Tomorrow’s Friday Nooner guest is Jon Birdsong, a partner at Atlanta-based VC firm Atlanta Ventures. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterwards on those platforms or in its podcast form.
SEED Grants
This is hot off the presses: NC IDEA has named the six winners of its Spring 2023 $50K SEED grants. The awardees include three from the Triangle—GrepBeat story subjects b.combs and Tromml plus Cary-based Vetletics, which veers outside our coverage scope industry-wise. With these six awardees, NC IDEA has now awarded a total of 200 SEED grants since its inception in 2006. See NC IDEA’s site for all the information, and congrats to the awardees!
Working Blue
Jason Widen—one of the original co-founders of Raleigh Founded and a former Download Q&A subject—is launching a new venture called Blue Co. It’s a coworking and warehouse space designed especially for service-based businesses like plumbers and landscapers. It’s a different target market than the tech professionals and startups that make up most of Raleigh Founded’s community with its own distinct needs, like shared warehouse space and enough parking spaces for a fleet of work vehicles.
Jes Lipson of Levitate and ShareFile has come on as the lead investor; Jes was another of Raleigh Founded’s co-founders. The Triangle Tweener Fund is another investor. Blue plans to open its first two locations this summer—it’s already leased two buildings on Pylon Drive in Raleigh—with the goal of expanding rapidly throughout North Carolina and the Southeast. See TechWire for more.
Growth Stage
Chapel Hill-based healthtech startup Quinsite has closed a $5.5M Series A and also announced a new partnership with Charlotte-based ImagineSoftware. We first profiled Quinsite and its husband-and-wife team Jeff (CEO) and Jenny (COO) Maze in June, 2021, with another story last March when it closed a $2.5M seed round. Jenny was also a guest this March on our For Starters podcast. Quinsite’s healthcare analytics platform now serves nearly 50 of the top U.S. radiology practices. The Series A round includes local investors Fulcrum Financial Partners, Front Porch Venture Partners and the Triangle Tweener Fund. Here’s more from Quinsite on the funding.
ImagineSoftware is a leading provider of medical billing automation software, and it and Quinsite already share a number of customers. Under the partnership, ImagineSoftware will serve as a referral partner for Quinsite; the Quinsite platform already interfaces directly with ImagineSoftware’s tech. See more about the partnership here.
Famous Name(s)
Raleigh-based Next Century Spirits has landed new capital from a celebrity backer for its Bear Flight whiskey brand: Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane. Next Century has a pretty high-tech backstory, as it’s a spinout of Tethis—which has developed biodegradable superabsorbents used in everything from diapers to food packaging—which itself came out of parent company Anavo Technologies. Next Century used similar tech to speed up the production and “aging” of alcohol.
We’ve written about Next Century several times going back to 2019, including when it launched canned cocktails called Caddy Clubhouse Cocktails with the backing of golfing great Greg Norman. Next Century has another whiskey brand, Creek Water, that partners with rapper Yelawolf. Suffice it to say that the startup is no stranger to landing celebrity partners, though this one includes a “big minority stake” investment from the Stewie Griffin creator. See TBJ for more.
Family Ties
We first profiled the female-founded Spring & Mulberry in April, 2022, when the luxury chocolate brand that sweetens its bars with dates rather than sugar was just starting out. Now Triangle Inno has an update that the startup is on track to hit $500K in sales just 14 months after launching and is available at stores all across the country.
Fun fact: co-founders Kathryn Shah and Sarah Bell each have family ties to other members of the Triangle entrepreneurial community. Kathryn is married to CareYaya founder Neal Shah (more on him in like 30 words) while Sarah is the sister of Brooks Bell, who among other things is an original co-founder of Raleigh Founded alongside her husband Jes Lipson and Jason Widen (see Item No. 1.)
Back to Neal—CareYaya has launched a healthcare accelerator program called Transform Health in collaboration with Raleigh Founded. (See, it all comes full circle!) The accelerator will focus on supporting innovation in AI for healthcare applications. CareYaya is a platform that offers on-demand, in-home-care booking services with a workforce largely comprised of students in nursing and related fields; we first profiled them last February. See more info on Transform Health here.
Branching Out
A few months after Raleigh-based drone developer PrecisionHawk was acquired by Norwegian tech company Field Group, a few PrecisionHawk vets have launched a new startup called Cloneable. It's at the idea stage—the non-drone concept is around developing no-code apps—but has already landed $750K in funding from a single unnamed investor. Co-founders Lia Reich, Patrick Lohman and Tyler Collins all worked at PrecisionHawk.
The trio have business backgrounds in sales and marketing, Lia told Triangle Inno, so the thought is to explore how people like them can develop technology without code.
Planting Roots
Sustainable homebuilding materials startup Plantd is moving its HQ from Durham to Oxford, where it’s building a manufacturing facility in a former tobacco factory that shut down in 2022. The move could also help local farmers who lost contracts when the factory closed. Plantd will offer contracts to farmers to plant their proprietary grass, which will be harvested and turned into carbon-friendly building materials in the new facility. (We first profiled Plantd in October, 2021.)
We hope that Plantd has fully thought through the implications of moving outside of GrepBeat’s core coverage area—though there’s much gray around the borders, IMO Oxford falls outside the “official” Triangle. On the other hand, Plantd CEO Josh Dorfman is appearing as a panelist at Grep-a-palooza 2 on June 1 (register now!) so they’re still on our good side.
Modest Proposal
SAS capped its annual SAS Innovate conference with a pledge to invest $1B over the next three years in AI products and technology. See more info in TechWire and Triangle Inno. Hey, we don’t want to tell Jim Goodnight and team how to spend its money, but we’d argue they could do more to help the Triangle tech community by using that $1B to send 5,000,250 startup founders and employees to Grep-a-palooza 2 at $199.99 a pop.
Build Great Software
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Extra Point
TBJ has released the first two batches of its annual 40 Under 40 Awards. (Two more batches of 10 each are still to come.) So far they include three tech ecosystem names and GrepBeat story subjects: HomePace's Joe Cianciolo, Allstacks' Hersh Tapadia and Jurassic Capital's Kevin Mosley. Kevin is also moderating a panel at June 1's Grep-a-palooza 2. Here's Batch 1 and Batch 2.
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