We’re just one week away from a holiday edition of the GrepBeat Happy Hour on Thursday, Dec. 14, from 5-7 p.m. at Lonerider’s Durham location (708 Ramseur St). Your first round will be courtesy of our sponsor, Fourscore Business Law. Please register so we can get a sense of numbers.
The guest on tomorrow’s episode of The Friday Nooner is Isaac Park, the CEO and Co-Founder of Durham-based digital health startup Keebler Health, which we profiled in September. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, or catch afterward on those same platforms or in its podcast form.
Founders First
Durham-based VC Bull City Venture Partners held its rebranded Founders First event yesterday at the Carolina Theater in downtown Durham. The event has grown from about 75 in its initial incarnation in 2009 to this year’s 700 investors, founders and ecosystem leaders. GrepBeat was there, and here is our report. One top-line takeaway: the current funding environment is definitely challenging and well down from its late 2021 peak, but there are still deals getting done for quality startups led by strong founders trying to solve big problems.
Read our full story here, plus some Triangle Inno coverage here and here.
In The Soup
This week's In The Soup tackles the perennial issue of when startup founders (or aspiring founders) should consult an attorney. Answer: pretty darn early, even if more for information at first than a formal engagement. Host Jenn Summe (Primordial) and sidekick Melissa Crosby welcome guests/startup lawyers Venus Liles—her Liles Law firm is the current show sponsor—and Hutchison's Trevor Schmidt. You can listen (and subscribe!) to the episode here.
Venture Studios
In 2014, longtime pharmaceutical executive Fred Eshelman made a $100M gift to UNC, which was then the largest gift the university had ever received. That bequest is now helping to fund a venture studios initiative that is focused on digital health startups. The main venture studio is based in Chapel Hill, with offshoots in Asheville and Greensboro and thoughts of potential studios at the coast (such as Wilmington) and Charlotte. As a venture studio, the idea is to incubate good ideas that can turn into startups, then draft a team to lead it and support its launch with capital and expertise. Triangle Inno has the full story.
Funding News
GTM Buddy, a Durham-based revtech startup, has raised $6.5M in equity according to an SEC filing, and is seeking up to $1.5M more. The startup—the “GTM” means Go To Market—was founded in 2020 by co-founders Sreedhar Peddineni and Sundar Vellaichamy and had already been backed by a $2M seed round in 2021 led by India-based Stellaris Venture Partners. This May, the company released its platform Ask Buddy, which is a generative AI tool to support “guided selling” designed to help reps close deals more quickly. See TechWire for more info.
Energy Savers
Tuesday’s Triangle Inno featured a profile on Pittsboro-based startup Nimble Energy and its Founder and CEO, Jeff Soplop. Nimble Energy helps building owners manage their energy and utility usage and costs. It launched in March, released its platform in July and had paying clients soon after, which is pretty darn fast as these things go. GrepBeat sister company Primordial is one of Nimble Energy’s seed investors—in fact, Primordial's Jenn Summe is quoted in the story—and my sources tell me we have a feature story of our own in the works.
AI Alliance
Red Hat and its parent company IBM are among the key players—along with Facebook parent Meta and chip maker AMD—who this week launched what they’re calling the “AI Alliance.” The organization aims to advance “open innovation” and “open science” in AI, rather than the proprietary (and largely closed) solutions that biggies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are working on. Red Hat, of course, made its name on open source, so it’s a natural fit. Though seeing Meta in there surprised me, at least. See TechWire and TBJ for more.
Bank Of Bob
Speaking of Red Hat and AI, Red Hat co-founder and former CEO Bob Young was cited by TechCrunch as one of the angel investors in a new AI startup that is spinning out of MIT. Liquid AI emerged from stealth mode yesterday by announcing $37.5M in funding, which is quite a “Hello, world” moment. The startup is developing what’s called a liquid neural network, “neural networks” being how AI systems “learn.”
Find more in TechCrunch and TechWire. Also, the New Yorker did an AI-themed issue last month that included this interesting story about Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “Godfather of AI” due to his pioneering work on neural networks, which was long a relatively sleepy academic pursuit before exploding over the past decade or two.
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
This isn’t Triangle-based and only half NC-based, but fintech startups will definitely want to know that Live Oak Bank-spinout Canapi Ventures has closed on a $750M fund, its second. Canapi is based in Washington D.C. and Wilmington. The fund targets early-stage fintech startups, where $750M can go a long way. Find out more in WilmingtonBiz.
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