and later a finalist) for the Fall 2021 cycle of NC IDEA’s $50K SEED grants. But the female-led startup wanted to hold off on a GrepBeat story until they were ready to release the first wave of their no-added-sugar sweets. Last month, Co-Founders Kathryn Shah and Sarah Bell rolled out five flavors of their luxury chocolate bars that are sweetened with dates.
Kathryn was inspired to kick sugar after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, and her time in Dubai a half-dozen years earlier that introduced her to the wide and sophisticated use of dates and other dried fruits led her to team up with Sarah to launch Spring & Mulberry. Read our full story here.
In The News
Raleigh-based HomeCloud, which we first profiled last September, is having a nice little burst of publicity. After a solid run in the Triangle Inno Madness brackets, Triangle Inno profiled HomeCloud along with three other Triangle startups we’ve also featured (Exhale, Second Nature and Tiny Earth Toys) trying to capitalize on trends in the housing market. Now TechWire writes that HomeCloud has raised $250K in funding and Founder and CEO George Kirkland—who’d previously co-founded and successfully exited the edtech RaiseMe—plans to raise a larger round in the coming months.
Cleaning Up
Green Places, the Raleigh-based startup founded by serial entrepreneur Alex Lassiter that we first profiled last July, recognized last Friday’s Earth Day by announcing its pledge to plant a tree for every “Tiny Climate Act” that was recognized on its microsite. Users could earn points by performing “tiny acts” like picking up litter, riding your bike instead of driving or composting food scraps—and issuing challenges to others to do so as well. TechWire also reports that Green Places raised some more funding from local angels.
We happen to know that Green Places’ largest investor is none other than Jes Lipson, Levitate’s Founder and CEO and the former founder of ShareFile. Jes helped bring in other Triangle entrepreneurs, including GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy, to the seed round. We also mention Jes and Joe in the same sentence because the two of them led a panel last Thursday during Raleigh-Durham Startup Week on bootstrapping, which is what Jes did with ShareFile and Joe did with Bronto. Friday Nooner co-host Chantal Allam wrote about the session for TechWire, which captures Joe pre-haircut..
Buying Spree
Let’s move up the tech company food chain from early-stage startups to large, private-equity backed Triangle unicorns insightsoftware and Prometheus Group. Students of the PE game know that when they write their big checks, they often want to fund growth by acquisition, so they can turn around in a few years and sell a by-then-larger company to someone else, often another PE firm. So it was no surprise last week to see headlines about insightsoftware’s 21st acquisition (at least) in the last few years, and Prometheus’ ninth such deal since 2019.
Apple Digs
Now let’s climb still further up the food chain to the very tippy-top: Apple, the world’s most valuable company. TechWire reports that Apple is planning to spend $19.3M upgrading the MetLife building in Cary where it’s basing its Triangle operations while it constructs its own campus. Unless you’ve wandered into this newsletter in error, you know that Apple announced last year that it’s opening a hub in the Triangle that will ultimately house about 3,000 employees.
Build Great Software
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Extra Bit
It’s been almost four years since RIoT co-founder Larry Steffan died after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. Or 1,370 days if you’re counting, which his kids surely are. That’s why they’re trying to raise $1,370 in Larry’s honor this Saturday (April 30) at the annual PanCan Purple Stride Walk to aid in the fight against pancreatic cancer. You can find more info here.
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Wow, I actually look like I could use some caffeine in this photo. But you can snatch that coveted red mug right out of my hands if you correctly identify my location. Send your guesses here!
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