We’re only a little more than 48 hours away from Thursday’s GrepBeat Happy Hour at Bull McCabe’s in Durham from 5-7 p.m. Your first round will be courtesy of our sponsor, the startup-focused Hutchison law firm. Please register so we can get a sense of expected numbers.
Scroll down for some big Grep-a-palooza announcements—including the opportunity for three startups to pitch at the event—as we count down to the end of the Early-Bird pricing this Friday. Get those tix now!
The Download
This week’s subject of the Download Q&A is Justin Senkbeil, the Co-Founder and CEO of Raleigh-based CompostNow. Hey, anyone who can turn trash into cash certainly deserves a platform in GrepBeat. And that’s arguably what CompostNow does, as it picks up food scraps and other compostable materials from households and businesses and turns it into nutrient-rich soil that’s returned to its customers or delivered to community gardens and urban farms. Read the full Q&A here.
Tech Culture Club
Longtime Red Hat exec DeLisa Alexander is this week’s guest on our Tech Culture Club podcast, hosted by WorkDove CEO Melissa Phillippi and sponsored by Vaco. DeLisa arrived at Red Hat armed with a law degree—which she quipped almost ruined her life—before discovering that she really wanted to focus on organizational development, eventually becoming the open-source pioneer’s Chief People Officer. She shares with Melissa her views on what “capitalism for good” means, what meritocracy should look like in action, and much more.
Read some show highlights here, then listen (and subscribe!) here.
Losers Weepers
We’ve got two more features today on Triangle-based winners of NC IDEA’s $10K MICRO grants for early-stage startups. First up is Raleigh-based LabRunner, which has a harrowing origin story. When Renee Hoyle was 8 years old, her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer—but only after her doctors literally lost her biopsy tissue and her diagnosis was delayed many months, by which point the cancer had metastasized to her lymph nodes. Renee’s mom survived, but the chemotherapy had lingering side effects that led to her becoming diabetic.
Renee grew up to be the anatomic pathology manager at WakeMed. Now she’s co-founded LabRunner, which tracks biopsy tissue and other samples with GPS sensors so that they aren’t lost—which currently happens dispiritingly often. Read our full story here.
Staying On Track
As a former teacher and executive with Teach For America and a 2020 recipient of a PhD in Education from NC State, Marcus Howard knows plenty about how students’ social and emotional well-being can affect their ability to excel in school. It was an insight he first had as a fifth-grader, when the tension he carried from a family argument that morning tanked his performance on a test that he had prepared well for.
All those experiences have led to Marcus launching Chapel Hill-based ROSA Technology, a platform for students to complete daily, clinically grounded, mental well-being check-ins. That gives schools an early-warning system to support students’ mental health and other life stressors. ROSA Technology is another winner of a $10K MICRO grant from NC IDEA. Read our full story here.
Rankings Fun
Who doesn’t love rankings??? Yes, that was a rhetorical question. Though I genuinely do like rankings so long as they make [insert something that I care about here] look good. So here are a few:
1) Inc. named 15 companies from North Carolina to its “Best Workplaces” list, which include several familiar names to the Triangle startup ecosystem—HireNetworks, Kevel, Pendo and RevBoss.
2) Raleigh and Durham (yes, it’s listed as a joint entry; don’t shoot the messenger) checks in at No. 6 in the 2022-23 Best Places To Live rankings from U.S. News & World Report. That’s actually down from No. 2 last year, but hey, it’s way ahead of Austin at No. 13 and Charlotte at No. 30.
Chapel Hill-based Union Grove Venture Partners is raising a third fund and has already closed on $4.1M. The firm primarily invests in other VC funds (i.e. a “fund of funds”) in addition to select direct investments. In fact they say that they invest 80% in the former and 30% in the latter. (Seriously; they explain how they get to 110%, which not coincidentally is also the effort I put into this newsletter.) Some of the firm’s hits have included Beyond Meat and Poshmark, and they’ve already made an investment in alternative seafood startup Current Foods out of the new fund. See Triangle Inno for more.
TBJ also profiles two more crypto investment funds that have been launched recently in the Triangle.
FemTech Focus
The first FemTechnology Summit will be held on June 1-2 (Wednesday and Thursday) at NC State’s Hunt Library, with a evening event on June 1 at Raleigh Founded. The event is being hosted by a local nonprofit called FemTech Focus, which Brittany Barreto started to help empower the women’s health innovation industry, aka FemTech. Tickets are $10-$30, though you can use code “RTP” to get 50% off. Click here for more info and to register.
Build Great Software
Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Dualboot is a business and software 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 at least 10 years 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.
Grep-a-palooza
With just four days left until the Early-Bird rates expire, here’s the full agenda so you’ll know what you’ll be missing if you don’t pull the trigger. Spoiler: we’ve got a lot of great stuff planned for you on June 9. Remember that the Early-Bird rates are $99 for startup founders/team members and $199 for everyone else. Starting this Saturday, those rates will jump to $199/$299, so don’t delay!
You’ll note that the agenda includes GrepTank, which is our spin on Shark Tank. If you’d like your startup to be considered as one of the three that will pitch as part of GrepTank, please apply here by Friday, May 27. The selected startups will receive live feedback on their pitch from real investors, as well as two free passes to Grep-a-palooza and the chance to win GrepBeat swag. And, of course, you'll have the chance to tell your story to several hundred members of the Triangle tech startup ecosystem. Apply today!
(*Remember that we re-set all eligibility requirements at the start of 2022, meaning that even anyone who won a GrepBeat coffee mug pre-2022 is once again eligible to guess and win.)
Any news we should know? Hit "reply" or send it to news@grepbeat.com.
