You won’t want to miss tomorrow’s Friday Nooner, in which Pete and Joe will welcome co-host Chantal Allam (WRAL TechWire) and guest Kelly Rowell, the CEO of CED. We’ll see how many details we can pry out of Kelly about CED’s Venture Connect 2022 Summit plans for the week of April 4. You can catch us (live!) at noon ET on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube, or afterwards on those same platforms or in podcast form.
Growth Gas
Hot off the virtual presses, Durham-based Kevel has raised $10M in Series B funding led by Atlanta-based Fulcrum Equity Partners. Kevel, of course, was formerly Adzerk (internal voice: not Adwerx not Adwerx not Adwerx) until rebranding last December to emphasize its focus on offering APIs for businesses to build and monetize their own custom ad servers. Kevel CEO James Avery is a FOG (Friend of GrepBeat), which we’re not saying just because he once gave us an Adzerk shirt at a GrepBeat Happy Hour. (Though it didn't hurt.) You can find more info on the funding here.
Name Game
Sticking on the name-changing beat, Durham’s ArchiveSocial is now Optimere. The rebranding comes as ArchiveSocial completes its merger with Monsido, which came shortly after it had acquired NextRequest. Since the three companies are now one—with a combined $30M in ARR (annual recurring revenue)—a new name was the logical next step.
ArchiveSocial was founded by frequent GrepBeat story subject/podcast guest Anil Chawla to help public agencies archive their social media accounts, while Optimere builds on that to offer broader tools to help public and private organizations comply with regulations and standards to increase trust in their digital communications. TechWire has more info.
Higher Education
This isn’t an easy time to be a college student, whether in the micro sense (many are still knee-deep in finals exams) or the macro (the pandemic has wreaked havoc on many of the in-person experiences that are a big part of what can make college so valuable). So we’re heartened by the way that the entrepreneurial departments at Triangle universities continue to support and encourage students with demonstrated success.
Today’s Exhibit A: NC State’s entrepreneurship programs at both the undergrad and grad levels were recently named No. 1 in the Southeast and No. 15 nationwide by Princeton Review and Entrepreneurship Magazine. Some of the credit surely goes to Lewis Sheats, who after two decades with the Wolfpack is leaving (with GrepBeat in tow, surely) to lead the entrepreneurship efforts at St. Louis University, which is No. 36 on the list.
Meanwhile at UNC, Anna Shuford has leveraged a number of the school’s entrepreneurship support initiatives to launch BOOMROOM, an online fitness platform. Anna first came up with the idea when she was a Tar Heel undergrad and was forced by the pandemic to work out at home, and has continued to build the business now that she’s an MBA student at Kenan-Flagler. Just like they say: when the pandemic hands you lemons, make the "Zoom for fitness."
VC Check-In
Triangle Inno checked in with local VCs to sum up 2021 and outline the top challenges they see for 2022. They were all asked to finish this sentence: “2021 was the year of ________,” and to our great surprise none of them got it right. (Correct answer: “GrepBeat.”) Among the top challenges they foresee for the year ahead are startups trying to live up to 2021’s lofty valuations and recruiting in a very tight labor market for tech talent.
Incoming
WRAL ran a segment this week about Apple’s impending arrival in the Triangle that featured a reporter camped out on the plot of currently undeveloped land on which the tech giant is going to build its campus. I mean, I’ll take his word for it, since it was just a bunch of grassland and trees. We also hear from TechWire editor Rick Smith and about some of what Apple is already doing in the Triangle, including an initiative with the Boys and Girls Club of Wake County to offer coding classes.
One other thing we hope that Apple will get involved with: the lack of affordable housing in the Triangle documented by this TechWire story. While overall we think Apple’s arrival is a net positive for the Triangle in general and the tech startup ecosystem in particular, one downside of bringing in thousands of employees with six-figure salaries is the undeniable upward pressure it will put on housing prices. Apple, Google and others need to do their part to minimize the negative offshoots of their impending presence.
Corporate Rebuild
In other campus-building news, Epic Games has filed a demolition request for Cary Towne Center, the closed-down mall it bought to serve as the site of its new HQ. Apparently the company wants to knock down everything but Belk’s, which maybe has some really good deals? We must say that we’re a little bummed that Epic Games isn’t basically moving into the mall, turning the Orange Julius into a break room and the Auntie Anne’s Pretzels booths into call rooms. Instead they want to build up to 3.5 million square feet of office space, 75,000 feet of commercial space and a 200-room hotel. Hey, I guess that’s another way to go. See TBJ and TechWire for more info.
Water ==> Plate
Raleigh’s KNOW Seafood has reportedly closed on $400K of new funding, on top of the $1M it banked earlier this year. KNOW uses blockchain technology to enable consumers to know exactly where their seafood has been from the water to the plate. As someone who eats salmon twice a week virtually every week, I should probably check into KNOW in search of answers deeper than “it comes from Harris Teeter.”
Breathing Easier
It’s more “medical devices” than tech, but we did want to share that Chapel Hill-based Bleep has secured a $1.7M SBIR grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for its “generation two” sleep mask. It serves the same purpose as a CPAP machine for people with sleep apnea and similar issues, but it doesn’t have headgear or straps. From the graphic, it looks like the device is inserted into your nostrils.
Not to go all Ariana Huffington on you, but I’m definitely in the camp that believes that most Americans don’t sleep long or well enough for their health or productivity. The Bleep could be one weapon in that fight. Also, it’s fun to say.
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 our (beta) CronJobs page. If you'd like your company to be listed, tell us at cronjobs@grepbeat.com and we'll do our best.
Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!
This week’s winner is Bill Perry, who was the first on Twitter to correctly identify my location as Summit Coffee in Baton Rouge. I asked Bill to describe himself in a few sentences, and here’s what he came back with: “Well, when I am not a suffering Buffalo sports fan, I am the Sourcing Manager for Hillrom's Cary business. I also have 3 great kids, including an astute reporter at GrepBeat.”
That last part is true—Bill’s daughter is Claire Perry, who uses the fancier “Suzannah Claire Perry” as her byline. In fact one of those smaller pictures in the background below is of Claire. I did make an effort to check the “Where’s Pete?” bylaws to see if parents of GrepBeat employees are eligible to win, only to discover that I’ve been totally making up the rules as I go along. So congrats, Bill! And thanks very much for Claire, she does a great job.
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