ICYMI: Gregg Bordes of Front Porch Venture Partners was our guest on the latest Friday Nooner, where we also learned whether or not Coach K will be speaking at June 1’s Grep-a-palooza 2. (Sorry, no spoilers.) You should also check out Jackie’s latest The Week in 90 Seconds.
For Starters
When most startups are approaching their second birthday, they’re still trying to figure out the basics about making a good product and finding people to pay for it. Morrisville-based cybersecurity startup JupiterOne, meanwhile, was already minted as a unicorn (valued at $1B+) before it hit two years old. That makes JupiterOne Founder and CEO Erkang Zheng the perfect guest for this week’s For Starters episode, hosted by Anil Chawla and sponsored by Robinson Bradshaw.
After all, this season is all about how startups find product-market fit, which Erkang and his team obviously cracked pretty quickly. (We profiled Erkang last July and also named JupiterOne to our 2021 Startups To Watch list, just a year after its launch.) Read some show highlights here, then listen—and subscribe!—here.
Tracing Change
Many of us want to do our part to help the environment, but it’s easy to be overwhelmed about where to start. Kevin Berman started Project Trace to help; the startup participated in the recently completed cohort at the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator. Project Trace’s resource guide will focus on the everyday ways that we can all do our part, from turning down the thermostat to turning off the lights to writing our elected officials or corporations on important environmental issues.
Read our full story on Kevin and Project Trace here.
So Meta
One odd thing that happened last year is that reporting surfaced that Meta (nee Facebook) planned to establish a beachhead in the Triangle, but the company never confirmed it publicly. Well, insert your favorite cat metaphor here (cat’s out of the bag? cat-and-mouse game is over?) because Meta came clean yesterday. The tech giant has office space on the American Tobacco Campus in Durham and Ryan Daniels, a Meta spokesman, said that it will eventually be the home to about 100 enterprise engineers.
The engineers will be part of Meta’s Reality Labs division, which is spearheading the company’s oft-discussed and well-financed efforts in virtual and augmented reality, aka the metaverse. The engineers will be working pretty close to Cary’s Epic Games, another major player in the emerging metaverse. See the N&O (which I think broke the news locally), TechWire and TBJ for more info.
SXSW Selection
Raleigh-based friction-less authentication startup Rownd has been selected to pitch at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, which will be held this year from March 10-19. The startup will pitch in the Enterprise & Smart Data category. Rownd has already made a few pivots in its relatively short life—from IoT tools to monitor vehicle fleets to data privacy—before arriving at its current mission to make it easier and safer to register and authenticate new users online. Last February the Rownd team participated in the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator, and now the SXSW recognition/opportunity is another step forward.
Flying High
Aviation software startup Portside, which is HQ’d in San Francisco but also has an office in RTP, has raised a $50M Series B funding round. The startup makes flight management software for business aviation customers. The round was led by Insight Partners and 12BF Global Ventures, which are both based in New York. In a recent SEC filing, Portside’s co-founder and COO Alex Strygin listed a Cary address. So we hope he’s checked out coffee shop/bakery La Farm, which reached the Final Four(score) of our 2021 March Mugness tournament.
If you thought that it was a big deal when Durham-based Wolfspeed announced in September that it’s investing $5B to build a semiconductor factory in Chatham County that will bring 1,800 jobs—and it was—you should see some of the even bigger deals that were floated. That’s what TBJ’s Lauren Ohnesorge has uncovered in chasing down the public documents that showed the behind-the-scenes negotiations between state officials and Wolfspeed. There was a possibility on the table that included nearly 2,500 jobs and $7.8B in investment, and even a “transformative scenario” that could have meant an additional 3,300 jobs. Alas, that last project eventually landed in Germany, as was announced on Feb. 1.
In other Wolfspeed news, the company promoted four executives to new roles. See TechWire or TBJ for more.
Founder University
Thanks to Abhi Narang for tipping us off to the upcoming Founder University intensive, a free two-day online course led by investor Jason Calacanis. The next session is exclusively for women founders and will be held on Feb. 16-17, this Thursday and Friday. The course is designed for startups that have a product in the market but have not yet reached a Series A. Find all the info and apply here. It's limited to 200 startups.
Keep It Fair
Getting this in just under the wire after a last look at Twitter before wrapping up this edition. Namely, Triangle Inno's profile on Carrboro-based ecommerce startup Made Trade, led by wife-and-husband team Cayley Pater and Andy Ives. Made Trade is a one-stop shop for curated home goods, clothing and other items that are ethically and sustainably made. To date the five-year-old startup has been entirely bootstrapped and has hit about $2M in annual revenue, but has now raised $200K in a convertible note seed round that could reach $1.5M.
See Triangle Inno for the full story, including how Cayley and Andy "met cute" during their first semester at UNC 17 years ago at a meeting of the UNC Fair Trade Club.
Build Great Software
Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Dualboot is a software and business development company. Their clients include tech and non-tech founders as well as Fortune 500 companies, so they can start small or scale fast depending on what you need. Every client is assigned a U.S.-based Product Director with years of experience bringing products to market, and they can manage the entire development process. They focus on how the software fits into your company to drive revenue and build the business. At Dualboot, they don’t just write your software—they help you grow your business. Intrigued? Email them here.
Extra Bit
TechWire columnist Marshall Brain recently plugged the following query into ChatGPT: “Tell me a story about ChatGPT beating out Google.” I thought the result was pretty cool.
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