Pete, Joe and Jackie welcome David Gardner, the General Partner at Cary’s Cofounders Capital, on tomorrow’s Friday Nooner. You can watch live starting at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterward on those platforms or in its podcast form.
Cleaning Up
Washing windows is one of those chores that battles it out with raking leaves, cleaning gutters and scrubbing toilets at the bottom of the to-do totem pole. But when it comes to large-scale solar farms, grime buildup is a big deal, not a minor annoyance. It means that less sunlight hits the panels’ photovoltaic (PV) cells, thus generating less electricity. That hits solar producers squarely in the pocketbook in what is already a low-margin industry.
Duke PhD Michael Valerino is tackling that problem with Durham-based startup Solar Unsoiled, launching with an algorithm that helps solar producers optimize the tradeoff between the lost revenue from grime vs. cleaning costs. Solar Unsoiled is currently participating in Techstars Alabama’s EnergyTech accelerator and recently raised $650K in seed capital from a top-10 solar producer. Read our full story on the startup here.
More Stacks
Raleigh-based Allstacks, a 2022 GrepBeat Startups To Watch honoree, has raised a $12.3M Series A led by Boston-based Companyon Ventures with participation from Atlassian Ventures and Creative Co., as well as initial investors Hyperplane Venture Capital, S3 and ClutchVC. The Allstacks platform offers predictive forecasting to engineering teams to unclog potential bottlenecks in the software development process before they totally gum up the works. Actually, CEO Hersh Tapadia described it better when he was on the Friday Noonerthis June. We first profiled Allstacks, which is a former SEED grant winner from NC IDEA, in February, 2019.
Over YONDER
Durham-based Written Word Media has partnered with serial fiction app YONDER to provide another content monetization opportunity for the authors on its marketing platform. YONDER is from the team behind leading storytelling tech platforms WEBTOON and Wattpad. Both are owned by South Korean internet conglomerate Naver, which purchased Canadian-based Wattpad last year for north of $600M. YONDER is a curated collection of stories that readers read in installments on their phones, basically a digital-age update of when authors like Charles Dickens published their works in chunks (i.e. “serialized”) in mass-market magazines.
This week, NC IDEA awarded 15 MICRO grants worth $10K each to young startups seeking to validate and advance their idea. Seven of the 15 hail from the Triangle. We have already profiled Dojo Fresh and TSV Analytics. The others are Cary’s BCombs, Durham’s Committees, Fayetteville’s Pinnacle Medical Products (O.K., “Triangle-adjacent”), Chapel Hill’s Tromml, and Holly Springs’ Trulight Holdings. See the full list here.
NC IDEA also released the names of the 11 finalists for its $50K SEED grants; the 5-7 winners out of the 158 original applicants will be announced live at NC IDEA’s 2022 Ecosystem Summit on Nov. 14-15 in Winston-Salem. Ten of the 11 finalists hail from the Triangle (yay!), of which we have already profiled seven: Raleigh’s LabRunner, MyMatR, Social Cascade and Spring & Mulberry; Cary’s ShopAgain; Durham’s Bristles; and Chapel Hill’s ROSA Technology. The other three are Raleigh’s Animal Cancer Dx, Bake Eat Love and Phase Dock. (Hat tip to Wilmington's OpiAID for breaking the Triangle shutout.) And if you want to know about the path that a SEED grant can set a startup on, scroll up two items.
All Things Open
The 10th annual All Things Open conference returns to the Raleigh Convention Center this Sunday through Wednesday (Oct. 30-Nov. 2). It’s one of the biggest annual events in the open-source community. There will be speakers from tech titans like Google, Microsoft, Intel, PayPal, GitHub as well as local names like multiple execs from open source OG Red Hat and Peter Zaitsev, the Co-Founder of Durham-based Percona and a former Download subject. You can find more info and register here.
Build Great Software
Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Dualboot is a software and business development company. Their clients include tech and non-tech founders as well as Fortune 500 companies, so they can start small or scale fast depending on what you need. Every client is assigned a U.S.-based Product Director with years of experience bringing products to market, and they can manage the entire development process. They focus on how the software fits into your company to drive revenue and build the business. At Dualboot, they don’t just write your software—they help you grow your business. Intrigued? Email them here.
Extra Bit
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