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Happy Tuesday!

Our latest Friday Nooner guest was Lee Whitley, the Founder of Raleigh-based Whitley Recruiting, which can help your tech startup hire the best sales professionals. Whitley Recruiting is also sponsoring the Friday Nooner for the next 10 episodes.
 
It was great to see so many of you at last Thursday’s GrepBeat Happy Hour, sponsored by Wyrick Robbins. Here’s a quick recap with a dozen pictures to see what you missed—or re-live the fun.
 


Water Loggers

Can you believe that CED’s Venture Connect kicks off two weeks from tomorrow (March 20-21) at the Citrix Building in Raleigh? It’s true. Speaking of: today we are featuring another startup that will be pitching at the summit. NC State-spinout Onda Vision is led by William Reynolds Jr. and is developing a wearable that monitors hydration levels in athletes. Dehydration can not only negatively impact performance, but it can lead to illness and even death.
 
Read our full story on Onda Vision here.


 


Face First

Identity verification is big business, especially in use cases where money is changing hands. But the more personal data that companies take and store in order to verify our identities, the greater the risk of hacking and other cyber threats to that private information. That’s the large problem that Duke MBA student Javier Cocero is tackling with his startup Anon ID, a decentralized, peer-to-peer identity verification service based on a user’s face.
 
Anon ID is participating in Duke’s year-long Melissa & Doug Entrepreneurs Accelerator. We’ve previously written about fellow cohort members: Alleviate Health, Hayha Bots, SaveOr, College To Climate, Aurganics, Infinity Portal and Himayat.
 
You can also see Anon ID in action if you use the startup’s demo for its Web 3 Face Vector ID as your “ticket” for the Duke Web3 Conference on March 22-23. Read the full story on Anon ID here.


 


Startup Showcase

While we’re talking Duke startups, this is the perfect time to mention that Duke I&E (Innovation & Entrepreneurship) will hold its second annual Startup Showcase on Thursday, April 11, from 4-6:30 p.m. More than $100K in prizes will be given out. The goal of the event is to create connections between Duke startups and folks outside of Duke to facilitate potential investments, first customer relationships, partnerships, mentorships and more.
 
The Startup Showcase is open to all. You can find more info and register here.


 


NCInvest

Vice President Kamala Harris was in Durham on Friday for the announcement that 10 minority and women-led VC firms—four of them from North Carolina, including three from the Triangle—have been awarded a combined $32M. The three local funds are Chapel Hill-based IDEA Fund Partners; Durham-based Resilient Ventures; and Durham-based agtech fund LeVert Ventures, led by Karen LeVert. Charlotte-based RevTech Labs, co-founded by the husband-and-wife team of Dan and Sara Garces Roselli, are also on the list; Dan is a former Friday Nooner guest.
 
Even the six VC funds not based in the state have made commitments to invest money in North Carolina as part of this NCInvest initiative. All told, the firms have signed commitments to invest more than $90M in North Carolina startups, focusing on minority entrepreneurs. See Triangle Inno for more.


 


Old Hands

Yesterday, Triangle-based startup CareYaya hosted a digital literacy program at Azalea Estates Gracious Retirement Living in Chapel Hill in collaboration with UNC students and CareYaya Ambassadors. We first profiled CareYaya in February, 2022, for its platform that provides affordable, high-quality elder care in part by tapping into a underutilized caregiving workforce of students in healthcare fields. Founder and CEO Neal Shah was also our guest on the much-watched Jan. 19 Friday Nooner episode, touting the startup’s rapid growth.
 
CareYaya believes that digital literacy can play a crucial role in empowering older adults, especially when it comes to accessing digital health tools—like CareYaya. You can learn more about the digital literacy program in this YouTube video or blog post.


 


Local Ties

Market-watchers likely know that there’s arguably no hotter stock than Nvidia, which as of press time has a market cap of $2.1T (that’s “T” as in “trillion”) and is now the world’s fourth-most-valuable company behind only Microsoft, Apple and the Saudi Arabian Oil Group. Microsoft and Apple have offices in the Triangle—and as the N&O points out, so does Nvidia, on Meridian Parkway in Durham.
 
It's not a big footprint by Nvidia standards; Durham is one of 20 U.S. cities that lists an Nvidia office and the roughly 300 Triangle employees are about 1% of the company’s total workforce of about 30K. But hey, it’s something, and Nvidia is listing 51 LinkedIn positions that include Durham as a possible location.


 


Board Reps

BWOB (Black Women on Boards), Pendo and Microsoft hosted an event on Sunday night at Pendo HQ in downtown Raleigh to celebrate the achievements and advocate for more Black women on corporate boards. Attendees saw a screening of the film OnBoard and a panel discussion moderated by Jes Averhart, a former GrepBeat story subject. The panel included Trisha Price, Pendo’s Chief Product Officer; Microsoft Vice President Rashida Hodge; and Gina Loften, a Fortune 500 board member. See TechWire for more.


 


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Extra Bit

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