We’re exactly one week away from the next GrepBeat Happy Hour on Thursday, Aug. 31, from 5-7 p.m. at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham. Many are calling it the social event of the summer. Even better: your first drink will be courtesy of GrepBeat. Please register so we can get a sense of numbers.
We’re eight days away from the nomination deadline 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, agencies/consultancies, or past honorees. The deadline for nominations—we encourage you to nominate your own startup but will also accept them from knowledgeable outsiders—is Friday, Sept. 1, at 5 p.m. ET. The new Startups To Watch list will be revealed on Sept. 14 at an invite-only event. See all the info here.
NC BEC
NC IDEA’s North Carolina Black Entrepreneurship Council—the NC BEC—marked its third anniversary this month, which is also National Black Business Month. The NC BEC has awarded more than $2M in grants over those three years to seven startups, 23 support organizations and five HBCUs to help combat systemic inequities impacting the Black community through the power of entrepreneurship.
We mentioned this milestone at the start of the month, but today we’re back with an in-depth look that includes interviews with the CEOs of two Triangle startups that received $75K GROWTH grants from the NC BEC, LoanWell’s Bernard Worthy and Sonja Ebron of Courtroom5. Both startups had previously received a $50K SEED grant from NC IDEA in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
Many apparel brands these days sell their wares directly to consumers on their own sites, but most clothing (80%+) is still purchased at brick-and-mortar stores rather than online. That means most brands still need to get their clothes into physical stores. But that’s something they can do online with RepSpark, a B2B ecommerce startup that’s HQ’d in Southern California but has a sizable presence in Durham led by Chief Revenue Office Joel Bush, a longtime vet of the Triangle tech scene. RepSpark enables brands to sell their goods on a wholesale basis to retailers.
Morrisville-based startup PlayMetrics has received a “significant” investment from a Texas-based private equity firm with ties to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones that provided a nice exit to several Triangle investors. While PlayMetrics—which develops software to manage youth sports—wouldn’t say what percentage Blue Star Innovation Partners has acquired, from reading between the lines we’re betting it’s a majority stake.
PlayMetrics is led by CEO Mike Doernberg—a former Download Q&A subject—and spun out of his parent company eMinor, which previously spawned Adwerx and ReverbNation. Mike will stay on (for now anyway) and will continue to own a piece of the company, according to Triangle Inno. Meanwhile Durham-based VC Bull City Venture Partners and the Triangle Tweener Fund each exited fully as part of the transaction. BTW Jerry Jones is one of Blue Star’s founding partners, in addition to owning the most annoying team in all of professional sports. (Full disclosure: I'm a Giants fan.)
Blowing Whistles
Sticking in the sport-y startup space, Raleigh-based UStopIt has announced a partnership with the Big West collegiate athletic conference for its men’s and women’s basketball officials to use the startup’s WhistleStop wearable tech during the 2023-24 season. The WhistleStop device is worn by refs and stops the clock at 1/100th of a second when the whistle is blown.
The idea is to help eliminate clock malfunctions and ubiquitous monitor reviews (though I’ll believe the latter when I see it, through no fault of WhistleStop). UStopIt CEO Keith Fogelman has been an NCAA Division I game official for 17 years, which means he’s used to getting yelled at. See TechWire for more info.
Fido Feed
Durham-based pet food startup Wild Earth—led by CEO Ryan Bethencourt, a former Friday Nooner guest—has made a deal with Petco to sell the startup’s products at the pet retailing giant. Ryan tells Triangle Inno that the deal could double or triple Wild Earth’s revenue; he’s targeting $14-$16M this year. Wild Earth makes plant-based food for pets.
Serving as Wild Earth’s CEO is just one of Ryan’s hats. He co-founded Sustainable Food Ventures—which invests in food startups—with his wife Mariliis Holm, and also launched a fund targeting crypto and blockchain startups last year.
Developer Friendly
Cary-based Epic Games announced its new “Epic First Run” program on Wednesday that promises game developers 100% of the revenue from all sales for six months for game titles listed exclusively on Epic’s Game Store. After that, the share reverts to Epic’s usual breakdown of 88%/12%, with the lion’s share going to the developer. That’s a much more developer-friendly split than the game/app stores of Apple or Google, as you might have heard about due to Epic’s multiple lawsuits against them. See TechWire for more info.
Car Talk
VinFast has had a wild ride in its week-plus as a U.S. publicly traded company, but most recently the roller coaster has mostly been going up—and up, and up.... Here’s a CNN story from yesterday, a day at which VinFast closed at $36.70 after opening at $10 last Tuesday. At noon today, it was up another 20%+ to $46/share.
In other car news, GM’s all-electric, driverless car company Cruise announced this week that it has started its initial testing phase of driverless taxis in Raleigh. Caveat: passengers can’t yet hail a ride and the cars are still being driven right now by human drivers. The testing phase means that the cars are driven around to soak up data about local roads, traffic signs and (human) driver behaviors so they’ll be prepared to go driver-less. See WRAL.com for more info.
Grant Deadline
Attention startups: the application deadline for NC IDEA’s Fall Grant Cycle of its signature SEED ($50K) and MICRO ($10K) grant programs is next Monday, Aug. 28, at 5 p.m. ET. You can find all the info here.
Build Great Software
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