We’re just nine days away from the first GrepBeat Happy Hour of 2024—next Thursday, Feb. 29, from 5-7 p.m. at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham. Your first drink will be courtesy of our great sponsor, the Emerging Companies & Venture Capital group of Wyrick Robbins law firm. Speaking of: here’s a helpful article by WR attorney Christopher Poe titled “Anatomy of a Venture Funding.”
Fun(ny) fact: immediately following the happy hour, Pete will be hosting a free standup comedy showcase at Bull McCabe’s with eight very funny local comics from 7:30-9 p.m. Find the Eventbrite for the GrepBeat Happy Hour here, and the Eventbrite for the comedy show with full details here. While both events are free, it’s always helpful to get a sense of numbers, so please register.
Peoplelogic Founder and CEO Matt Schmidt was the guest on the latest Friday Nooner, which also saw a cameo from GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy from the mountains of Medellín, Colombia.
Sneaker Trackers
With just one month to go before CED’s Venture Connect summit on March 20-21 in Raleigh, today we’re rolling out the first two of our upcoming feature stories on Triangle-based tech startups that have been tabbed to present but which we haven’t previously profiled. First up is Chapel Hill-based SneakPeek, from mid-20s Raleigh natives Michael Truesdale and Justin Kelly. SneakPeek uses AI to authenticate sneakers in the second-hand resale market, where counterfeits are a serious problem.
In addition to being selected to present at Venture Connect, SneakPeek recently finished participating in the Fall 2023 cohort of Techstars Detroit and will participate in the upcoming cohort of the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator. Read our full story here.
Multiplying Fish
The Triangle has a burgeoning “alt-protein” (alternative protein) startup scene. While often these companies tend to skew too “out of a test tube” for our traditional coverage focus, given that Raleigh-based Atlantic Fish Co. is presenting at Venture Connect, we’re going to make our tent a little bigger than usual today.
Led by Co-Founder and CEO Doug Grant, a former Navy pilot, Atlantic Fish Co. is “growing” fish in a lab from a biopsy of live tissue, targeting popular types of white fish that are overfished in the wild and can’t be easily grown on a fish farm. The startup has raised almost $1M to date and will be launching a product demo within the first half of the year, with plans to hit the market in two to three years. Read our full story here.
Half-A-Hundred+
Durham-based homebuilding software startup Higharc just raised $53M in a round led by San Francisco-based Spark Capital with participation from SE Ventures—the venture arm of French-based multinational company Schneider Electric—existing investor Home Depot and others. We first profiled Higharc and CEO Marc Minor in March, 2020, for its all-in-one platform that allows homebuilders and buyers to design and share the blueprints for new homes. The platform brings in the whole homebuilding ecosystem, including building materials and distributors, which is what is attractive to the likes of Home Depot and Schneider Electric. See Triangle Inno for more.
Filling The Slack
When Slack rolled out its announcement of Slack AI last week, it included Durham-based startup Wrangle as one of the 20 apps it specifically called out from among its “partner ecosystem” of more than 13,400 AI apps built within Slack. Most of the 20 are big-name tech companies like Notion, Canva and Tableau. We first profiled Wrangle and its Co-Founders Adam Smith and Adam Long—aka “The Adams”—in January, 2022. Wrangle’s Slack-integrated productivity tools help teams manage their workflows. See more in Adam Smith’s LinkedIn post.
Top Line?
As this N&O story notes, in the past, Cary-based Epic Games has been eager to announce the valuation at which it raised money, doing so in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Needless to say, those valuations were sky-high—$17.5B, then $28.3B and finally $31.5B, respectively. But when Disney announced on Feb. 7 that it has invested $1.5B in Epic Games as part of a broader partnership to incorporate Disney characters and IP in Epic’s megahit Fortnite and other current and future games, both Epic Games and Disney were mum on the valuation.
Of course, as a private company Epic Games is under no obligation to say, but it seems likely that it’s lower than $31.5B or they probably would have broadcast it. Tech news site The Information has quoted a source saying that it was $22.5B, which is a big drop from 2022 but still a huge number. See the full N&O story for more, including a rundown of who Epic Games’ biggest current shareholders are believed to be.
Space Race
Bandwidth’s new(ish) Raleigh HQ, which opened last year, cracked TBJ’s 2024 Space Awards for Top Office Development. I must say, I am eager to see the “two-story fitness center with a gym and yoga studio,” full-size soccer field and Montessori school that are all part of the sprawling campus.
Turning Blue
Chris Chung, the leader of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, updated officials at a meeting last night on the latest state of play; WRAL.com has a report here. One nugget: of the 20 projects that kicked off in January, none were for office jobs. The same was true for December. Instead, the growing trend is toward blue-collar industrial jobs, at least when it comes to economic development dollars. IMO in part it’s an offshoot of white-collar jobs—including tech—being increasingly hybrid and remote rather than purely office-based, even if the office is a Shangri-La like Bandwidth’s.
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