So we’ve locked down the location for next Thursday’s GrepBeat Happy Hour in Raleigh—The Avenue Raleigh, on 3 Glenwood Ave. Join us there one week from today on Dec. 8 from 5-7 p.m. Your first round of drinks will be courtesy of our sponsor, Fourscore Business Law. Bonus: I will bake something. Please register so we know how many to expect.
The Friday Nooner returns after a one-week break with two guests for the price (OK, it’s free) of one: Brian and Alexina Alonso, the husband-wife team behind Built Story. The Durham-based startup is a marketplace for self-guided tours and was one of our 2022 Startups To Watch honorees; see our previous stories on them here. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch it afterward on those platforms or in its podcast form.
Help The Helpers
It's a classic startup story: someone personally experiences a professional pain point, then decides to build a solution. Nate Branscomb and Cary-based BCombs fits that mold. For over a decade, Nate has volunteered at various nonprofits and saw that smaller ones often can’t afford pricey enterprise CRM (customer relationship management) software like Salesforce. So he set out to create a lower-cost CRM tailored to the needs of smaller nonprofits, especially in the youth-mentoring space.
This fall BCombs was one of 15 startups to receive a $10K MICRO grant from NC IDEA. Read our full story on BCombs here.
In Living Color
As a younger man I had a lot more first-hand experience with X-rays than I would have liked; while in college I broke my ankle, thumb and wrist in consecutive years while playing soccer (the first two) and basketball. The experience would have been more, well, illuminating if only the X-rays were in full color rather than boring black-and-white. But I was [an undisclosed number of] years too soon for medical physicist Joel Greenberg and his Hillsborough-based startup Quadridox. The company’s innovative X-ray diffraction tech creates full-color images that are valuable for use cases ranging from airport scanners to food inspection to tissue biopsies.
Quadridox was a finalist for one of NC IDEA’s $50K SEED grants this fall. Read our fill story on Quadridox here.
WIN-ning
The Wolfpack Investors Network (WIN)—the NC State-affiliated angel group—has partnered with Cary-based VC Harbright Ventures to enhance WIN’s and NC State’s place in the startup ecosystem. The collaboration, WIN says, “will strengthen opportunities and professional support for WIN members, NC State students and WIN portfolio companies.” By partnering with Harbright, WIN members can see more potential deals as well as join rounds led by Harbright, which tends to be more hands-on than WIN has historically been post-investment. Harbright is somewhat of a rare bird locally in that it invests in both tech and life sciences. You can see Triangle Inno and TechWire for more info.
Dining Out Safely
Attendees at June’s inaugural Grep-a-palooza will recall that Durham-based Allergood and Founder/CEO Michelle Addison won the GrepTank event by landing the largest (fictional) investment from our sharks and also winning the (non-fictional) survey among audience members. We first featured Allergood back in May, describing its mission to help those with food allergies. Today marks the official implementation of its pivot into the restaurant space.
After discovering that grocery stores lacked the infrastructure to swiftly implement Allergood’s solution to track food allergens in a way that helps both consumers and the companies that would pay for the SaaS subscriptions, Michelle turned to restaurants. Today Allergood launches at Durham’s Eastcut Sandwich Bar and next at Durham’s NanaSteak, key trials to establish case studies and prove the concept before selling into larger restaurant chains. How it works: restaurant guests scan a QR code that would enable them to access an interactive menu that can automatically filter for their dietary preferences and allergens.
Breathing Easier
Raleigh-based digital health startup VitalFlo—which we first profiled in 2019—has formed a partnership with the Allergy & Asthma Network that gives VitalFlo an opportunity to work with the network’s more than 2 million partners and patients. VitalFlo devices and digital dashboards help asthma patients especially manage their respiratory health. See TechWire for more info.
Mall Rats?
You likely already know that Cary-based gaming giant Epic Games has bought the former Cary Towne Center mall with the stated purpose of converting it into its new HQ. Well, maybe not so fast, says TBJ. Renowned public-records-digger Lauren Ohnesorge has noticed that Epic Games has been quietly filing legal documents to spend millions for improvements to its current HQ, while it has decidedly not been filing the kind of development plans for the Cary Towne Center property that will be needed to make its purported new HQ a reality.
True to form, Epic Games didn’t want to comment to the media. That’s OK—I hereby invite CEO Tim Sweeney to next Thursday’s GrepBeat Happy Hour, where hopefully a free drink from sponsor Fourscore Business Law can loosen his tongue. You should come too!
Layoffs Impact
The headlines about layoffs (or potential layoffs) at the giant tech companies continue to come, but how alarming a signal is that for the tech industry more broadly? With the significant caveat that getting laid off stinks on an individual basis for anyone who gets a pink slip, it’s also true that there’s still a big demand for tech workers—especially developers—overall. That means that the significant majority of those laid off by a Meta or Apple or Amazon could likely find a solid new opportunity well before their severance ends. See TechWire’s story yesterday on just that topic.
But a guest column in TechWire by Steve Rao also highlights one key subset of those laid off who are in a much more tenuous position: employees who are in the U.S. on an H-1B work visa that’s tied to their job. It’s worth a read, and worth thinking about.
NC TECH Gala
Tuesday night, NC TECH held its annual Awards Gala in Raleigh. Pendo was named the Tech Company of the Year, adding on to the previously announced award of Pendo’s Todd Olson as Tech CEO of the Year. Other GrepBeat story subjects taking home hardware included Ablr (for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Tech), mesur.io (in Analytics/Big Data) and Ndustrial (Manufacturing/Supply Chain). The evening also honored the previously named Top 10 Startups To Watch, which included GrepBeat story subjects CliniSpan Health, FastQSR, Klearly, Rownd and Truentity Health.
Build Great Software
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