We’re five days away from the next GrepBeat Happy Hour on Tuesday, April 9, at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham to cap off Day One of the four-day (April 9-12) Raleigh-Durham Startup Week. Your first drink will be courtesy of our great sponsor, Dualboot Partners. Please register so we can get a sense of numbers.
Speaking of Raleigh-Durham Startup Week, event Co-Founder Archie O’Connor will be our guest on tomorrow’s Friday Nooner, sponsored by Whitley Recruiting. To prep for the show, read our full preview on the event here, then see/hear Archie give you more color. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterward on those same platforms or in its podcast form.
It’s never fun for founders, employees or investors if a startup fails. In fact, it’s typically very painful in the moment, especially for the first two groups. But “failure” in the startup world especially can often be the launching point for future success, or at least lead to another big swing of the bat worth taking.
Consider our story today on Durham-based startup nvend, which helps bioeconomy companies and investors better evaluate the economic viability of potential biogas projects—which are expensive and take many months to complete—in real time. Founder Andrew Joiner ran a previous startup, Durham-based EnMass Energy (we profiled it in February, 2022), a platform that helped the same kind of waste-to-energy projects run more efficiently. But that startup turned out to be ahead of its time, in part because there weren’t existing market intelligence tools to help evaluate the economics of such projects on a granular level in the first place.
So Andrew and his team set out to build those tools themselves, which is what has become nvend. EnMass officially ceased operations in Q2 of 2023; nvend emerged from stealth last month. Read our full story on nvend—which is some ways is a classic startup tale—here.
In The Soup
Many, many early-stage startups are in search of what can sometimes seem like the Holy Grail—VC funding. But if you’re not aware of the potential challenges, taking funding from VCs or private equity can sometimes be like the dog who catches the car.
That’s why this week’s In The Soup episode dives into lessons learned from working with investors. Hosts Jenn Summe (Primordial) and Melissa Crosby (Colopy Ventures) welcome guests Brian Reale (ProcessMaker, whom I happened to bump into on Main Street in Durham yesterday) and Susan Wall (Corevist). Listen (and subscribe!) to the episode here.
Going Global
Chapel Hill-based data connectivity startup CData has acquired Germany-based Data Virtuality, which specializes in data visualization. That’s a good complement to CData’s core business, CEO Amit Sharmatold Triangle Inno, and Data Virtuality’s strong presence in Europe is also additive to CData’s strength in North America. (Amit was a Download Q&A subject in February, 2021, and back in 2019 we profiled CData spinout RSSBus.)
Predictably CData is mum on the purchase price, but Amit did say that it didn’t need to take on any debt to complete the deal, unlike its lone previous acquisition. That’s thanks in part to CData raising $140M back in 2021 and its generally conservative approach to spending. The newly combined company is hiring, primarily in Chapel Hill. Currently CData has about 110 of its 375 employees based in the state. Read the full Triangle Inno story here.
Patent-ly Productive
The National Academy of Inventors has released its annual (2023) ranking of the top 100 global universities for granted U.S. utility patents. All three of the Triangle’s research universities made the list. Duke landed at No. 29 with 92 patents, while NC State ranked No. 60 with 53 patents and UNC finished No. 94 with 36 patents. Curiously, the rankings don’t seem to take into account recent March Madness performance.
In the last report—which was for 2022—Duke was No. 19 (126 patents), UNC No. 68 (49 patents) and NC State No. 71 (48 patents). See Triangle Inno for more.
Meanwhile Axios Raleigh notes that the local universities aren’t the only factors that make the Triangle a hub of innovation, as measured by patent creation. Durham ranks No. 8 among U.S. metro areas in the number of patents per 100,000 residents, while Raleigh is No. 13. The Triangle is clearly the dominant force in the state; in fact in 2021, 42% of all the state’s patents came from Wake County alone.
Still In Doldrums
The national VC picture in Q1 was, shall we say, not great. PitchBook data showed that the number of deals (2,882) was down 16% from Q4 of 2023 and 28% down from Q1 a year ago in 2023. Meanwhile total dollars raised was $36.6B, down 8% from 2023Q4 and down 29% from 2023Q1.
VC firms also raised just $9.3B in Q1, only 11% of the $81B raised across all of 2023—which itself was down from $188B in 2022 and $184B in 2021. If you’re looking for green shoots, the recent successful IPOs of Reddit and Astera Labs could foretell at least a partial rebound of tech IPOs, which would have helpful downstream (or is it upstream?) effects on the fundraising environment. See this American Inno story for more.
Local Rebound
Fortunately the local picture for VC investing was better for Q1, at least in the early-stage waters trawled by the Triangle Tweener Fund. After a slow second half of 2023, the Tweener Fund deployed a record amount of capital in Q1 by investing $940K in 18 Triangle startups. Of those 18, 10 were new startups to the fund and eight were follow-on investments in existing portfolio companies.
Since general partners Scot Wingo and Robbie Allen operate the Tweener Fund as an index fund of sorts for early-stage Triangle startups and aim for the rolling angel fund to be a part of as many deals as possible, its activity level can be a useful proxy for how many early-stage Triangle startups are raising money in general.
The 10 new investments include six that we’ve previously profiled: Sani, Phinite, Higharc, Revcast (a 2023 GrepBeat Startups To Watch honoree), Medicom and Vector. And before long we’ll have stories coming on Cookie, Upswing and RxLink now that they’ve tripped our radar. See the full Tweener Fund report here.
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