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Happy Thursday!

Snow or no snow, The Friday Nooner will answer the bell tomorrow for your viewing pleasure. Guest Krista Covey, the President of RTP-based First Flight Venture Center, is returning after she only had a minute or two of airtime last week due to a snafu. Pete and Joe also welcome back frequent guest co-host Chantal Allam of WRAL TechWire fame. You can watch live at noon (or afterward) on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube, while auditory learners can catch the podcast version.
 
Also not to be missed: Jackie’s ongoing “Way Back When” series that has been rolling out weekly on our social media platforms. The conceit is that a successful founder guides us on a walk down memory lane with the help of old pictures. This week, she featured Spoonflower Co-Founder Stephen Fraser. Before that was Levitate’s Jes Lipson (about his ShareFile days) and ArchiveSocial Founder Anil Chawla.
 


Wrangling Cash

“The Adams”—aka Adam Smith and Adam Long, the co-founders of Durham-based Wrangle—have rounded up $2M in pre-seed funding for their workflow automation startup. Our Suzanne Blake has the full story here. You’ll likely recall that we first wrote about Wrangle and its founders, who are both vets of Automated Insights, back in August, 2020. Longtime readers might also remember that Adam Smith was the subject of a “Three Questions” Q&A way back in September 2018.
 
The round was led by San Francisco-based Bloomberg Beta and Eniac Ventures, which is based in New York and San Francisco and laid out its reasons in detail for opening its checkbook for Wrangle here. The round also featured 20+ fellow founders as angel investors, which included a number of Triangle boldface names such as Automated Insights Founder (and For Starters podcast host) Robbie Allen, Kevel Founder James Avery, Green Places founder Alex Lassiter and ArchiveSocial Founder Anil Chawla.
 
Read our full story on the deal here. You can also find more info from Wrangle’s blog post, Triangle Inno and TechCrunch.


 


Staying True

Before prescribing any medication—or doing much of anything—it’s essential for healthcare providers to know what medications you’re already taking, and in what doses. But that’s not always to keep track of, whether because the patient can’t remember it all on the spot, or isn’t in a condition to answer, or the information is misplaced somewhere along the labyrinthian path that is our healthcare system.
 
Raleigh-based Truentity has attacked that problem head-on. We first wrote about Truentity last February, and today we’re writing about the $1M in pre-seed funding they just raised based on some solid early traction from CEO Mike Desai and his team. Read the full story about the new funding and Truentity’s journey to date here.


 


Branching Out

Speaking of journeys, Spiffy has been on quite a path since the first car it washed in 2014. Serial entrepreneur and Tweener Titan Scot Wingo’s fourth startup has now passed its 1 millionth service and is kicking off 2022 by entering five new markets for its mobile car care services. The five new markets include four franchisees—a program that Spiffy launched in 2021 that has sped up its already rapid growth—and one corporate-owned effort.
 
Read our full story with all the details here. The story was also covered by TechWire and TBJ, albeit without GrepBeat’s je ne sais quoi.


 


Quantum Leap

Frankly I’m still trying to figure out what a quibit is, which is why I didn’t lead the $60M Series B round for RTP-based Atom Computing. (That, and the whole not-having-millions-of-dollars thing.) But Silicon Valley-based Third Point Ventures has both the cash and the knowledge to lead said funding round into the quantum computing startup. TechWire has more details. On Tuesday we also included this link to Atom’s CEO Rob Hays making six quantum computing predictions for 2022.


 


Epic Effect

Microsoft’s $68B proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard that ranked as huge news in the video game industry—as well as posing broader implications on the development of the metaverse—broke shortly before we went to press on Tuesday. That didn’t leave all that much room for analysis. Fortunately TBJ’s Lauren Ohnesorge looked into how the deal might impact Cary’s Epic Games.
 
As we mentioned Tuesday, if approved the deal would make Microsoft the third-largest video game company by revenue behind China’s Tencent and Japan's Sony. I noted that Tencent owns a large stake in Epic Games, but forgot that (as Lauren pointed out) Sony has also invested in the Fortnite maker.


 


Device Designers

This is the first of two items on topics that straddle the line of what GrepBeat covers. No. 1: The N&O reports that Raleigh startup CanvasGT, which makes software for medical device designers, has been acquired by Indianapolis-based Greenlight Guru. Greenlight Guru, which has raised more than $120M from investors for its alliterative quality-control platform for medical device designers, will not only keep but add to the combined companies’ presence in downtown Raleigh. In GrepBeat terms, our eyes light up at “software” and close on “medical devices.” So I kind of half-peeked at this one.


 


Fauxfish

Also in the gray zone: food science. Actually, this is even further from our hit zone than the previous item, but I’ve come this far, so what the heck. Triangle Inno profiled Pearlita Foods, a startup that is moving from San Diego to Raleigh in pursuit of its ultimate goal of growing oysters and other seafood in a lab. The startup is backed by Sustainable Food Ventures, the Triangle-based micro-VC fund run by husband-wife team of Ryan Bethencourt and Mariliis Holm to invest in the "future of food." Both have attended GrepBeat Happy Hours, which we can tell you right now increases your odds of getting mentioned in the newsletter.

 

 


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Because too much news is never enough.

 

Here's some helpful content from our partners.

You can find all our Partner Feeds here.

 

Here are some great jobs at Triangle startups.

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.

Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!
 

Nobody was more excited by the 2022 “Where’s Pete?” rule change that allowed past winnners to compete—and win—again than the dream (?) team of startup lawyer Jesse Jones and Lewis Sheats, the longtime Entrepreneurship Czar at NC State. And if you thought they were good at identifying coffee shops (though tbh Lewis totally carried Jesse) it turns out that they are savant-like at recognizing bars. Last week they even named the two bar regulars in the background of the photo but couldn’t beat the feared random number generator. They were back again this week.

Here’s the full text of Lewis’ guess: “This bar is one of my all-time Raleigh favorites. You could get a Ball and Chain there in the past, which consisted of a shot of whiskey and a Miller High Life pony bottle. This, my friend, is the Anchor Bar.” I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or alarmed. But I couldn't deny that it was, in fact, the Anchor Bar in Raleigh.
 
Thus I grant them the floor: “Jesse leads a team of kick-ass business attorneys who enable their clients to make the greatest impact with clarity and confidence. After a lifetime in NC, Lewis now leads the Chaifetz Center for Entrepreneurship at Saint Louis University. More importantly, Jesse and Lewis are the first to beat the ‘random number generator’ twice. #2timewinners”
 
That’s Jesse (left) and Lewis below at a pre-Covid gym workout to which they evidently brought their GrepBeat mugs, because of course.

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