It’s Pete again, back from my cruise. In a possibly related story, I now have Covid and feel, well, less than great. But the newsletter must go on, so I’m playing hurt today. And before you ask, the answer is yes—the cruise was still totally worth it.
Man In A Hurry
When Erkang Zheng immigrated to the U.S. from China while in high school, he really wanted to be a doctor—until he learned how long it would take. He didn’t have the patience to go to med school and endure a residency. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that this man in a hurry has led his Morrisville-based cybersecurity startup JupiterOne to unicorn status in just two years.
We first profiled JupiterOne in October, 2020, and named the company to our inaugural Startups To Watch list in 2021. We also included last month’s news that JupiterOne’s $70M Series C funding valued JupiterOne somewhere above the coveted $1B (i.e. “unicorn”) level in the newsletter. Now Suzanne has caught up with Erkang for a deeper dive on his personal story. Read it here.
Storytellers
Enterprise sales engineers have long been giving software demos to potential clients over Zoom and similar platforms, but the trend was certainly turbo-charged by the pandemic. But that didn’t solve issues like the ability to be logged in as several users at one to show how a product will work from multiple user perspectives. That’s where Raleigh-based startup Demostory (as in “demo” + “story”) comes in. Read our full story on founders Chris Colburn and Alec Robinson and Demostory here.
Diversity Score
Friday Nooner co-host Chantal Allam, in her more frequent guise as a writer for WRAL TechWire, has taken a deep dive into the minority representation on Scot Wingo’s Triangle Tweener list, which was recently unveiled for 2022. (We wrote about the list here and the event celebrating it here.) The short answer is that the number of Black-led startups is very low—just four out of 251, or 1.6%. Women-led startups fared better with 18 startups, or 7.1%. Latino founders accounted for three, or 1.1%. You can find her three-part series here, here and here.
To be clear, much like GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy (who is quoted in the stories), we think this isn’t really an issue with Scot’s methodology or selection process—we remain big fans of Scot and his Tweener List and Tweener Fund—but, rather, an unfortunately accurate reflection of current realities. There have been some incremental gains since we published our four-part series on diversity in the Triangle tech ecosystem in August, 2020, not long after the nationwide protests of the killing of George Floyd spurred a renewed call to action. But obviously much more needs to be done. We hope to play our small role in making things better.
Breathing Easier
Raleigh-based respiratory health startup VitalFlo has established a partnership with India-based Ambee, a fellow Techstars alum that builds detailed data sets of air quality. Environmental air quality is a major trigger for asthma and other respiratory ailments, which is precisely what VitalFlo is designed to manage. (We first featured VitalFlo in October, 2019.) See TechWire for more details.
Bull-ish On Durham
Maryland-based healthcare startup Adelade is putting its recent $123M fundraise to use by opening three new offices, including one in Durham. The Bull City branch will be the HQ of a new health services unit led by CEO Dr. Mandy Cohen, the former secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services who became a much more public name/face during the pandemic. The Durham-based health care unit could grow to 200 employees by the end of the year. See TBJ for more.
New School
UNC-Chapel Hill has named Stanley Ahalt as the inaugural dean for its new School of Data Science and Society, which will become UNC’s 15th school when it opens this fall. It certainly won’t be news to readers of this newsletter than data science is a big deal and only getting bigger, so good for UNC in putting real resources into helping educate the next generation of data science pioneers. See TBJ for more.
Metaverse Future
Hey, so is the metaverse going to be really huge and touch virtually every part of our lives, like the internet (especially the mobile internet) does today? Or not? That was the question addressed by more than 600 experts in a new report by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. The tl:dr version is that they’re fairly split on the issue, with only a slight majority (54% to 46%) saying that by 2040 they expect the metaverse to be a fully immersive aspect of daily life as opposed to a still niche-y space for gaming and entertainment. See TechWire for more on the report.
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.
To see all posted jobs, go to CronJobs. If you'd like your company to be listed, tell us at cronjobs@grepbeat.com and we'll do our best.
There's no mug on the line because (sad trombone) "Where's Pete?" as we once knew it has run its course. Also I'm pretty sure that you can guess where I am in the pic below. No, I don't know who the couple is behind me, but that is indeed the Royal CaribbeanAllure of the Seas partially visible in the top right. Isn't she a beaut?
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