The next GrepBeat Happy Hour is two weeks from today on Thursday, Aug. 31, from 5-7 p.m. at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham. Your first drink will be courtesy of GrepBeat. Please register so we can get a sense of numbers.
Keep those nominations coming for our third annual Startups To Watch list. To be eligible, a startup must be HQ’d in the Triangle and have annual revenues <$3M. Sorry, but no life sciences/biotech/medical devices, or past honorees. The deadline for nominations—and we encourage you to nominate your own startup—is Friday, Sept. 1, at 5 p.m. ET. The full list will be revealed on Sept. 14 at an invite-only event. See all the info here.
Food Is Love
UNC (undergrad) and NC State (grad school) alum Anna Petrova considers food to be an “international love language,” but for people (like her husband) who suffer from Celiac disease, communication can be more difficult. That’s why Anna has launched Wolfe Cravings Co., a line of decadent, gluten-free desserts. The startup is participating in this summer’s cohort of NC State’s Andrews Launch Accelerator (ALA).
Read our full story on Wolfe Cravings here. We’ve also previously profiled other members of the 2023 ALA class including SonoVoice, Nature's Throne, LetsGoRaleigh and TutorSmith (the links are to our stories).
VinFast's Splash
VinFast made a dramatic debut on Wall Street on Tuesday in its first day as a publicly traded company after completing its SPAC transaction, nearly quadrupling its opening price of $10 to close at $37/share. That implied a market cap of almost $86 billion—bigger than GM, Ford or Volkswagen. It has since dropped off those highs (to $24.76 a share at last glance) but it’s still been a heady few days for the Vietnamese automaker that—all together now!—has broken ground on a planned $4B EV production facility in Chatham County.
A few caveats are in order. Trading volume in the shares is pretty low—in part because a very small percentage of shares are publicly available at this point—so expect a wild ride of fluctuations in the near term at least. And remember, the $86 billion market cap (or about $57B at last glance) isn’t actually money that’s going into VinFast’s pockets; in fact the company likely didn’t raise anything from the SPAC. But the early interest certainly gives VinFast more attractive options to sell its stock publicly or in a private placement to generate proceeds that could, for instance, go toward building the Chatham facility. Here’s more on VinFast’s early run from the N&O and CNN.
Ahead Of Schedule
Now that we’ve mentioned VinFast we’re contractually obligated to bring up the other company building a huge factory in Chatham County: Wolfspeed. The Durham-based semiconductor manufacturer reported its earnings on Wednesday in a call with investors.
While the markets weren’t too happy (the stock dropped almost 14%) with the news of fiscal fourth-quarter losses and disappointing earnings and revenue projections, Wolfspeed CEO Gregg Lowe preferred to focus on the fact that the Chatham facility is ahead of schedule. The company now expects to be cranking out silicon carbide crystals in Chatham County less than a year from today. See TBJ and the N&O for more.
Inc. 5000
Since we only saw it as we were going to press on Tuesday, we put Inc. magazine’s annual edition of its Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the country down in the More section. In all, the list has 136 North Carolina companies (by TechWire’s count) and 46 from the Triangle (according to TBJ). A few local startup names you’ll know include Pendo and Levitate.
One name I didn’t recognize is Raleigh-based Givebacks, which a little digging revealed to be the recently rebranded MemberHub, a member of our inaugural Startups To Watch class in 2021 that we first profiled in 2019. Speaking of Startups To Watch: the nomination deadline for the 2023 list is Friday, Sept. 1.
New Owners
Two software product lines from the former Triangle-based ChannelAdvisor—now owned by New York-HQ’s CommerceHub—have been sold to New York-based MikMak. Wow, yet more transplants from North Carolina to New York, amirite people? The products are Shoppable Media and Brand Analytics. See TechWire for more info.
Big(ger) Blue
IBM has acquired business software maker Apptio for $4.6B in a deal with some tangential Triangle ties. Apptio is based outside Seattle but has an office in Morrisville. Meanwhile IBM was one of the first tenants of RTP going back to its inception and strengthened its local bona fides with its $34B acquisition of Raleigh's Red Hat in 2019. See Triangle Inno for more.
Build Great Software
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