The next GrepBeat Happy Hour will be Tuesday, April 9, at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham to cap off Day One of the four-day Raleigh-Durham Startup Week. (See our full preview of this year’s third edition of RDSW down in Item No. 1.) Your first drink will be courtesy of our great sponsor, Dualboot Partners. Please register so we can get a sense of numbers.
The guest on tomorrow’s Friday Nooner (sponsored by Whitley Recruiting) is Susan Mahlburg, the Co-Founder and CEO of Durham-based edtech startup DiffyQ, which we first profiled last October and also saw pitch at the November Demo Day of CED’s GRO Incubator. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterward on those platforms or in its podcast form.
Thanks to Kaitlyn (GrepBeat Kaitlyn? Kaitlyn from GrepBeat?) for doing a great job writing the newsletter on Tuesday. She’s going to be handling the newsletter every other Tuesday. I know you’ll continue to make her feel welcome!
RDSW III
Raleigh-Durham Startup Week returns for its third year on April 9-12 (Tuesday-Friday), with the first two days in Durham and the last two in Raleigh. We have a full preview of the free event here. There will be three main tracks of content—Idea Track, Build Track and Scale Track—plus multiple keynotes. There are evening events each night as well, including GrepBeat’s Happy Hour to cap the first day on April 9 (register here) and the Tweener List Awards the following night, hosted by Tweener List creator/Spiffy CEO Scot Wingo and Robbie Allen, the Bionic Health CEO who is Scot’s fellow general partner on the Triangle Tweener Fund.
Read our full preview here, which includes plenty of quotes from RDSW co-founder Chris Heivly. Next Friday, we’ll host Archie O’Connor—Chris' fellow RDSW co-founder—on the Friday Nooner to talk more about the event.
Bird Calls
Very Early Bird rates for Grep-a-palooza 3 end at midnight on March 31, which is Sunday. The Very Early Bird prices are $99 for Startup Founders/Employees and $199 for Everyone Else. On April 1, prices go up to $149 for Startup Founders/Employees and $249 for Everyone Else; then starting on May 1 through the event, they’ll be $199 for Startup Founders/Employees and $299 for Everyone Else. In other words: prices will never be better than this week, so lock in those rates now!
Grep-a-palooza 3 is our third full-day conference focusing on tech startups in the Triangle and those who care about them, and will be held on Tuesday, June 4, at the Durham Convention Center. We’ve locked in founders Jes Lipson (Levitate, ShareFile) and Igor Jablokov (Pryon, Yap) as keynote speakers.
Like last year, we will have two tracks of programming during three of the six programming slots, for nine sessions in all. While we’re still locking down all the moderators and panelists, here are the planned session topics with their working titles: Early-Stage VC Funding Outlook; Building Your Early Team; Multiples Bring The Exits To The Yard; Services ==> Product Evolution; Alternatives To Traditional Equity Funding; and two sessions of GrepTank, our take on Shark Tank with startups pitching to investor/judges.
As in the past, we'll cap the event with an After-Party at Bull McCabe's starting at 4 p.m. The After-Party is open to all, though only Grep-a-palooza attendees will receive drink tickets. And we appreciate the Grep-a-palooza 3 sponsors who have signed on so far: Hutchison, Robinson Bradshaw, Financial Symmetry and NC IDEA's ENGAGE grant program. (If you're interested in sponsoring, reach out to our Business Development Manager, Cesar Romero.)
In The Soup
Our In The Soup podcast returns from its one-week Venture Connect break with a new episode on the experience of being a female founder in male-dominated spaces. Hosts Jenn Summe (Primordial) and Melissa Crosby (Colopy Ventures) welcome guests Cara Borenstein Marin (Stashpad) and Lauren McCullough (Tromml). You can listen (and subscribe!) to the episode here.
Back For More
Raleigh-based restaurant recommendations/community builder startup Offline has gone live today with its second fundraise on the equity crowdfunding platform Wefunder, and the early indications are that it will be every bit as successful—if not moreso—than its record-setting first one. In September, 2022, Offline closed the largest equity crowdfunding in NC history with an oversubscribed round of $2.4M on Wefunder from 700+ investors, 80% of whom were Offline community members.
For Round Two, Offline’s fundraise emerged today from friends-and-family stealth mode and already had received commitments as of 11:15 a.m. for $1,486,112 (and counting fast!) of its $1.88M goal, raising on a pre-money valuation of $14M. You can find Offline’s Wefunder page here. The minimum investment is $100.
We named Offline to our 2022 Startups To Watch list to recognize the way CEO David Shaner (also a Friday Nooner guest in February, 2023) successfully pivoted his way to finding a business model that works and can scale—providing curated restaurant recommendations along with time-limited coupons to encourage people to try new restaurants in their cities. (Here’s our feature story from September, 2022.) Offline’s crowdfunding success proves that it hasn’t just been successful in building an engaged community that loves to use its subscription service, but that believes in it enough to buy into the company itself.
Tough Call
We’re sorry to pass along that Durham-based coding school Momentum has made the tough decision to close the company. Momentum has helped more than 400 people transition to new careers in the technology industry, with job placement rates consistently above 90% at more than 120 companies. Alas, multiple market challenges and fundamental changes in the tech industry have led the Momentum board and CEO and Co-Founder Jessica Mitsch Homes to make the call to wind down.
I’ve always been a big fan of Momentum and Jessica, which was only reinforced when yesterday, she gave me (umprompted) the permission to “make any jokes you’d like about a company called ‘Momentum’ closing its doors.” For the record, I feel it's too soon for me to go there—though I guess I sorta just did?—but appreciate the gesture. We look forward to seeing Jessica’s next act. And for employers looking to hire technologists, check out Momentum’s final graduation class from earlier this month and its other grads here.
NIH Funding
Raleigh-based startup CareYaya has received funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to partner with Johns Hopkins University’s Artificial Intelligence & Technology Collaboratory to launch the first AI-powered training for dementia care. CareYaya’s YayaGuideAI uses AI to offer personalized training to caregivers in bite-sized video modules.
We first profiled CareYaya in February, 2022, for its innovative approach to in-home care that draws on an underutilized workforce of students in healthcare professions. CareYaya CEO Neal Shah was also our guest on the Jan. 19 Friday Nooner. He’s a writer too, including this guest column on WRAL TechWire from Tuesday headlined “Customer-first healthcare could be the next big disruption.”
Topping Out
Wolfspeed has certainly been full speed ahead (see what we did there?) with its $5B Chatham County semiconductor factory, celebrating a “topping-out” ceremony with the final steel beam going into place just nine months after the first beam went in. That’s super-fast. You can read all sorts of coverage from our local media friends, including TechWire’s main story and a separate Q&A with Wolfspeed CEO Gregg Lowe; a TBJ story; and an N&O story.
Price Is Right?
The N&O’s Brian Gordon is the latest to test-drive a VinFast vehicle at Cary’s Leith VinFast dealership, and here is his report. Brian concedes that he’s not a gearhead (neither am I) and doesn’t dive deep into the vehicle’s handling—though he does make clear that “it didn’t blow up”—but he was certainly impressed by the low lease price. VinFast is clearly willing to compete hard on price even it means losing tons of money in order to establish a foothold in the U.S. market.
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Extra Bit
You might have seen MyMatR CEO John Starke when he played the bagpipes on the March 15 Friday Nooneror when he won the audience choice award during his pitching session at Venture Connect a few days later. Now, after winning the South Regional pitch competition for Founders Live, he’s competing to be one of the top three in the North America region—and thereby qualify for the global competition.
As of press time, he sits in second place, but there’s plenty of time for positions to change before the voting deadline of March 31, this Sunday. If you’d like to help—or are just curious to see his pitching prowess—you can watch his 99-second video pitch here and thereby qualify to vote. Good luck, John!
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