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Happy Thursday!

Voting for March Mugness’ all-Durham Coffee Championship pitting Cocoa Cinnamon v. Guglhupf continues until 11 a.m. tomorrow. The winner will be revealed on The Friday Nooner. Of the results to date, I will say only that Cocoa Cinnamon is leading but it’s still anybody’s game. Go vote now! (And thanks to our sponsor Fourscore Business Law.)
 
Hey, did somebody mention The Friday Nooner? With Joe vacationing in the mountains this week with a shaky Internet connection and a family that (understandably) wants his undivided attention, Pete will be accompanied tomorrow by guest co-host Kevin Mosley of Exit Stories fame. They will also welcome Vickie Gibbs, who runs UNC’s Eship Center and is a former Pete Meets... guest and Download subject. You can watch on Facebook Live or YouTube Live, and remember that you can comment in real time—and we’ll react to said comments.
 


Going Hollywood

You might know Brian Hamilton as the Co-Founder and former CEO of Raleigh-based Sageworks, the fintech that sold to PE firm Accel-KKR in 2018, or maybe as a subject of The Download. But his Wikipedia page is about to get an update: Brian is the co-host of a new TV show on ABC that debuts this Saturday morning called Free Enterprise. Building on the work he has long done with his Inmates to Entrepreneurs organization, the show will follow the formerly incarcerated as they launch new businesses from the initial product idea to finding their first customer. Read our full story on Brian and the show here.


 


Road Pavers

Thanks in part to increasingly automated lab processes, scientists can generate as many as 100,000 samples a day. The good news is that there are plenty of tools to analyze those mountains of data. The bad news is that the road between data generation and data analysis is now more pothole-strewn and overcrowded than ever. Enter Durham-based SaaS startup Snthesis, which is hard to type but makes it easier to bridge the divide between data collection and data analysis. Read our full story on Snthesis and Founder/CEO Emerson Huitt here.


 


Nobody's Fools

April Fools’ Day gags can be a bit tricky for companies—interested in buying a Voltswagen, anyone?—but Durham’s Seguno today released a tasty spin on the trend. The former GrepBeat officemates—GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy is an investor in Seguno and its ex-Bronto founders Chris Geiss and Marc Baumbach—have “launched” SegunO’s, a reputedly tasty cereal. Each “box” comes with a free email template, which isn’t quite as good as the free bike my younger brother once won in a box of Honeycombs (though it was really my box of Honeycombs; don’t get me started), but it’s pretty sweet nonetheless. Be sure to check out the amusing video on the "creation" of SegunO's. On the other 364 days of the year, Seguno is an email marketing platform for Shopify merchants that we wrote about last January.


 


Timely Deal

Durham-based Pro-ficiency has landed a $3M investment from Raleigh-based NovaQuest Capital Management. Pro-ficiency makes simulation training videos for clinical trial investigators. It’s been another startup that has turned out to be in the right place at the right time during the pandemic, as clinical research has never been more important but it was harder than ever to onboard and train new employees in person. See TechWire and TBJ for more info.


 


Diversity, Higher

It’s always a good time to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in tech. Yesterday, TechWire did just that with a three-story package by Jason Parker. One story, piggybacking off last week’s NC TECH Diversity + Inclusion in Tech Summit, talked to execs at Pendo, ChannelAdvisor and Lenovo about what steps they are taking. Another covered the keynote address from the summit by Gina Loften, the CTO for Microsoft U.S. and a native North Carolinian who graduated from Durham’s North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics (NCSSM) and North Carolina A&T in Greensboro.
 
The final story is on a topic we discussed last week: Vineet Jain, the CEO of tech company Egnyte—which is HQ’d in Silicon Valley but has a growing presence in Raleigh—announced that he’ll use hiring quotas to hit desired gender equity goals. We discussed that on last week’s The Friday Nooner.


 


Epic Raise

Hey, do you remember when we recently said that Cary’s Epic Games might be raising another $1B? You should tack on another $700K to that figure, and maybe more. Bloomberg is reporting that the new financing round will be $1.7B or more, and the valuation will be at least $28B. That’ll buy a lot of malls.


 


New Frontiers

UNC will hold its fifth annual Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Conference on April 22-23 (a Thursday-Friday). There are two key differences this year: the conference will be both virtual and free to the general public for the first time. Co-hosted by UNC’s Eship Center and the UNC-affiliated Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, the conference will focus on emerging entrepreneurship trends in these challenging times. Find more info here.


 


P.S.

Following up on an item in Tuesday’s newsletter, we bring you a TBJ story with a self-explanatory headline: “How to get a seed investment from Atlanta's Overline.” That would be the newly launched, Atlanta-based seed fund Overline.


 


Build Better

Dualboot Partners is a software development firm that helps ventures at all stages build great software and great companies. Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Dualboot Partners comes to each project with deep expertise in technology and business, as well as a commitment to supporting its clients well beyond the development process. The team offers advice and perspective—built over the course of hundreds of projects—and leverages its vast network to connect clients with investors, future hires and other resources critical in turning a concept into a successful venture. Intrigued? Email them here!

 

Because too much news is never enough.

 

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It's time for March Mugness!
 

The polls are still open (until 11 am tomorrow) for the Coffee Championship pitting Cocoa Cinnamon v. Guglhupf in a Bull City showdown. This clash of the titans will mark the finish of the inaugural March Mugness, the greatest caffeine competition in the history of startup-y sports which pits 32 former "Where's Pete?" locations against each other for the big prize. Go vote now!
 
Re: the results to date, we will say only that Cocoa Cinnamon leads, but that it’s still anybody’s game.
 
We’d also like to thank Fourscore Business Law, the sponsor for the Final Four(score) and Coffee Championship rounds. And if you want a quick and easy way to learn about stuffy legal subjects, check out Fourscore's Briefs section.

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