Programming note: There won’t be a Friday Nooner tomorrow because Pete will be trotting through the N.C. mountains on the 208-mile Blue Ridge Relay, which he promises to mention only a few more times (in print, anyway). We’ll be back next Friday with guest Nick Jordan, the poohbah of both Smashing Boxes and current newsletter sponsor Durham Bottling Company.
Exit Stories
Back by both popular demand and the generosity of show sponsor Vaco, our podcast Exit Stories returns for Season 2. In the first of 10 episodes that we’ll roll out each Thursday, host Kevin Mosley—who runs Colopy Ventures sister company Jurassic Capital on a day-to-day basis—welcomes guest Tom Simon. The successful “exit” story being told is that of Source3, a 3D art licensing-turned-music licensing startup where Tom was a Co-Founder and the Director of Marketing. Source3 ended partnering with and then being acquired by Facebook, in 2017.
You might also recognize Tom’s name as one of the founders of Zookie’s Cookies, a homebaked dog treat startup that landed a deal on Shark Tank, or from his current day job as the head of marketing at Lonerider Brewery. Read highlights of the episode here, then watch (and subscribe!) to the podcast here.
Good For Ghosts
While there is plenty of grumbling about the major food delivery apps like GrubHub, DoorDash and UberEats from both sides of the transaction—restaurants don’t love the hefty revenue share, and eaters don’t love the substantial markup—at least it’s pretty straightforward and predictable. That’s not really the case for “ghost kitchen” businesses, which aren’t dine-in operations and might struggle to fill on-demand, I-want-my-food-right-now orders.
That’s the problem that UNC student Shaswat Joshi discovered when operating his homemade samosa business, so he decided to solve the issue by creating CloudEats, a web app for food ordering and delivery that’s especially geared to the particular needs of ghost kitchens. CloudEats participated in this summer’s cohort of the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator. Read our full story here.
Centennial Campus
NC State is moving full speed ahead with the redevelopment of its Centennial Campus after picking Charlotte-based developer Lincoln Harris to run Phase One. This initial phase is the Innovation District, 32 acres situated at the northeast end of the 1,000-acre-plus campus that are considered the heart of the redevelopment.
This district is zoned for up to 28 stories, which would be taller than any other structure on campus. (And 7x taller than any building on the college campus I attended, FWIW.) The Innovation District is intended to have a heavy tech and life sciences flavor. TBJ has more details.
AI Hub
The Brookings Institution has released a report that identifies the Triangle (O.K., they call it the “Raleigh metro area”) as a burgeoning hub for AI. Hey, it’s about time someone noticed! TBJ’s Lauren Ohnesorgetalked to the researcher behind the report, which looked at factors like AI patents, AI-related R&D via both the private and public sectors, and AI job postings. In particular, Brookings found that the Triangle is one of the “few places that’s as strong for actual job creation and hiring as it is for federal research.”
And in a related story that underscores these findings, Duke researchers have helped create a new platform to enable hospitals and research centers to share private patient data securely to better train machine learning and AI models.
Next Unicorns
TechWire, in partnership with Innovate Raleigh, is launching a six-part series on Wednesday, Sept. 15, that will each week focus on a Raleigh-born startup that it thinks has the potential to be a unicorn. (One quibble: we always like to look through the broader lens of the Triangle rather than “just Raleigh/just Durham/just Chapel Hill/just Cary etc.” and believe that framing is ultimately what’s best for the region as a whole, but especially since Innovate Raleigh is helping underwrite the series, we understand the Raleigh-centric focus.)
The multimedia series will run in the lead-up to the Innovate Raleigh Summit, which is scheduled for Oct. 25-29.
Outward And Upward
Durham-based fintech Spreedly continues its speedy (sorry) growth, today announcing that its payment platform now enables and optimizes over $30B in annualized gross merchandise volume (GMV) globally. To support that growth, Spreedly has grown its team by 50% year-over-year.
I might have told this story before in print, but the very first week that I moved to the Triangle in May, 2018, I attended a Startup Crawl event at Spreedly’s then-new HQ in Durham. Well, it outgrew those digs in less than two years and moved into their new-new HQ a year ago in the Durham.ID building, and they're continuing to grow-grow-grow. Here’s some more info.
Hit Refresh
Raleigh-based K4Connect has rolled out some new features in its flagship product, K4Community, for staff and residents of senior living communities. The updates include new data-driven reporting tools and other ways to analyze data to mine key insights. This link has more info. And you’ll surely recall that K4Connect Founder/CEO Scott Moody was the first guest on the late (?), great (??) podcast Pete Meets... last year, and was also a Download Q&A subject.
War Torn
The Innovate Capital Law duo of Jim Verdonik and Benji Jones, who have been providing ongoing commentary on the Epic Games-Apple battle for TechWire, argued this week that while Epic Games might lose the legal battle that recently played out in federal court between the two, Apple is ultimately going to lose the war.
The war, of course, is being fought about the iron control that Apple has over its App Store (and that Google owns over its own store) that currently include requiring app developers to pay hefty fess of up to 30% on any transactions made through an app on its ecosystem—while simultaneously requiring that all those transactions stay within said ecosystem. See the story for the pair’s reasoning.
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.
Extra Bit
BREAKING: Wild Earth, a plant-based and cell-based meat pet food startup that’s HQ’d in Berkeley but also has a presence in Durham, has just announced a new $23M+ round of funding. The investors include some big names like Mark Cuban and actor Paul Wesley, one of the stars of The Vampire Diaries, as well as At One Ventures and Big Idea Ventures. Wild Earth CEO Ryan Bethencourt recently relocated to the Triangle; you might have seen him at the June GrepBeat Happy Hour.
Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!
After former winner Chantal Allam (of TechWire fame) was the only reader to correctly identify this week’s location, we had to turn to Twitter to find an eligible winner. (One can only win once.) The first to come up with the right answer—the Open Eye Café in Carrboro—was Ryan Lerman. When asked for a celebratory picture and a description of himself for GrepBeat readers, Ryan sent the below pic and the following sentence: “North Carolina is cool to me.” He would say no more.
I can tell you that Ryan lives in South Florida and that he’s also previously made guesses (correct ones) when we’ve turned to Twitter to get a winner—and only when it’s been on Twitter. My gut from a little Internet sleuthing is that he follows us on Twitter and is identifying the places using Google image search. It's not clear what, if any, ties he has to the Triangle tech/startup scene, though we certainly applaud the hustle. Of course, if you’re out there, Ryan, feel free to set the record straight!
Any news we should know? Hit "reply" or send it to news@grepbeat.com.
