We revealed our third annual “Startups To Watch” list live on Thursday night at an event in downtown Durham. The honorees from among the 100+ nominations are: Arpio, Bionic Health, Made Trade, Peoplelogic, Plantd, Quinsite, Revcast, SchedulePop, Syllaby, and Windlift. We congratulate all the winners and thank all who came out to help make it a memorable night, with special thanks to our event sponsors: Dualboot Partners, Hutchison, HPG, Deloitte, Rankin McKenzie and Evergreen & Oak. Here’s a recap of the event that includes capsules on each of the honorees.
The latest Friday Nooner featured guest Robert McKenzie, the Co-Founder (and co-namesake) of Triangle-based Rankin McKenzie, one of our Startups To Watch sponsors and your go-to for fractional CFOs. In the episode, we resolve the Eastern v Western BBQ debate once and for all.
The Download
This week’sDownload Q&A subject is Justin Wright-Eakes, the Founder and Managing Partner of Raleigh-based VC Oval Park Capital. The firm has a unique spot among Triangle VCs for its focus on what Justin calls non-FDA deep tech or hard tech. In other words, while it doesn’t do life sciences/biotech/medical devices, it’s also not a straight B2B SaaS player; it’s somewhere in the middle. Justin also talked about Oval Park’s approach when he was a Friday Nooner guest in February, at least when Joe wasn’t going on and on about his family’s chickens.
As the saying goes, one learns more from failure than success. We would argue that’s true whether the ups-and-downs are first- or second-hand. That’s a big reason that this week’s Exit Stories podcast (sponsored by Robinson Bradshaw) is especially worth listening to. Guest Mark Self freely shares that he made almost every “rookie mistake” that a CEO could make in leading Raleigh-based Entigral Systems from 2015 before its successful acquisition earlier this year. Mark was also an engagingFriday Nooner guest back in January.
Read some highlights of this week’s Exit Storieshere, then listen (and subscribe!) to the episode here.
Real $ For AI
Even in the rapidly growing Triangle tech ecosystem, a nine-figure fundraise is far from an everyday occurrence. Raleigh-based AI startup Pryon joined that exclusive club today when it announced the closing of a $100M investment led by the Pittsburgh-based U.S. Innovative Technology Fund, founded by billionaire Thomas Tull. The investment reportedly values Pryon at somewhere between $500M-$750M, according to Triangle Inno and TechCrunch.
You may recall Pryon Founder and CEO Igor Jablokov from this one-of-a-kind Downloadfrom 2019 that led me to dub him the World’s Most Interesting CEO. Igor’s previous startup was acquired by Amazon and its tech helped form the basis for the famed voice assistant Alexa. And while everyone is talking about AI these days, Pryon has been AI-native from the start and is helping enterprises—including customers like Dell, Nvidia and Westinghouse—adopt AI for their businesses.
Sticking in the AI space, another AI-native Triangle startup is rebranding itself. Raleigh-based Diveplane will henceforth be known as Howso, with the name change part of a heightened emphasis on open source and transparency in AI development. Going forward, the startup’s “Howso Engine” will be available on open-source terms via GitHub. It’s also releasing the Howso Synthesizer, a solution for generating synthetic data. We’ve previously featured Howso Co-Founder and CEO Michael Capps in The Download. For more on the Diveplane ==> Howso switch, see TechWire.
Home Checkers
Durham-based startup HomeCloud has raised $4.24M according to an SEC filing cited by TechWire. Actually, HomeCloud CEO George Kirkland also mentioned the fundraise to myself and “The Pete” owner Steve Klein on Thursday at the Startups To Watch event.
We first profiled HomeCloud in September, 2021, for its digital alternative to the home inspection that provides new homeowners with an extensive dashboard on what they might need to fix both in the near term and down the line.
More To Watch
NC TECH announced its statewide list of 10 Startups To Watch for 2023 on Thursday, which… hmmm… just so happened to be the same day we had long announced we were going to reveal our 2023 Startups To Watch list. We’re going to assume the timing was just an oversight. Regardless, let’s give a special shout-out to the six Triangle representatives on the list: FemHealth Insights, Peoplelogic (also a 2023 GrepBeat Startups To Watch pick), Social Cascade, TRAKID, TSV Analytics, and Launch Labs. (We linked to GrepBeat stories where relevant.)
NC TECH also released the finalists for its many other award categories. Those winners will be revealed at the org’s annual awards show on Nov. 1. GrepBeat readers should recognize many of the names; at a quick glance I counted ~30 startups that we’ve previously profiled. Of special note is that new 2023 GrepBeat Startups To Watch honoree Quinsite is up for two awards, and past STW winners Element451, Clinispan Health and Givebacks (formerly MemberHub) are also finalists, the former in two categories.
High Fliers
Yesterday’s TechWire included an interesting feature on Morrisville-based SmartSky Networks. We’ve mentioned them a few times over the years for their expensive but increasingly effective efforts to deliver high-quality internet access to planes, especially private jets. With that tech problem essentially solved, SmartSky is also delivering valuable real-time info to the pilots and airlines themselves via its Skytelligence platform, such as where lightning might strike (literally) and how to chart the most fuel-efficient path given the weather. It’s worth a read.
Red Hat W
Red Hat’s decision to limit access of its signature product Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to paying customers—which has annoyed the open source community—has scored a big W by landing tech giant Salesforce as a client. Salesforce is reportedly moving 200,000 systems—its entire “software estate”—to the latest version of RHEL. See TechWire for more info.
Familiar Names
Here are two recent stories on names that will be familiar to GrepBeat readers: 1) Triangle Inno featured the daughter-mother team of Rebecca Egger (CEO) and Dr. Helen Egger (Chief Medical Officer) behind Little Otter Health, a platform that tackles mental health issues among kids. We first profiled Little Otter last June and named the startup to last year’s Startups To Watch list. Rebecca has also been a guest on our For Starters podcast. 2) At this point, Jes Lipson needs no introduction to our regular readers. Here’s a Q&A with TechWire on the latest with his high-flying startup Levitate.
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