The latest Friday Noonerneeds to be watched (or listened to) to be believed. Come for the 15-minute debate on the propriety of Pete eating a piece of homemade Irish sodabread that someone had shamefully tossed in the garbage—he had his reasons—and stay for the interview with Klearly CEO Alex Krawchick.
The Download
This is quite a time to be an entrepreneurship professor at UNC. First came the news that UNC prof and serial entrepreneur Jim Kitchen would be going to space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocketship. (We wrote about that last week; yesterday we learned who would replace Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson as one of Jim’s fellow passengers on the flight, which has been postponed until next Tuesday, March 29.)
Now we learn that Jim’s UNC colleague, Ted Zoller, has the even greater distinction of being the subject of this week’s Download Q&A—and Ted didn’t even need to pay an undisclosed sum for the honor. Ted has taught entrepreneurship at UNC since 1998, and now he’s writing a book called Gumption about the “entrepreneur next door”—and what it takes to become one. Read the full Q&A here.
Getting In-Personal
GrepBeat has been publishing since Aug. 7, 2018. In that time, there has been precisely one CED Venture Connect summit for tech startups (previously dubbed the CED Tech Conference) held in-person. The event scheduled for the fall of 2018 was postponed due to Hurricane Florence. It went off without a hitch in February, 2019—yay!—but was chased online in both 2020 and 2021 by Covid-19. In fact 2020’s would-be Venture Connect—which was supposed to start on March 17, 2020—was one of the first large events in the Triangle to get sideswiped by the pandemic.
All that is to say that we’re very excited for Venture Connect to return in person on April 7—two weeks from Thursday—at Cisco’s campus in RTP. Today we have a full preview story of all that you can expect. Some 85 startups will be making live pitches, and we’ll continue to roll out previews of those startups up through April 7. This year’s event is capped by an outdoor “tailgate party” that you can attend even if you don’t go to the full summit.
They want to cap numbers to keep everyone safe, so online registration ends today. The summit (including the tailgate party) is $249 for startups and $499 for everyone else, while tickets for the party alone are $99 for startups and $199 for everyone else. Read our story here or find the Venture Connect site here.
Staying Fit
Hot off the presses: Durham-based startup Peoplelogic—think of it as a “Fitbit For Organizations”—announced this morning that it has raised $1.9M in pre-seed funding. The round is co-led by Richard Holcomb’s North Carolina Venture Capital Fund (NCVCF) and San Francisco-based Underdog Labs, with participation from local angels including Spiffy CEO Scot Wingo, Kevel CEO James Avery and Corevist COO Susan Wall. Our Suzanne Blake turned around a quick story on this after talking to Peoplelogic Founder and CEO Matt Schmidt, which you can read here.
You might already know Matt’s name as the former co-founder of DZone (which is now called Devada); he was a guest on our Exit Stories podcast in 2020 to talk about DZone’s successful 2017 exit to a private equity firm. Peoplelogic (which we first profiled two years ago) helps companies optimize employee retention by unlocking hidden insights in the tools that employees use—think Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, etc.—to see who’s happy and who needs some TLC before they decide to hit the door. Hey, just read our story.
Plum Opportunity
We mentioned a few weeks back that serial entrepreneur Matt Williamson was back with a new startup: Plum. Durham-based Plum is a platform to enable co-ownership of vacation homes to make a beach (or mountains) pad more affordable for middle- and upper-middle-class families, and has raised a $1.5M pre-seed round to kick things off in earnest. We promised then that we’d have a deeper dive with Matt on Plum, and today we deliver. Read the story here.
BTW Matt is another former Exit Stories guest, on which he recounted his experience as Founder and CEO of predictive-marketing startup Windsor Circle, which was acquired by Output Services Group in 2018. And if you want to find out more about potentially co-owning a vacation home with Plum, there will be an information session this Thursday in Raleigh that you can register for here. But only after you read our story.
Genius Funding
Online insurance unicorn Policygenius—which dubs its Durham office as a “dual headquarters” with its original New York City base—has raised $150M in new funding. The current round is led by a slew of life insurance and annuity carriers, including Brighthouse Financial, Global Atlantic Financial Group, iA Financial Group, Lincoln Financial and Pacific Life. The startup has now raised a total of $250M. Policygenius CEO Jennifer Fitzgeraldtells TBJ that the new cash will mean more employees in the Bull City, up from the 230ish they have now (about the same as in New York).
Good Bets
TBJ’s year-long series “52 Shades of Success” landed last week on Ashok Mathur, the Founder and CEO of Cary-based Patagonia Health, which makes apps and cloud-based software for electronic health records. It’s an interesting read. Ashok started the company in 2009 during the Great Recession, which meant that he had lots of recently unemployed or underemployed talent to choose from—but not much money to pay them. So he was generous with equity, which looks like it’s going to pay off big-time for those early employees.
Serious Gaming
More evidence that the Triangle is a growing video game hub: a startup video game studio owned by toy giant Hasbro is launching in Raleigh. Atomic Arcade is led by video game vet Ames Kirshen and will focus first on a G.I. Joe game. (Here’s to hoping they’ll employ Joe’s famed “Kung-fu grip.”) Ames picked the Triangle in large part because Epic Games and local branches of Ubisoft and Insomniac Games all prove there’s plenty of local talent. Triangle Inno has the full story.
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