On the latest Friday Nooner, we said a sad good-bye to our Jackie Sizing on her last day at GrepBeat (see her farewell cake celebration here) and a hearty hello to Neal Shah, the Founder and CEO of Triangle-based CareYaya. Jackie will still be around the Triangle; she’s accepted a position at abc11.com. We’ll miss you, Jackie!
Neal and CareYaya aren’t going anywhere either, unless you count the 10 markets that they’ve already expanded to with their in-home elder-care platform that calls on an underutilized labor force of undergrad and grad students in the health professions.
New Champ?
Enterprise SaaS B2B sales—i.e. selling “software as a service” on a subscription basis to larger business customers—is an increasingly crowded space with billions on the line. Any product that can demonstrate that it helps sales teams close more deals has a chance to make it. Raleigh-based startup Champly is one of the newer entrants in the space with its own twist: it helps its customers create mini-sites that can serve as digital sales rooms (DSRs). In other words, the seller can whip up a personalized website for a prospective buyer to make the sales process and later the deal execution easier and more efficient for everyone.
There are some positive rumblings in the effort to reinstate the portion of Section 174 of the tax code that had allowed R&D costs to be fully expensed immediately rather than amortized over five years. As we’ve discussed in this space before, the change—dubbed by some as the “innovation tax”—has severely hurt many research-focused startups, among others. There’s renewed optimism that a fix might be in the works after a proposed compromise tax package passed the House Ways and Means Committee by a whopping 40-3 bipartisan vote on Friday. It would be hard to get 93% of Congress to agree that pizza tastes good, never mind coming together on an actual piece of legislation. The fix would be retroactive to 2022 and go through 2025.
Of course, this being Congress, it’s still far from a done deal and multiple hurdles still remain before it becomes law. But things are looking better than they did a few weeks ago. Here’s more from GrantThornton, a site that covers tax issues; and from Triangle Inno.
More Tax Talk
Sticking in the tax/accounting realm, Raleigh-based startup Allstacks today announced the release of its R&D Software Capitalization offering. It enables engineering teams to easily track software R&D investments, in part to make sure they take full advantage of any available tax credits. See more about the new offering here.
We first profiled Allstacks in February, 2019 and named it to our inaugural Startups To Watch list in 2022 for its platform that helps development teams manage the process of building and launching software. Allstacks Co-Founder/CEO Hersh Tapadia was also a Friday Nooner guest in June, 2022.
Resolved
One reason I’m not very litigious is because I know that TBJ/Triangle Inno’s Lauren Ohnesorge would probably hear (and write) about any lawsuit I was embroiled in before lunch. Lauren’s legal blotter story from yesterday was a relatively happy one, as these things go: Triangle startups FeedStation and Tromml have resolved their case before a potential trial, filing jointly to dismiss it.
We felt a little awkward about the whole thing since we know and like the CEOs of both startups: FeedStation’s Michael Linnane and Tromml’s Lauren McCullough (whom we should note was not named as a defendant in FeedStation's suit). So we’re happy that it’s come to a resolution that both parties agreed to.
Female Founders
Susan Cook, the CEO of Zaloni, and Biomilq Co-Founder Michelle Egger spoke last Thursday night on a female founders panel at an event held by the Triangle Female Founders Meetup. It was the second such event held by the group, which Kelly Rowell (the CEO of CED) tells Triangle Inno emerged out of conversations on LinkedIn and is still in the experimental stage. See the full story here.
Bankruptcy Details
Legal filings arising from the Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection that Raleigh-based drone company PrecisionHawk sought in December paint a more detailed picture of how the once seemingly high-flying startup is no more. For one thing, revenue fell in recent years from $7M in 2021 to $6.7M in 2022 to $6.1M in 2023, which isn’t falling off a cliff but certainly is far from ideal—especially since it seems it was paying at least some execs more like it was a more firmly established company. TBJ has all the details.
Still More Tax Talk
Avalara, a leading provider of cloud-based tax compliance automation software that is HQ’d in Seattle but has a significant Durham presence, today released its annual Avalara Tax Changes report for 2024. One finding: businesses should expect an uptick in audits over sales tax collection and reporting in 2024 and 2025. See all the info here. Also from Avalara, late last week the company announced a partnership with Atlanta-based Actabl to simplify and automate tax compliance and data management for the hotel industry. See more here.
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