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Happy Tuesday!

You should check out the most recent edition of The Friday Nooner, with guest host Robbie Allen stepping in for the GrepBeat Godfather. But Joe will be back in his rightful place alongside Pete this Friday on Facebook Live (you should comment in real time!) or YouTube Live at Noon ET. See you there!
 


Had Us At Hello

The wife-and-husband team behind ByteBaseCara Borenstein and Theo Marin—recently moved from the Bay Area to Durham, with their startup in tow. Both Cara and Theo are software developers, and it was while she was working at Twilio and he at Nextdoor that they came up with their idea for a new way for developers to create and share notes without losing their flow/momentum. ByteBase is currently participating in the Techstars Anywhere accelerator. Cara also wrote GrepBeat one of the alltime great pitch emails, which is why we wrote today’s story. Read it!


 


Frozen Funds

Brian Hamilton, the former CEO and Co-Founder of Raleigh’s Sageworks (and Download subject), has made a “significant” investment in the Canadian broadcast and video conferencing company Frozen Mountain. Sageworks was acquired in 2018 by the private equity firm Accel-KKR, and since then Brian has mostly focused on his extensive philanthropic efforts, especially in helping former inmates become entrepreneurs. Now he’s jumping back into the startup-y game, with plans to help Frozen Mountain scale further and create jobs both in North Carolina and Canada. As you might suspect, the pandemic has juiced the demand for Frozen Mountain’s video conferencing services and increased its opportunities. TechWire and TBJ have more details, though the folks at the Brian Hamilton Foundation want to stress that this is an investment, not an acquisition.


 


Sweet Music

Bold Music Lessons, which launched as an in-person music lessons startup in Charlotte in 2013, expanded to the Triangle last year. You might have noticed that 2020 was a bad year to start an in-person anything, but fortunately Bold Music was prepared for the shift-to-virtual. Co-Founder George Ramsay tells GrepBeat that the company originally developed a live, virtual platform in late 2019 as a way for students to take make-up classes, when it might be inconvenient for a teacher to drive to the student’s house outside of the originally scheduled window for the lesson. They rolled out this “make-up solution” in February, 2020—i.e. just one month before the whole world went sideways.
 
All of their lessons went virtual for a while, and now it’s about 50/50 between in-person lessons and virtual. There are even some advantages to giving the lessons virtually. For instance, some teachers have elaborate in-home studios that come in handy when giving lessons to more advanced students; and teachers can demonstrate on their own piano or drum set if they’re virtual, say, whereas they wouldn’t typically lug those larger instruments to a student’s home. Bold Music intends to keep this hybrid model that mixes virtual lessons with in-person lessons and other events. Find out more—and book lessons—on their website.


 


Cleaning Up

In late 2019 we wrote in this very space about 2ULaundry, a Charlotte-based laundry and dry-cleaning startup that was expanding into the Triangle, its third market (after Charlotte and Atlanta). To help execute 2ULaundry’s pick-up-and-deliver service, the startup actually built a brick-and-mortar laundromat in Charlotte called The Laundry Room that it opened to the public as a souped-up, tech-enabled version of the self-service laundromat.
 
Now 2ULaundry is offering a new franchising opportunity called LaundroLab for those who want to open and run (or mostly have someone else run) their own laundromat. Franchises are available throughout the Southeast, including the Triangle. The franchise fee is $49,500. Their pitch is that the $25B laundromat industry is recession-proof, has no single market leader, and seems ripe for a tech-y upgrade. Our friends at the Atlanta-based tech startup site Hypepotamus (like “hippopotamus,” but with “hype” instead of “hippo”) have more details.


 


Making A List

Last Friday, TechWire featured Raleigh-based Reignlist, a new national real-estate listing startup launched by Anthony Brown, who’s been a real estate broker for almost 30 years. It sounds like the service is far friendlier to agents than what’s out there now, including the fact that Reignlist promises not to sell the listings to sites like Zillow and Trulia. Anthony is certainly aiming high: “We intend for reignlist.com to become the largest real estate platform in the world.” One confession: some part of my brain keeps trying to read the name as some mix of “re-enlist” and “ignition.” Maybe if it was “Reign List,” two words? Just work-shopping here.


 


Cash Call

Yesterday’s TBJ ran a roundup of Triangle startup funding for the month of January, which according to public filings topped $30M. The most tech-y-ish one that we haven’t previously discussed is Cary-based Stitch Golf Holdings, which raised $3.6M to help fund the skyrocketing growth of its e-commerce business thanks in part to golf being one of the most pandemic-friendly sports. The story also mentions Raleigh-based edge computing startup EDJX, which we discussed last week, and Raleigh-based tennis instruction platform TopCourt, which we profiled last July.


 


Following Up

Here are a few more quick follow-ups on startups/stories that we’ve mentioned before: 1) TechWire has more on Durham’s ArchiveSocial landing the gig of archiving (former) President Trump’s social media content; 2) TBJ profiles former Download subject Courtney Tellefson, the Founder and CEO of The Produce Box; 3) According to TBJ, Bandwidth CEO David Morken’s 2021 is off to a great start: he pocketed nearly $40M by selling shares of his company’s stock in January.


 


Make It Legal

Hutchison is a boutique law firm that embraces the entrepreneurial spirit and steers technology and life sciences entrepreneurs to success through all stages of their company’s life. Hutchison partners with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial-minded organizations to enable business solutions that make the law work for them, and advises angel investors and venture capital firms to support their investment selections to maximize their potential for success. Hutchison takes the time to learn your business and understand what’s behind the deal.

 

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