Save The Date: We’re excited to announce the inaugural Grep-a-palooza, a full-day conference geared to early-stage tech startups to be held on Thursday, June 9, at the Durham Convention Center. Unlike most GrepBeat events it won’t be free, but we will make it worth your money—and time. We’ll release more specifics in the days and weeks ahead, but for now please just mark your calendar. And, full disclosure: one day we came up with the phrase “Grep-a-palooza” and liked it so much that we felt compelled to reverse-engineer an entire event to manifest the name into reality.
While you have your calendar out, remember that tomorrow brings another edition of The Friday Nooner sponsored by Dualboot Partners. Pete and Joe will welcome guest Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, the Founder and CEO of Raleigh-based Bee Downtown. You can watch live at noon ET on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube, or catch it afterward on those same platforms or in its podcast form.
Quin$ite
We first profiled Chapel Hill-based healthtech Quinsite and its husband-and-wife team Jeff (CEO) and Jenny (COO) Maze last June. Today we’re writing about the $2.5M seed round that Quinsite announced today, a funding led by RTP-based investor and serial entrepreneur Jeff Clark. Quinsite’s software enables healthcare practices to access and analyze their data to boost their revenue while also improving patient care. Quinsite already serves 20% of the 100 largest radiology practices in the U.S. with a 100% client retention rate and, with this funding, will expand into other medical disciplines like pathology, anesthesiology, emergency medicine and orthopedics.
Read our full story (including more on Jeff Clark’s background) here.
Seeing Clearly
The eyes aren’t just a window to our souls, it turns out. They’re a window to neurological disease, diabetes, cardiac disease, immune disorders and more. That’s why Eric Buckland launched Translational Imaging Innovations (TII) with a focus on software products to improve ophthalmic research. Eric will be pitching TII at CED’s Venture Connect summit on April 7 in RTP. (BTW we need to correct something we said on Tuesday—online registration for Venture Connect actually runs through next Friday, April 1, at 11:59 p.m.)
Read our full feature story on TII here. And maybe someday I'll write about how I met T.I.
Pivot Power
Andrew Fox, the Founder and CEO of Chapel Hill-based iValu8, will likely tell the Venture Connect audience of the power of the pivot when he pitches on April 7. iValu8 started out as a marketing platform for restaurant owners to create engagement campaigns via social media, but after a few years it was still showing depressingly little traction.
So Andrew could pack it in or pivot, and he chose the latter. In 2016 the startup partnered with Cisco to offer VivaSpot, a marketing platform that’s built into Cisco’s business WiFi services. For example, you pull out your smartphone in a restaurant—and now, a nail salon or movie theater or bowling alley or even an apartment complex—and receive an offer through the establishment’s WiFi service. And if you’d like to surf the WiFi for free, no problem; just kindly hand over your email address.
Read our full story on iValu8 and VivaSpot here—or see them in person at Venture Connect.
Tech For All
Nehemiah Mabry, the Founder and CEO of Raleigh-based edtech STEMedia, knows full well that tech fields suffer from a lack of diversity. As a Black man who earned a PhD in engineering at NC State and worked at NASA, all he had to do was look around. But while he believes that making the tech workforce more diverse is the right thing to do on moral grounds, STEMedia focuses more on the proven business case that diverse teams outperform homogenous ones.
That’s why STEMedia’s edtech platform teaches both “hard” programming skills and soft skills like interviewing, networking and project management as part of its mission to bring underrepresented groups into STEM. It’s already completed paid projects with NC State, the University of Texas at Austin, Best Buy, GM and CVS Health and is now seeking seed funding to scale further. Read our full story in Nehemiah and STEMedia here.
Collecting Cash
Raleigh-based online collectibles marketplace Hip eCommerce—a former GrepBeat Happy Hour sponsor that we first profiled in 2019—has banked $1M in new funding in a round that could grow to as much as $3.5M. The startup has three customized marketplaces for stamps, postcards and comics. Founder and CEO Mark Rosenberg tells TechWire that the funds are fueling growth in the form of hiring and the acquisition of a comic book retailer. Interestingly, Mark also says that the surge in interest in NFTs has also fueled a similar interest in tangible collectibles.
Teens On Tech
Early last month our Suzanne Blake took a deep dive into the “dark side” of technology, especially the impact of social media on young people. So we were especially interested to see that the Winston Family Foundation has made a $10M gift to UNC to fund a new research center to study the long-term effects of technology and social media use on the social and emotional development of teens. See TechWire and TBJ for all the details.
Hybrid Work
As more and more companies—tech and otherwise—move toward a hybrid model that combines both in-office and remote work, new challenges naturally arise. Two professors from UNC’s Kenan Institute have an interesting take that focuses on four axes: culture, work process, socialization and personal needs.
UNC Eship Event
Next Monday (March 28) from 4:30-6:30, the UNC Eship Center is hosting a virtual event titled “Combating Disparities in Supporting Female Founders.” The panelists include Helen Gu, the Founder and CEO of Raleigh-based InsightFinder (which we previously profiled here) and Shawna Cannon Lemon, a co-founder of female-focused angel fund xElle Ventures. Find more info and register here. And perhaps they’ll address whether or not they agree with this TechWire headline: Raleigh is nation’s best city for working women, study concludes.
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 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 pint glass!*
Until this week, Amber Cobb was one of the only RIoTers who had never won Where’s Pete? Well, they’ll have to make more room around the office coffee machine because Amber correctly named my location this week as Beyu Caffe in downtown Durham.
Here’s what she has to say for herself: “Amber is RIoT's Director of Partnerships and the last on the RIoT team to get a GrepBeat mug. Amber says she will put it in a place of pride with the others at RIoT Labs. When Amber is not reading GrepBeat and connecting the dots on RIoT's Partners, you can find her around Raleigh with her two kids, Benjamin and Sophia, and husband, Eddie, at one of their favorite spots The Kitchen Table playing board games.”
FYI Beyu happened to be the second “Where’s Pete?” location alltime way back in June, 2019, so it was nice to be back.
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