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The Download

Healthtech is one sector that has boomed during the pandemic. One Triangle startup that has ridden that wave with particular panache is Durham-based Validic, and Validic CEO Drew Schiller is this week’s subject of the Download Q&A by our own Brooks Malone. Validic is a digital health platform for personal health data, meaning it’s where all that info being hovered up by wearables, in-home monitoring devices and health apps goes to be collected, analyzed and shared with your medical providers. Speaking of providing. Drew is also a fount of food and drink recommendations. Read the full Q&A here.

New Check

Durham’s Bull City Venture Partners has made its latest investment by joining the $16M Series B for Nashville-based insurtech Blueprint Title. The startup sells title insurance to real estate investors, commercial builders and REITs, i.e. more frequent and sophisticated property purchasers compared to the individual home-buyers who have traditionally been the target of title insurance purveyors. See TechCrunch for more info.

I-Corps Sites

UNC and NC State have been selected by the National Science Foundation as Innovation Corps (I-Corps) sites. The NSF has created five “hubs” of at least eight schools each—46 universities in all—with $3M funding a year for five years. Both UNC and NC State are part of the Mid-Atlantic region. The goal of the I-Corps sites is to help turn academic research into startups and other entrepreneurial ventures. You can find more info from the NSF here, and from UNC here.

Good ENDUREnce

TBJ has featured Raleigh-based BOA Nutrition, a startup we profiled a few weeks back. BOA Nutrition helps replenish sodium for endurance athletes via a quick aerosol spray called ENDURE, initially targeting the triathlon market and then expanding from there. Speaking of endurance, you’re now all going to suffer through yet another mention that later this week (Friday/Saturday) I’ll be running on a nine-man team in the 208-mile Blue Ridge Relay.

Running Lean

The latest entry in TBJ’s year-long “Breaking The Glass Ceiling” series features Kenya Oduor, an IBM vet and PhD in philosophy and human factors psychology who runs her own user experience (UX) and design agency, Lean Geeks. She started the company as a side hustle before making it fulltime in 2017, though she also still teaches one semester a year at NC State, where she earned her doctorate.

More Tributes

TechWire is continuing its tributes to its former longtime writer Allan Maurer, who is seriously ill. Cal Chang Yocum wrote about her time being mentored by the fedora-wearing, wise-cracking Allan as what was then called Local Tech Wire was launched in 2002, and Rick Smith also shares the recollections of a number of other members of the Triangle tech and business community.

Newcomer

Hutchison is adding an attorney to its tech startup team, Dan Alfino. Dan has degrees from Harvard (undergrad) and UNC (law school) and most recently worked at an Atlanta firm. We relate this news in part because it’s a good excuse to mention that Hutchison is one of the two headline sponsors (along with Dualboot Partners) of our upcoming invite-only event on Sept. 23 in which we’ll be revealing the 10 early-stage startups that have been selected to our inaugural Startups To Watch list. We’re looking forward to a great night!

Bottled Up

If you’re looking for coworking space, you can always play it safe and glom on to a big chain like WeWork. And hey, they’re perfectly nice. But if you’re looking for something more local, gritty and—dare we say it—cool, then the soon-to-open Durham Bottling Company may be for you. Smashing Boxes CEO Nick Jordan bought the space at 506 Ramseur Street a few years back as a new company HQ but always had grander plans for the 16,000+ square feet. Enter Durham Bottling Company (DBC), which might sound like a new nightlife concept but is in fact a coworking and event space with a stated mission to create a more inclusive and diverse community. DBC offers all the usual amenities you’d expect (free coffee, hot desks, private offices, etc.) but also has a sister nonprofit entity that will help stage a monthly event series. You can get on the waitlist here.

Because too much news is never enough.

• Startup Rewind: From Black angels to NSF initiaitives at UNC, NCSU – a look back at a busy week (WRAL TechWire)
• Entrepreneurs inspire us despite all that divides, says NC IDEA’s CEO (Thom Ruhe via WRAL TechWire)

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