Guiding Light

Many of us have dived into new recipes during the pandemic, or at least we did back in March and April before the novelty wore off. But how about a light recipe? No, not a recipe for a low-calorie dish, but directions for carefully modulated light wavelengths to make your indoor crops grow just so. That’s the specialty of Raleigh-based startup Folux Labs, which is participating in current cohort of the RIoT Accelerator Program. We’re pretty sure that Folux is the only startup founded because a nasty note from a homeowner’s association forced a high schooler to move his tomato plants indoors. Read our full story on Folux Labs here.

Healthy Jump

While the pandemic has been a nightmare for gyms, it’s been a boon to at-home fitness companies. Raleigh startup Crossrope has been a major beneficiary of the trend. Crossrope was launched in 2012 by a former Navy pilot (Dave Hunt) who had rediscovered jump-roping when he was rehabbing from an injury he sustained while bench-pressing—and if that sentence doesn’t inspire you to get off your couch, nothing will.

In addition to selling jump ropes with removable weights to vary the difficulty, Crossrope shares at-home workouts with the 91K members of its Facebook group and, now, the Crossrope app. The bootstrapped startup began 2020 with 15 employees but, to meet surging demand, has hired 21 more since the pandemic began. Read our full story on Crossrope here.

Fender To Fender

Spiffy began as a convenient way to get your car washed, but Tweener List Titan Scot Wingo’s latest startup now helps with basically every car-related concern you might have right up to the moment that you potentially sell it. Yesterday Spiffy announced a series of partnerships with Gabi (to help you find cheaper car insurance), Uproar.com (a pay-by-month warranty program to cover repair costs) and Carvana (to help you get a good price if you sell your car). Of course you can still get your car cleaned and disinfected, your oil changed, and all the other on-demand car maintenance you’ve come to expect from Spiffy.

Rocket Fuel

Launch Chapel Hill is getting a big boost from a $230K grant from Sanford-based real estate firm Lee-Moore Capital Company. Launch Chapel Hill—as GrepBeat readers should well know—is an accelerator and coworking space that was created via a partnership between UNC, the Town of Chapel Hill and Orange County. Technically the grant was made to Innovate Carolina, but it will be entirely dedicated to beef up Launch Chapel Hill’s support of entrepreneurs. We’ve written about a number of startups who have participated in Launch Chapel Hill’s accelerator, including three of them (WAVE, Audible Ancestry and memoryCrafters) in the past month alone. We know that Velvet Nelson and her LCH team will put the cash to good use.

Grant-ed

Two Durham-based startups that we’ve written about several times before—LoanWell and Courtroom5—have landed sizable grants from the Google For Startups Black Founders Fund. The loan-making platform LoanWell received $100K, while Courtoom5—which provides resources to help people represent themselves in court—landed $50K. Congrats to both! TechWire has some more details.

Reloading

Raleigh-based private equity firm Plexus Capital has closed on its latest fund, the $502M Fund V. (Had to squeeze that last $2M in there, huh?) Plexus typically targets companies with between $10-$100M in annual revenue, and has already made five investments of around $40M total out of Fund V. Among Plexus’s portfolio is Raleigh-based golf ecommerce player Global Value Commerce, whose CEO Ed Byman was a subject of our Download Q&A last month. See TechWire and TBJ for more details.

Updates

Two startups we’ve written about previously are making news this week. Durham’s LCI Tech—the digital accessibility unit within LCI, one of the nation’s largest employer of the blind and visually impaired—is officially branching out from the LCI nest. LCI Tech will form a new joint venture with Raleigh-based digital marketing agency Walk West (led by CEO Donald Thompson) called Ablr that will focus on digital accessibility for the differently abled. See TechWire for more details, and also for Donald’s weekly column. Meanwhile TBJ has a profile on Durham’s Allobee, a platform for working moms looking for freelance projects such as web development that just raised $200K in outside funding. We wrote about Allobee founder Brooke Markevicius a few months back when Allobee was still going by MOMentum Marketplace.

Updated Updates

From the “really recent” update category, here are new stories on items that we mentioned in Tuesday’s newsletter. 1) Both TechWire and TBJ have stories on Durham’s Bull City Venture Partners trying to raise a new $50M fund despite all the negative publicity arising from BCVP General Partner Jason Caplain getting smoked by GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy in a now-infamous scooter race; 2) Jim Triandflou, the former Relias CEO who just took over the same position at insightsoftware, tells TBJ why he made that call; 3) TBJ has released batches 2, 3 and 4 of its Fast 50 list of the Triangle’s fastest-growing private companies. The tech names in the last three additions include the aforementioned insightsoftware, Spreedly, Pendo and Prometheus.

 

Extra Bit

This year’s WRAL Voters’ Choice Awards include a Most Innovative Local Startup category. You can nominate a startup by Oct. 11.

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

Evan Gross is this week’s winner for correctly deducing that I was at Tallula’s in Chapel Hill. More from Evan: “I'm a Business Development Manager at Kadro Solutions in Raleigh, helping build eCommerce solutions for both B2B and B2C companies. When I'm not selling eCommerce solutions, you can find me cheering on the Tar Heels, picking a banjo, or out of office travelling somewhere warm!” Kudos to Evan for tying his written description to his photo so well.