If you weren’t able to make last Thursday's inaugural Grep-a-palooza—or even if you did—you can read about the highlights in our story here and/or see some pictures here. Triangle Inno’s Lauren Ohnesorge (who was also a Grep-a-palooza panelist) wrote about the Growth Stage Founders panel moderated by Spiffy CEO Scot Wingo and featuring a trio of CEOs who have also been Friday Nooner guests: Seguno’s Chris Geiss, WorkDove’s Melissa Phillippi and Written Word Media’s Ricci Wolman. Rest assured that Grep-a-palooza will be back for Round 2 in 2023!
Given that the hosts were a bit groggy and punch-drunk from Grep-a-palooza, we were very lucky to have the burst of effervescence that is Cloud Giants CEO Kelly Pfommer as the guest on the latest Friday Nooner. It’s worth your time.
Teamwork$
GrepBeat’s directly-across-the-street neighbor Teamworks today announced that it has closed a $50M Series D financing led by Boulder-based Delta-v Capital. Teamworks (fairly) bills itself as the Operating System for Sports given that its software platform is used by more than 5,000 sports organizations around the world, including hundreds of universities and teams in all of the major professional leagues. The financing is a great sign that Teamworks is back in major growth mode after what must have been a very difficult stretch at the start of the pandemic when many spectator sports around the world were shut down.
As you may well know, Teamworks was founded by former Duke football player Zach Maurides. Zach shared the news of the financing on his LinkedIn page, and here’s more info on Teamworks’ blog. We’re now working on a story of our own that we will share when complete.
The Download
This week’s Download Q&A subject is Cara Borenstein, the Co-Founder and CEO of Durham-based Bytebase, which we previously profiled last February. Cara and her husband Theo Marin—Bytebase’s CTO—are both engineers who have created a virtual “scratch pad” for programmers so they can noodle on new ideas and share them with other team members. The New Yorker native also details how she’s found the best New York pizza in the Triangle. (I’ve put it on my list.) Read the full Q&A here.
Coming Home
Durham-based Little Otter Health is another startup that’s a family affair at the top—in this case, the daughter-mother team of Rebecca Egger and her mom, Dr. Helen Egger. Let’s first rewind to when Rebecca was growing up in the Triangle and struggled with ADHD and anxiety. Fortunately her mom ran the child psychiatry department at Duke University Hospital and could make sure her daughter received quick and effective treatment, which unfortunately is far from the norm. Now the Eggers have launched Little Otter Health as a telemedicine platform to bring high-quality mental health care to kids and their families.
As CEO, Rebecca—who previously worked at Palantir Technologies and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in the Bay Area—oversaw a $22M Series A not long after Little Otter Health launched in 2021. She’s now moved back to Durham, where she grew up and attended the North Carolina School of Science & Math. Read our full story here.
Real Go-Getters
Ordering Chick-fil-A on DoorDash on GrubHub, for instance, is fairly straightforward once you’ve done it a few times. But you know what’s even easier? Texting somebody, “Please grab me a chicken sandwich meal with a Diet Coke.” And then when they say yes, you ask them to also pick up your dry cleaning. That’s the basic idea behind Raleigh-based Lavi, a subscription-based concierge delivery service where you simply text your request rather than downloading and jumping through yet another app.
Lavi Founder Nathanial Torres is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force Reserves and has received a grant from Bunker Labs. Read our full story here, including the pivot that led to Lavi’s current iteration.
Relay Racing
There was so much for me to talk to Bandwidth CEO David Morken about during his closing keynote at last week’s Grep-a-palooza that I didn’t get to ask about the company’s success in developing and then spinning off another successful startup—Republic Wireless. The latter also crossed well over $100M in revenue (like Bandwidth before it) before selling its wireless business to Dish Network last year. But before the sale, Republic Wireless spun out its walkie-talkie-like device as a standalone startup it called Relay.
Today, Relay announced that it has grown so rapidly—from 25 people last year to 124 today—that it’s moving into a new HQ in Raleigh by taking over the 18th floor of the Advance Auto Parts building in North Hills. The growth is due to the traction that the Relay device, which was originally marketed to kids, has gained with “frontline workers” in industries like hospitality, healthcare, food services, distribution centers, manufacturing, and more. See TechWire and TBJ for more info.
Into The Archives
It was less than six months ago that Durham-based ArchiveSocial re-branded as Optimere after making two acquisitions. Then, late last week, came the news that Optimere has been acquired by Kansas-based CivicPlus, a management software platform catering to municipalities and local government. You’ll likely recall that ArchiveSocial was founded by Anil Chawla (both a Greppy Award winner and a Friday Nooner guest) to help public agencies and others archive their social media posts.
After Anil moved up the ladder to become Executive Chairman, CEO Ray Carey—a former Olympic swimmer and Download Q&A subject)—took over running the company day-to-day. Ray will join CivicPlus as President of Compliance Solutions. The financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but Ray called them “fair,” which doesn’t sound super-awesome but is certainly better than unfair. See TechWire and TBJ for more.
Curbio Appeal
“They” say this is a good time to sell your house given potential dark clouds on the horizon, presuming of course you know you have somewhere good to move. If you need to fix things up and/or make improvements to fetch a better price on the market, you might want to know that Maryland-based Curbio has come to the Raleigh market, making it one of the 30 it now operates in. The Curbio platform helps to manage the last-minute repairs and improvements. See TechWire for more.
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Extra Bit
Our friend Lauren Ohnesorge is back on the Greg Lindberg beat, if in fact one could say that she’s ever left it. (Narrator: she hasn’t.) In TBJ’s latest cover story, Lauren dives deep on the now-jailed founder of Durham-based Eli Global and the real people that have been hurt by the collapse of his insurance company empire after his conviction on bribery charges.
(*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.)
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