The latest Friday Nooner guest was Eric Boduch, the CEO and Co-Founder and Raleigh-based startup Revcast, one of Pendo’s four Co-Founders and an expert spatchcocker. The Friday Nooner will be taking off this week for Thanksgiving and return on Friday, Dec. 1. There also won’t be an In The Soup podcast episode this week. Have a great holiday!
Home Sweet Home
The team behind Durham-based startup First—which was acquired in 2019 by real estate giant RE/MAX—is back with another startup in the real estate space, Acre. The startup offers a new way to approach home ownership, especially for those who think they might well move in the next 3-5 years and don’t want to get locked into a mortgage. Instead, Acre buys the home for cash and the new residents pay Acre 5% of the purchase price upon moving in, pay Acre while living in the home, and share in a percentage of the price appreciation going forward.
Compared to buying a home, it’s basically giving away some of the potential upside (appreciation in the value of the home) in exchange for eliminating lot of the downsides—trying to outbid other buyers in a competitive market, closing costs, getting locked into a long-term mortgage at today’s high interest rates, needing to sell the home in the future, etc.
While there has been increasing awareness of the dangers of concussions over the past decade or so, especially in professional and college sports, unfortunately that hasn’t led to significant improvements in treatment and recovery. That’s where Chapel Hill-based startup Heads Together Health is aiming to make its mark. The platform has both a web portal for clinicians and a mobile app for patients to help those who suffer from concussions achieve a faster, more sustained recovery.
Durham-based cooling tech startup Phononic has teamed with Canada-HQ’d Vidir Vertical Storage Solutions for what they’re calling “BOPOS,” which is a “Buy online, pick-up on-site” solution for grocery stores. Vidir makes vertical storage and lift solutions across a variety of industries, and in this case it’s teaming with Phononic refrigerator units made with its innovative solid-state technology for grocery employees to assemble and store online orders until customers can pick them up. See TechWire for more.
Going All-In
Yesterday’s Triangle Inno included a feature on Nikin Shah and his decision to go fulltime with Triangle-based Front Porch Venture Partners now that he’s moved on from his family’s former advanced biomaterials company, Polyzen. Polyzen was founded by Nikin’s dad, Tilak Shah, and was acquired last November by Solesis; Nikin stayed on through Nov. 2 to ease the transition to the new owners.
Now he’s full-speed-ahead on Front Porch, which he co-founded in 2019 with his Duke Fuqua School MBA classmates Gregg Bordes and Joe Mancini. (Gregg has been both a Friday Nooner guest and a Download Q&A subject.) Front Porch invests about 60% in other funds—including our sister company Jurassic Capital—and 40% directly in startups, with a strong emphasis on the Southeast.
New Name
TBJ’s recent Fast 50 Awards recognized the 50 fastest-growing private companies in the Triangle. While Pendo checked in at No. 3—which is especially impressive given that it’s grown so large that its growth rate is off of a much higher revenue level than most on the list—it didn’t have many startup-y and/or tech names. Though an interesting, new (to us, anyway) name popped up at No. 2: Raleigh-based Synchrogistics, which Triangle Inno featured today.
Launched by married team Erica and Bill Jackson in their basement in 2010, Synchrogistics is an analytics and tech-enabled logistics firm that helps optimize its customers’ transportation and shipping processes. It seems to be a tech-enabled services firm rather than a product-ized software startup, but we can always hope. Though obviously they’re doing just fine the way they are; the Jacksons have bootstrapped the company to 40 employees and $81M in revenue.
One NC Grants
Attention startups interested in the SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) and STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) federal technology grant programs: applications for the One North Carolina Small Business Program are open. One NC not only dispenses grants to match the funds of SBIR and STTR grants with money from the state, but it also makes grants to support startups as they prepare and submit their proposals for those federal programs.
The One NC program is part of the NC Department of Commerce and overseen by former “Where’s Pete?” winner David Kaiser. See TechWire for more info.
Epic v Google
Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Cary-based Epic Games, spent several hours on the witness stand yesterday in federal court in Northern California as part of Epic’s lawsuit against Google over the Google Play app store. The Verge has been providing exhaustive coverage in this live blog, and you can also see this TechWire story.
VinFast News
We can’t send you off on this short Thanksgiving week without a little VinFast news. First up, there was enough smoke from rumors that two U.S. law firms are looking into potential legal disclosure issues that VinFast felt compelled to deny that they are being sued in the U.S. Which of course isn’t exactly a denial that there are folks out there who are considering such suits. VinFast also named the former Vietnamese ambassador to India, Nepal and Bhutan to lead its emerging operations in India.
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
The Bull City Summit has posted video of the session on Ethics in AI that I led with Nihal Mehta, a Co-Founder of New York-based VC Eniac Ventures, on Sept. 20 (we wrote about that day’s programming here, and you can find video of much of the rest of the event here). You should also mark your calendars for next year’s event on Sept. 23-29. You can do even more than that by locking in a special pre-sale price of $179 through Jan. 2 on Business PRO all-access passes for next year’s event.
Real talk: doing our best to serve you costs money. Businesses and organizations that would like to support our efforts should see our sponsorship opportunities here.
