Tomorrow’s Friday Nooner guest is Nate Branscomb, the Co-Founder of Cary-based BCombs, a software platform that helps nonprofits simplify their operations and better fulfill their missions. (Here's our BCombs feature story from December, 2022.) You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterward on those platforms or in its podcast form.
Spiffy Deal
Flush with $60M+ in venture funding over the past two years—a $32M Series B in 2022 and a $30M Series C in 2023—RTP-based mobile car care startup Spiffyannounced today that it’s acquiring Texas-based NuVinAir. NuVinAir sells vehicle cleaning technologies and products and is a direct competitor of Spiffy’s Smart Tumbler car-odor-elimination device. In fact, Spiffy CEO (and Tweener List/Fund Czar) Scot Wingo says that NuVinAir has about 5x Smart Tumbler’s current business, so combining forces is a big jump forward for Spiffy in this niche.
Of course Spiffy offers a full and growing suite of mobile car-care services to fleets (especially rental car companies) and individuals—including tires, brakes and oil changes in addition to making your car squeaky clean inside and out. Read our full story on the acquisition here. Triangle Inno covered it as well.
Polished Pitcher
Triangle serial entrepreneur Doug Speight is a familiar name to many in the local startup ecosystem, including from his stint as Executive Director of Durham’s American Underground. You can see him in person if you’ll be at CED’s Venture Connect summit in Raleigh on March 20-21, where Doug will be pitching Greensboro-HQ’d AxNano, which he leads as CEO. AxNano is a startup that treats water polluted by PFAS chemicals; it recently landed a $2M contract with the Army.
Speaking of Venture Connect, our In The Soup podcast is continuing its “conference season” series with this week’s episode on the importance of advisory boards for startups looking to raise seed rounds. Anyone who’s seen a lot of pitches from early-stage startups is familiar with the slide touting an advisory board, but how important is that to seed-stage investors?
As with most things, it depends. Hosts Jenn Summe (Primordial) and Melissa Crosby (Colopy Ventures) hear from investors Abby Phillips (Wolfpack Investor Network) and Jason Caplain (Bull City Venture Partners) on the subject. You can listen (and subscribe!) here.
SAS Layoffs
Cary-based homegrown software giant SAS has confirmed more layoffs. It didn’t specify a number, but it comes after trimming 1% of its total workforce in 2023. In fact it seems like SAS is a little tired of answering questions about layoffs, given that a company spokesperson led an email statement with the phrase, “As we have previously explained…” which I’ll confess made me chuckle involuntarily. The layoffs are in the retail solutions division. See TechWire, TBJ and the N&O for the full story.
One looming backdrop to any SAS story, of course, is whether or not CEO and majority owner Jim Goodnight’s company is still on track for an IPO as it has publicly stated in the past, though that timeline has already been pushed to 2025 from 2024. As I have previously explained… I’m still in the I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it camp, but hey, time will tell. An IPO by SAS would likely have some positive knock-on effects for the Triangle tech startup community, especially if equity is distributed generously enough to employees to create a new group of angel investors and founders.
Opportunity Knocks
Yesterday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission—the SEC, or “the other SEC” to fans of the Southeastern Conference—approved regulations that public companies will soon be required to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. As Triangle Inno reports, that could be a big opportunity for Raleigh-based startup Greenplaces. We first profiled the startup in May, 2021, and recognized it as part of our inaugural Startups to Watch list in 2021; Founder and CEO Alex Lassiter was also a Friday Nooner guest in 2022. Though we’re not sure when Alex and his team ditched the space in what they used to call “Green Places.”
Space or no, Greenplaces is well-positioned to help companies accurately measure and report their carbon footprint, as well as help them reduce it. See the full Triangle Inno story for more.
Dine 'N Deal
There’s a tasty new twist on seed-stage investing in the Triangle called Seed2Table, featured this week by WRAL TechWire. Co-founded by Caleb Thornton and Amanda Powers, the goal is to bring together two startups to pitch in front of industry-specific investors over a gourmet meal. After a trial run last June, Seed2Table held its second event last Thursday night at CarSpace in Raleigh.
It was focused on Life Sciences and neither startup is based in the Triangle—Boreas Monitoring is HQ’d in Wilmington and Abbatia Labs in Switzerland, albeit with some connections to local event sponsor Kymanox—but we’re eager to see if future editions will be in our Triangle-based tech startup sweet spot. Cool idea, regardless.
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Extra Bit
We’ve landed another keynote speaker for Grep-a-palooza 3:Igor Jablokov, the Founder and CEO of Raleigh-based AI startup Pryon. You’ll likely recall that Pryon raised a $100M Series B last fall and that I’ve dubbed Igor the “World’s Most Interesting Man” for this 2019 Download Q&A. Igor joins Jes Lipson of Levitate/ShareFilefame as a keynote. Stay tuned for many more programming announcements as we get inevitably closer to the big day of Tuesday, June 4. And remember that Very Early Bird prices extend through March 31 at $99 for Tech Startup Founders/Employees and $199 for Everyone Else.
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.
