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The Download

This week’s Download subject is Haley Huie, who leads NC State’s entrepreneurship efforts, including running the Wolfpack’s Entrepreneurship Clinic and its summer Andrews Launch Accelerator. You might recall that Haley was a Friday Nooner guest last September, and you can also check out this Q&A from NC State’s Poole College of Management from last month. But it’s only in the Download where you can learn what Haley has in her pockets (if she indeed has pockets today) or what coffee shops and restaurants she likes most.

Read the full Download Q&A here.

For Starters

Can you believe we’re already up to Episode 8 (of 10) in Season 2 of For Starters, brought to you as always by Robinson Bradshaw? It’s true. Fortunately we have another episode worth savoring as host Anil Chawla sits down with Drew Schiller, the Co-Founder and CEO of Durham-based healthtech startup Validic (and a former Download Q&A subject). Like with most successful startups, Validic’s path to product-market fit was decidedly not a straight line.
 
Read some episode highlights here, then listen (and subscribe!) here.

Grass Houses

Durham-based sustainable building materials startup Plantd has raised a $10M Series A, which is part of what’s covered in this TechWire feature on the company. We first profiled Plantd in October, 2021, for its mission of replacing wood and lumber with building materials made from a more sustainable agricultural supply chain. They started with hemp and are now focusing on a proprietary blend of “perennial grasses.” (That's right, “grass houses.” Please don't throw the first piece of wood.) The result is building materials that aren’t just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative, because they literally capture carbon.

PR Battle

Raleigh-based publicly traded company Issuer Direct, which develops cloud-based communications and compliance tech for the PR industry, recently closed on a $44M acquisition of Newswire, a distribution service for press releases. Like all such deals, it came at a cost, which in this case includes a $22M debt instrument at 6 percent interest with a maturity date in November.

But Issuer Direct CEO Brian Balbirnie tells TBJ that the company has the cash flow to service the debt and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add Newswire to its legacy Accesswire wire service to gain key market share. With the deal, the combined company has about five percent of the market for companies to release press releases, with a goal of hitting 10 percent by the end of next year. I must confess that as a not-always-willing recipient of many, many press releases I personally hope that this means more a redistribution of the pie rather than increasing its overall size, but that's a purely selfish wish.

Touch Points

Raleigh-based Levitate has announced a partnership with New York-based Wealthbox, a leading CRM (customer relationship management software) for financial advisors and broker-dealers. Savvy GrepBeat readers will know that Levitate is the second startup from Jes Lipson after the fully bootstrapped ShareFile, which was acquired by Citrix and led to the latter’s significant Raleigh presence. We’ve written plenty about Levitate and expect we’ll be doing so for some time.
 
Levitate helps client-driven business stay top-of-mind with their current and potential clients. The integration with Wealthbox's CRM helps expand Levitate’s reach to finance pros. See TechWire for more.

Open Wide

Good news for dental tech startups—the newish Dental Innovation Alliance (DIA) is a specialized VC that’s opening its checkbook wide for early-stage startups that target dental practices. That’s a big market that has long been underserved. We already have some local players in the space, including 2021 Startups To Watch honoree CureMint and GroupUps, which we wrote about when it was called The Convoy before it narrowed its target market to dental practices. The DIA is HQ’d in the Triangle and also has offices in Boston and Nashville.
 
More on the check-writing front: Chapel Hill-based TrueBridge Capital is launching a fund to invest in blockchain opportunities. The goal is $125M, with TrueBridge already circling $55.3M in commitments. See TechWire for more.

Chatham Chatter

VinFast electric vehicles are officially on the roads in the U.S., with photos from last week showing the first customers in California getting their keys. Meanwhile, closer to home Chatham County manager Dan LaMontagne told WRAL News that VinFast’s design team is coming to town this week to talk about next steps in the construction of VinFast’s planned $4B factory. TBJ also ran an opinion piece by Chuck Fuller, the CEO of Raleigh-based PR firm The Results Company, that makes the case for VinFast as a very good bet for the region, as a counterpoint to a recent TBJ op-ed that questioned VinFast’s ability to deliver on its ambitious promises.
 
Also in Chatham County: Wolfspeed has dropped $15M to acquire 445 acres in the county as part of its plan to build its own mega-factory, this one to make semiconductors. See TBJ for more.

Quick-Hitters

1) As demonstrated by Meta’s reported (by Bloomberg) plan to make thousands more layoffs this week and Amazon’s decision to delay completion of its much-ballyhooed HQ2 (see TechWire and TBJ), the public hits keep coming for Big Tech. But  yesterday's TBJ features a story that dives deeper on the local impacts, with the tl:dr that while Big Tech’s layoffs are grabbing the headlines, the local tech outlook—even for those same tech giants—is much rosier.

2) Former Friday Nooner guest co-host Sarah Glova is TechWire’s “newest contributor,” which was announced at the top of this story: Cut your headcount – or cut your software spend? Tough choices face Triangle tech sector. Sarah has written for TechWire multiple times in the past, but now it sounds like it’s more official.

3) Here are follow-up stories from TechWire and Triangle Inno on CED’s 2022 Venture Report, which we mentioned last Thursday. And we also want to remind you that CED's Venture Connect summit kicks off just three weeks from tomorrow, on March 29-30. Hope to see you there!

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