Tomorrow’s Friday Nooner guest is Austin Armstrong, the CEO of Durham-based Syllaby, an AI-aided platform that helps companies make video marketing campaigns. We first profiled the startup in July and named it to the 2023 GrepBeat Startups To Watch list; Syllaby is also a member of the 2023 cohort of GrepBeat sister company (and startup investor) Primordial. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterward on those platforms or in its podcast form.
Game Time
Playing games is fun, but it can also be a great way to learn—especially for kids who don’t much like school and/or who learn in non-traditional ways. That insight is a key motivation behind Chapel Hill-based startup GameFlo, which aims to bridge the skills gap by teaching kids and teen-agers everything from probabilities to managing emotions via tabletop games like its flagship product, the basketball-themed card game Pick Up. (It sounds much more fun than a card “game” our dad sometimes played with us, 52 Pick Up.)
GameFlo, which was recently a semifinalist for an NC IDEA $50K SEED grant, has signed a deal with Target to get its game in 1,700 stores by next June after landing a slot in the retail giant’s Target Forward Founders program earlier this year. Read our full story on GameFlo here.
Sales Booster
The sales team is the main revenue driver for many companies of all sizes—especially in the B2B space—so there’s always room for a product that can help make those teams more efficient. Cary-based Core AI helps sales leaders better manage their teams by using AI to analyze the coaching sessions that sales managers have with their sales reps. That leads to better such sessions going forward, leading in turn to more capable managers and also to more confident, comfortable and productive sales reps.
Several veterans of former Raleigh-based drone startup PrecisionHawk—which was acquired earlier this year—have emerged out of stealth mode with a new drone-related startup called Cloneable. The team also announced a $750K pre-seed funding round led by Washington, D.C.-based First In. The Cloneable platform enable developers to build applications for edge devices—such as drones, but also potentially for robots and all sort of IoT devices—to better deploy internal intelligence to those devices to drive real-time decisions.
Cloneable COO Lia Reich gives a potential example of a utility company’s drone spotting some rust on a transformer and automatically dispatching a worker to check it out in person. Cloneable is also opening its platform to a developer beta, so get those coding fingers limbered up. You can read more in WRAL TechWire and Triangle Inno.
Wholesale Help
Cary-based fintech Viably has launched a new product for ecommerce entrepreneurs who sell wholesale on Amazon that is backed with a $50M debt financing facility from Israel-based Viola Credit. The Viably Wholesaler Accelerator is a working capital product that will help sellers finance their inventory, which is a major hurdle that faces all sellers given that they must spend real money to make or acquire their products well before they receive cash from (hoped-for) buyers of the finished products.
Viably is founded and led by CEO Doron Gordon, who has brought on many veterans of his previous startup Samanage, which was acquired in 2019 by SolarWinds for $329M. Viola Credit also worked previously with Samanage, which obviously helped facilitate this deal. We first profiled Viably last July and named them to our 2022 Startups To Watch list. You can also read more about the current news in Triangle Inno or Viably’s press release.
Funding News
Raleigh-based edtech Element451 has raised $2M in new funding, according to an SEC filing noted by TechWire. Element451 helps colleges and universities engage with prospective and current students. We first profiled the startup in February, 2020, and named it to our inaugural Startups To Watch list in 2021.
Open And Shut?
We’ve previously discussed the ongoing saga of Red Hat’s decision to essentially put its previously open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux product behind a paywall. That was (and is) big news in the open source community, in which Red Hat is both a pioneer and one of the biggest success stories. Today’s N&O dives deep on the whole issue, going all the way back to the origins of the open source movement in the mid-‘80s. It’s worth a read.
Taxman Cameth
We wrote in April about the problems being caused for startups and research-fueled companies of all stripes by the end of Section 174 of the tax code, which allowed R&D costs to be fully expensed. The elimination of the tax provision meant big, unexpected tax bills for many startups. Triangle Inno ran a follow-up story on Tuesday and unfortunately the news isn’t any better. One thing the story said that I hadn’t realized: apparently grant money (such as from government research programs) is now being treated as income, on which tax must be paid. What??? Then that’s not a “grant.” Ouch.
Quickie Updates
Here are some updates on local stories that we’ve been following for some time: 1) With the then-sudden collapse of startup-servicing Silicon Valley Bank on March 10 almost nine months in the rearview mirror, the N&O checks in with local tech companies and investors about how SVB is doing as part of Raleigh-based First Citizens Bank, which purchased SVB off the scrap heap on March 27. 2) Here’s the very latest on Wolfspeed’s under-construction semiconductor factory in Chatham County from TBJ and the N&O. 3) Even as Match legally settled with Google, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says that the Cary-based game maker “will go to trial against Google alone” if that’s what it takes.
Build Great Software
Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Dualboot is a software and business 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 years of 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.
Extra Bit
Congrats to all the winners at last night’s NC TECH Awards! Among the highlights was Levitate’s Jes Lipson taking home Tech CEO of the Year, Spiffy’s Scot Wingo earning the Beacon Award for Outstanding Achievement, Bandwidth being named NC’s Tech Company of the Year, and Triangle startups (and GrepBeat story subjects) Peoplelogic, FemHealth Insights, TraKid, TSV Analytics and Social Cascade all being among the Top 10 Startups To Watch. You can see Jackie’s live coverage from the event on our LinkedIn and Twitter.
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