We have two livestreams you won’t want to miss: 1) Tonight starting at 7:30 on Facebook Live, we’ll be revealing the inaugural class of GrepBeat’s Startups To Watch list of early-stage startups that we think will be making even bigger news in the years ahead. The presentation—which will air live from our invite-only event at The Pit in downtown Durham—will run for about a half-hour and will also be available afterward on our Facebook page.
2) Tomorrow’s edition of The Friday Nooner will feature guest Josh Owen, the CEO of Cycle Labs, which we profiled in June. You can watch the half-hour show when it kicks off at noon on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube, or find it afterward on those same platforms.
Exit Stories
This week’s Exit Stories episode has a twist—host Kevin Mosley was on the other side of the exit (or growth investment, depending on where one sits) in his day job at Jurassic Partners. The guest is Dallas Romanowski, the Co-Founder and former CEO of Performance Culture, in which Jurassic invested $2.9M in late 2020. (We profiled Performance Culture in February.) The episode gives a unique look at an exit/investment from both sides of the table. Read some episode highlights here, then listen (and subscribe!) here. Thanks as always to this season’s sponsor, Vaco.
More Shots Fired
Hey, so did you hear that Cary’s Epic Games and Apple are fighting? It’s true. And it got even nastier and more personal yesterday after Apple informed Epic that it wouldn’t allow the game maker’s Fortnite back into the App Store until after all appeals in the companies’ ongoing legal battles are concluded, which could easily take as long as five years.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney came out firing; his first Tweet on the matter begins “Apple lied” and gets angrier from there. Epic Games is miffed because it says it’s now playing entirely by Apple’s rules and is still being blackballed, while Apple is basically saying, hey, we have “discretion” over who gets into our store and we’re going to use it—so get lost. Here’s some national coverage on the feud in CNN, and some local takes from the N&O and TechWire.
Unicorn-y
Yesterday TechWire featured Raleigh-based AI startup Diveplane as the second entry in its “Tomorrow’s Unicorns” series. Diveplane CEO Michael Capps used to be the President at Epic Games, but is surely best known as a Download Q&A subject. Diveplane’s fastest-growing product, GEMINAI, creates a synthetic “twin” of large data sets that omits personally identifiable information without sacrificing the ability to share and analyze the data, a key attribute as the prevalence of data breaches of personal information only grows. Here’s TechWire’s main story plus a Q&A with Mike. Also, here’s the schedule for the future LinkedIn Live “Chats with the Founder” that are part of the series.
Dirty Deal
Chapel Hill-based mesur.io, a startup that uses sensors that are literally planted in the earth to provide analytics and environmental data primarily for agricultural customers (we profiled them in 2019), has reportedly raised $900K. The company is dubbing the fundraise a “Seed-2 round,” because, hey, people can call early funding rounds whatever they want. (Seed? Series Seed? Seed A? Seed B? Second Seed? Seed+? There are no rules!) See TechWire for more.
Cool Story
Durham’s Phononic is the coolest startup in the Triangle, provided we’re being entirely literal. (Pro tip: Linguists have determined that when people say “literally,” 83% of the time they actually mean “figuratively” and/or don’t know the difference. Though this instance is among the 17%.) Phononic, which recently raised $50M to grow its solid-state cooling solutions, unveiled a new product at the Groceryshop industry conference this week in Las Vegas.
The “Tote” is a portable fridge/freezer that avoids the use of toxic refrigerants, while its small size and light weight makes it a great fit for the rise of ecommerce grocery fulfillment and point-of-sale displays at grocery and convenience stores. TechWire has more details, though I’m a little disappointed that GrepBeat didn’t send me to Vegas to cover this story in person.
Under The Sea
In what I believe is the first lede I’ve ever read that’s based on a scene from The Little Mermaid, Triangle Inno ran a feature earlier this week on Chapel Hill-based LiRA. We featured LiRA back in May; the startup provides a lip-reading platform to help patients in the hospital who have lost their voice after surgery or treatment of the head or neck. To “train” the translator, LiRA wants your video selfies for visual voice samples. So I guess you’d be Ariel in this scenario, and there’s something about a seashell? Sorry, I didn’t actually see the movie.
Telling A Story
RTP-based Klearly has been chosen to present on the mainstage at Venture Atlanta on Oct. 20-21. We’re pretty confident that Klearly’s presentation will focus on the startup winning both the judges’ and Readers’ Choice Greppys in the Best Small Startup category. Though I guess they could also mention that Klearly is a B2B SaaS solution to make your sales and marketing spend more efficient and effective. The next slide should depict our 2019 feature story on the company, and then they can just sit back and collect investor checks.
Hoppy Hour
While the inaugural Raleigh-Durham Startup Week that was originally planned for the fall of 2020 has been pushed back again—darn you, Delta!—to the spring of 2022, the event’s organizers are hosting a fall “hoppy” hour on Thursday, Oct. 28, from 4-6 p.m. The outdoor happy hour (sorry, “hoppy”) will be held on the lawn at the American Tobacco Campus. All are welcome to the free event, but an RSVP is required due to limited capacity. You can also whet your appetite for next spring’s Startup Week with this way-too-early programming schedule.
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.
Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!
Warner Lambeth was this week's only reader who correctly identified my location as the Panera on Franklin Street right by UNC. We had a few other Panera locations guessed, but only one winner—so the Random Number Generator got a week off. Here's what the winner has to say for (well, about) herself: "Warner Lambeth is always catching up on the latest triangle start-up scene, loves hanging out with her family and trying out new recipes in the kitchen.
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