We are officially just one week away from GrepBeat’s inaugural “Rising Stars” event. As I have been bellowing from assorted rooftops around the Triangle for some time now, this event will take place from 6:30-9pm on Thursday, February 6th at the 21c Hotel in Durham.
You can still snag a spot and join many of your fellow community members to mingle and celebrate 10 up-and-coming-but-also-already-accomplished figures (and enjoy tasty foodstuffs!).
Regular, land-based vacations are yesterday’s news. What’s in now is staying under the sea. Or at least, that’s the hope of Durham startup Argoneta and its co-founders Ivan Francis and Andrew Lamm—who are quite literally designing underwater habitat units.
Beyond making these units available for vacationers at the price of a high-end hotel room, Argoneta is also aiming to make scientific research and conservation efforts more efficient. The startup’s underwater units are meant to support “saturation diving,” essentially enabling researchers and conservationists to remain underwater without a regular need to resurface.
Long ago, in a previous Age, Epic Gamesbought what was then Cary Towne Center for $95M—with plans to turn the site into a sparkling new HQ by 2024. The mall was subsequently demolished, but the site has since been marked by inactivity. And a relocated Dave & Busters on the periphery, I guess.
Now we’ve learned that due to the inactivity, the rezoning application Epic Games filed in 2021 has been withdrawn by the Town of Cary. Epic has not commented on any new plans for the site (aptly referred to as a “moonscape” by one Cary council member). But under Cary rules, the gaming giant will have to wait a year (barring a waiver) before submitting a fresh rezoning application.
Exciting news for Raleigh-based Scale Social AI this week as Founder and CEO Runbin Dong announces that the startup will be teaming up with Downtown Durham Inc. to help generate attention and traffic for local businesses.
As a quick refresher, Scale Social combines customer-generated content, creativity, and automated curation to generate affordable and effective marketing materials for small businesses. By the sound of things, we’ll soon see this magic at work around Durham!
See Runbin’s announcement here, and check out our past profile on Scale Social AI.
Renaissance Woman
Quick note on a CEO departure as Allison Wood—who co-founded Durham’s DaVinci Education and remained in a leadership role when the startup merged with Elentra—announces she’s setting off on a “fresh new path” of her own.
Congratulations to Allison on everything she accomplished with DaVinci. And readers, Allison has invited collaboration re: her encore career.
It still doesn’t fully qualify as local startup news, but with aviation startup Boom Supersonic ultimately planning to work on supersonic passenger jets in North Carolina, it’s hard to resist mentioning when they do something cool. (Plus, we’re NC; flying is our thing.) I think breaking the sound barrier counts.
This is not necessarily a rare feat for, say, fighter jets. But in this case, the startup’s XB-1 test aircraft—which went supersonic at a 35,000-foot altitude—is meant to be a “foundation” for passenger jet (for 64-to-80 passengers) that could fly at 2x the speed of most commercial airliners.
I say NC takes full credit. Eventually. Anyway, read more at N&O.
In The Soup
Yesterday’s new episode of In The Soup was one that I suspect will be of particular interest to many in leadership roles at startups. Co-hosts Jenn Summe (Primordial Ventures) and Melissa Crosby (Colopy Ventures) spoke to two successful founders—Nathan Snell (of Wilmington’s Raleon and formerly nCino) and, hey, there’s Allison Wood again (now-formerly of DaVinci Education) about how to go about cultivating a company culture.
Listen and subscribe to The GrepBeat Podcast (where the soup is now served) here.
Woolly Mammoths
Jurassic Park might become a real thing, folks. Not in the Triangle, sadly. But because A) it has Triangle support, B) it's a fun story, and C) we like prehistoric things here in the Colopy Ventures orbit, I had to close with this story today.
Here's the story: Raleigh native (and Ravenscroft School grad) Marshall Sandman is managing partner at Animal Capital, which recently relocated its HQ from New York to Raleigh. Animal Capital invested $400K in a Texas company called Colossal Biosciences (then valued at $30M) back in 2021. And Colossal Biosciences is now valued at $10B—and aiming to revive the woolly mammoth, as one does.
