The guest on tomorrow’s Friday Nooner—sponsored by Whitley Recruiting—will be Zakiya Alta Lee-Hill, a senior associate at Chapel Hill-based VC IDEA Fund Partners. (It’s still an adjustment to not write “Durham-based.”) We’re confident that Zakiya is the only Triangle-based VC who was previously a dancer for an NBA team, namely the Atlanta Hawks. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterwards on those platforms or in its podcast form.
ICYMI: We’d like to thank everyone—and there were a bunch of you—who attended Tuesday’s GrepBeat Happy Hour, which was sponsored by Dualboot Partners. The event culminated the first day of Raleigh-Durham Startup Week, and the RDSW tie-in helped drive our biggest attendance ever at a happy hour. (More on RDSW below.) I'd estimate the crowd as easily over 200, judging in part by the Here’s a recap with a gallery of pics if you missed the event or want to relive it—or just see if you were caught on camera.
More and more people want to live sustainably to do their part to combat climate change, but it can be hard to know where to start. That’s the reason Duke grad student Tiana Elame—she’ll finish her masters in environmental management next month—has launched EnvAns, which is short for “Environmental Answers.” EnvAns is a two-sided marketplace that helps homeowners make their homes more sustainable by vetting products and services and providing tailored information.
EnvAns is participating in Duke’s year-long Melissa & Doug Entrepreneurs Accelerator. (We have also written about fellow cohort members Alleviate Health, Hayha Bots, SaveOr, College To Climate, Aurganics, Infinity Portal, Himayat and Anon ID.) Those startups will be among 36 at today’s Duke Startup Showcase from 4-6:30; each startup will have a table where you can chat them up from 4-5:30, and then the action will shift to a pitch contest with $100K in non-dilutive prizes on the line—including a $10K award decided by the audience. Find more info and register here.
April is Stress Awareness Month, which is why this month’s episodes of our In The Soup podcast are diving into how to handle stress while managing a startup. This week’s edition deals with the specific form of stress—and joy—that comes from having a baby while trying to run your other baby (i.e. your company). Hosts Jenn Summe (Primordial) and Melissa Crosby (Colopy Ventures) chat with founders/baby-havers Lucy Kosturko (Social Cascade) and Akash Ganapathi (Opine).
You can listen (and subscribe!) to the episode here.
Funding News I
Some hot off the presses funding news: Durham-based GTM Buddy has raised an $8M Series A led by Boston-based Archerman Capital and Singapore-based Leo Capital. Hat tip to Jeff Welch, the director of Duke New Ventures, for the heads up. Confession: I hadn’t heard of GTM Buddy until yesterday, when it was revealed as one of the new additions to the Triangle Tweener List. (More about that two items down.)
CEO and Co-Founder Sreedhar Peddineni was previously the co-founder of Gainsight and Planful. His LinkedIn lists him as living in the Phoenix area, but maybe he’s too busy running a fast-growing startup to update his profile. “GTM” stands for Go To Market; its AI-powered platform helps guide sales reps through the sales process. In other words, it aims to patch the holes in a leaky sales pipeline to close more deals.
Funding News II
Raleigh-based Medicom has banked $4.1M in new funding according to a filing with the SEC. The startup with founded by three NC State alums is a health information network that helps providers, patients and others access and share medical info such as images and reports. We first profiled Medicom in July, 2020. It previously closed a $21.8 Series B round in November, 2021, led by Raleigh-based Oval Park Capital. See more in TBJ.
Tweener List
Last night I attended the reveal of the Triangle Tweener List, the list of “goldilocks” startups—not too small but not too big—based in the Triangle that Spiffy Czar/serial entrepreneur Scot Wingo has compiled since 2015. He has since brought aboard fellow serial entrepreneur Robbie Allen—Robbie was the GrepBeat readers’ choice while Scot was the judges’ choice as Most Impactful Individual in the 2021 Greppys Awards—to help him with the list. The two are also the general partners of the Triangle Tweener Fund, a rolling angel fund that aims to be an “index fund” of Triangle startups by jumping in as many deals as possible, especially among Tweener (or pre-Tweener) companies.
Some top-line takeways: 54 startups joined the Tweener List, bringing the total to an even 300. Six companies successfully exited—and thus “graduated” from the list—while 2023 fundings by Tweener List startups were led by a $100M raise by Raleigh-based Pryon. (You can hear more about that when Pryon CEO Igor Jablokov is the closing keynote at Grep-a-palooza 3 on Tuesday, June 4.) By my reckoning, we’ve previously featured 10 of the new Tweeners: Able Device, Epifany, Phinite, Plantd (a member of 2023's GrepBeat Startups to Watch list), Sizeo, Suggestion Ox, Syllaby (another 2023 Startup To Watch) and vTestify.
You can read full highlights of the event here, and find the Tweener List itself here.
RDSW Marches On
Raleigh-Durham Startup Week shifts to Raleigh today after two days in Durham. (Day One was capped by a packed-to-the-gills GrepBeat Happy Hour.) I was able to make a few sessions and can anecdotally attest that there have been roughly 2x as many attendees as last year’s 2nd edition, so get to your chosen events early for good seats (or seats, period). Here’s a TechWire recap of Tuesday’s Day One.
Check out the RDSW schedule for everything going on today and tomorrow in Raleigh, much of it at the Raleigh Founded location at 509 W North St. All sessions are free but you’ll want to download the event’s Whova app to register, find your way around and connect to fellow attendees.
Legal Briefs
Durham-based dev agency Pathos Ethos is suing New Bern-based BrainTap—though it has, or at least had, a Durham office—claiming that it was never paid for its work on a “brain fitness” app. I spent some time in my email archives this morning to piece together my past dealings with BrainTap. They include a coffee I had with someone from BrainTap in August, 2019, and we were waiting for them to release their app to write a story.
I didn’t entirely understand (or necessarily buy) how BrainTap was supposed to work on the brain, but hey, they had local ties and seemed credible enough. I checked in five months later (January 2020) to learn the app was still not ready, so we didn’t end up writing anything. Though TechWire did a story in September 2020 after BrainTap raised $3M, so obviously some folks believed in the company enough to write a check.
Anyway, according to the lawsuit, BrainTap approached Pathos Ethos to build an app in 2021 in exchange for equity, and things have now gone sideways. See TBJ for the full story.
Triangle Inno has another legal item in a very similar bucket: dev shop (and GrepBeat sponsor) Dualboot is suing sports betting platformSquareAction for not paying its bills for Dualboot’s work on designing the platform. We’re not going to pretend to be objective on this one. Go get ‘em, Dualboot!
Catch Of The Day
Raleigh-based Atlantic Fish Co. has unveiled the world’s first cultivated black sea bass. That’s “cultivated” as in cells grown in a lab, a sustainable alternative to overfishing. We profiled the startup and CEO Doug Grant in February, leading up to his pitch at Venture Connect. See all the info on this breakthrough here. And as Doug pointed out to us, the Triangle is a growing hub of sustainable food ventures. Another data point: last Friday’s Duke Alternative Proteins Conference.
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