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Meeting A Need

One possible silver lining of the pandemic is that it shone a light on the importance of mental health care and inspired some folks to rise to the occasion of meeting that need. One such example is Durham-based Lavni, which was founded by Marcus King and Laura Valentine to provide virtual mental health services to under-served communities such as Black men. Lavni will be presenting at CED’s Venture Connect summit on March 29-30 at RTP.
 
Read our full story on Lavni here.

Charged Up

When I was a kid, I thought the odds were better that my regular “ride” in the year 2023 would be a flying car than a 2001 Acura. Oh well. But if Nanode’s breakthroughs in battery technology are any indication, flying cars (in some form) might not be that far away after all. The startup is HQ’d in Edmonton, Canada, but COO Brian Worfolk is based in the Triangle and Nanode will be pitching at Venture Connect.
 
Read our full story on Nanode here.

Topping Off

Cary-based Belongly, a professional community platform for mental health providers, has closed on an oversubscribed follow-on round of $500K+. It tops off the oversubscribed $1M+ seed round that Belongly first closed in January, 2022. In total, Belongly has now raised north of $1.6M. Belongly was founded by Dr. Doug Kaufman, a serial entrepreneur who was the CEO of transit-finder app TransLoc, which sold to Ford in 2018 for $60M.
 
Investors include Atlanta-based Knoll Ventures, the Triangle Tweener Fund and Kevel Founder James Avery. We first wrote about the startup in December, 2020, when it was called Vertroos Health, before it tweaked its focus to serving mental health providers.

Epic Fine

Epic Games is now officially on the hook for $520M to settle claims made by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after the government agency voted unanimously yesterday to finalize its order that was first announced in December. The half-billion-plus is to settle complaints about customer privacy related to Epic’s monster-hit game Fortnite. Epic must pay $245M toward a fund that will provide refunds to consumers plus a $275M penalty. See TechWire for more info.

SVB Fallout

The sudden and fairly shocking collapse of Silicon Valley Bank—as well as Signature Bank—at the end of last week continues to reverberate. North Carolina’s retirement fund is one of many, many investors who lost money as equity shareholders of the banks. The pension fund had almost $18M in shares in the two—about $9.9M in SVB and $7.8M in Signature, mostly through various index funds–though that only made up about 0.01 percent of the fund’s value. (See TBJ, which broke the news, and TechWire for more.)
 
Here are more stories on the mess: 'I am permanently scarred from this': For startups, SVB's collapse extends far beyond Silicon Valley (TBJ); Unraveling Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse – what happened? UNC professor explains (WRAL TechWire).

RAISE Forum

Thanks to multiple-hat-wearer Mark Friedman (RTP Capital, The Launch Place and more) for giving us a heads-up that the application deadline for the next RAISE Forum is this coming Monday, March 20, for the May 5 event. RAISE Forum is an Atlanta-based virtual pitch event that connects startups throughout the Southeast to Southeastern investors, focusing on group syndication, VCs, large angel groups and family offices. A number of North Carolina startups have successfully landed capital through RAISE in the past. See more info here.

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.

Because too much news is never enough.

• The technology behind ChatGPT is about to get even more powerful (CNN)
• North Carolina ranks No. 5 as best state for small business, new study says (WRAL TechWire)

Here's some helpful content from our partners.

	Corevist Opens Office Space In Durham For Face-To-Face Collaboration Published Yesterday by Corevist
	Resources for those impacted by SVB Fallout Published Sunday by CED
	Jurassic Leads $6.5M Follow-on Investment in Cycle Labs Published March 2, 2023 by Jurassic Capital
	Cycle Labs Secures $6.5M in Series B Funding Published March 2, 2023 by Cycle Labs

You can find all our Partner Feeds here.

	Fullstack Developer Posted February 21, 2023 by ZeroSync
	Sales / Partnership Development (Raleigh or Wilmington) Posted February 3, 2023 by Amped
	Head of Client Services Posted February 2, 2023 by Accredit Solutions
	Manager, DevOps Engineering - RapidScale Posted January 9, 2023 by Rapid Scale

To see all posted jobs, go to CronJobs. If you'd like your company to be listed, tell us at cronjobs@grepbeat.com and we'll do our best.