Tomorrow’s Friday Nooner guest is Kristen Baileys. Kristen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Raleigh-based Bake Eat Love, a subscription baking kit startup that we first profiled in November. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterward on those same platforms or in its podcast form.
Our first GrepBeat Happy Hour of 2023 will be two weeks from today on Thursday, March 16, at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham. Your first round will be courtesy of our sponsor, Hutchison law firm. Since the happy hour will be held on St. Patrick’s Day Eve, I will bake my famed Irish sodabread. Please register here so we can get a sense of numbers.
Dime To Dollars
Duke senior Abby Huang has another big milestone looming before her May graduation—pitching her startup, Dime Marketplace, as one of the featured presenters at CED’s Venture Connect summit on March 29-30. Dime connects brands to student “ambassadors” on college campuses who use their social media savvy and general influence among their peers to spread the word. Dime is currently up and running at Duke, Emory University and Princeton and plans to launch soon at UNC-Chapel Hill and Northwestern.
Let’s hop from Duke to UNC to check in on Tar Heel sophomore Rob Sullivan, who is developing an app called Arete that’s a modern take on keeping a physical journal. In the app, users can set goals for themselves in categories from finance to family, track their progress with cool data visualizations, and receive daily reminders and affirmations to keep them on task. Rob participated in the most recent cohort of the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator, which has its free, open-to-the-public Demo Day tonight at 5:30 p.m. (You can find more info and register here.)
Cary’s Cofounders Capital announced yesterday that it has closed on its $50M Fund III. Tim McLoughlin is also taking over as Managing Partner for Founding Partner David Gardner, who will remain with the team. David raised the first Cofounders fund of $12M eight years ago, while Fund II clocked in at $31M in 2018.
Fund III will be similar to past funds in that Cofounders will continue to invest in early-stage B2B software companies, including those that are pre-revenue or only have a few customers. But the larger fund enables Cofounders to write bigger checks—both initially and in follow-on investments—and the firm will broaden its geographic focus to the entire Southeast, while still planning to deploy the majority of the capital in North Carolina. You can read more about the new fund in TechWire and Triangle Inno.
Cofounders has already made its first investment out of Fund III by participating in a $6.5M round for Raleigh-based Cycle Labs that was led by none other than our sister company in the Colopy Ventures universe, Jurassic Capital. Jurassic officially announced the deal today. Cycle Labs, which is a former spinout from Raleigh-based Tryon Solutions, provides a continuous test automation software platform. We named Cycle Labs to our 2021 Startups To Watch list and have frequently lauded CEO Josh Owen's mustache.
CED's Venture Report
CED has released its brand-spanking-new Venture Report on equity funding raised by NC startups in calendar year 2022. In total, 246 companies (25 more than in 2021) raised a total of $4.2B across 269 separate funding events. Another mega-raise by Cary’s Epic Games helped juice the overall dollar figure, but there were also 174 transactions of $5M or less—indicating a growing funnel at the seed stage. Here’s CED’s release with all the highlights, and you can find the full report here.
And while we’re discussing CED, let’s take another opportunity to plug Venture Connect on March 29-30 in RTP. GrepBeat will be there!
Drinking It In
Durham-based startup Precision Fermentation has raised $2M according to an SEC filing made public yesterday. The company uses IoT technology to help brewers manage the fermentation process to make better beer more efficiently. We first profiled the startup way back in November, 2018, and also checked in early in the pandemic when the closing of bars and restaurants was clobbering alcohol-related startups. (Hey, remember back when we had a global pandemic? Fun times!)
We have not yet profiled ReUp and The Woobles, though we’ve mentioned the latter multiple times in the newsletter (especially about their Shark Tank appearance). We are definitely putting ReUp on our list to profile.
Cast Adrift
Yesterday’s N&O put a human face on an issue that is rarely at the fore when tech layoffs are announced. Namely, foreign citizens who are in the U.S. on an H-1B visa that is tied specifically to their employer generally have 60 days after a layoff to find a new job or face deportation. Talk about a ticking clock.
The N&O focuses its story on Sruthi Pasupulati, who was recently laid off by NetApp’s RTP division. Now everything is up in the air—including the decision to potentially start a family—as she scrambles to find a new job to stay in the States with her husband, who is also here on an H-1B visa.
News Briefs
Some local startups making news: 1) Animal Cancer Dx, which we profiled in January, has been accepted into Leap Venture Studio’s accelerator. Leap is the first and only pet care-specific startup accelerator and is sponsored Mars Petcare, Michelson Found Animals and R/GA Ventures. The selection means 12 weeks of programming on top of a $200K investment.
2) Spiffy has iterated its engineering to knock down the price of its “Smart Tumbler” odor elimination device for cars to as low as $3 per treatment. Let CEO Scot Wingo tell you much more in this Twitter thread.
3) Seven startups have been chosen for the next cohort of the RIoT Accelerator Program (RAP). Two of them are local: Raleigh-based online car-buying platform Wyndscreen (which we profiled last August) and Morrisville-based Saanketh Sound Analytics, which we hereby add to our to-do list. Check out all the startups on the RIoT site.
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
There was an odd story in today’s Triangle Inno about the now-ex-CEO at Raleigh-based drone startup PrecisionHawk. Jim Norrod is officially out as CEO, confirmed CFO T.J. Karr, but that’s not the weird part. Norrod had posted on LinkedIn that PrecisionHawk was bought out by Norwegian tech firm Field Group, even congratulating the “great team at PrecisionHawk that made this possible” and saying that he’s “off to [his] next adventure.”
Well, Karr insists that PrecisionHawk hasn’t been acquired by Field Group or anyone else, and that Norrod “had no authority to make any public statements about the company.” What the what???
This thing doesn’t write itself.
Credit (or blame) us directly via email.
It also doesn't pay for itself. If you share our mission to lift the Triangle tech community, please consider becoming an individual GrepBeat Supporter. And businesses should see our sponsorship opportunities here, then
write us at sponsorships@grepbeat.com to become a sponsor.
