Editor’s note: The new Seahawk Innovation Funds is up and running in Wilmington, backed in part by UNC-Wilmington. Laura Baverman has the story in the latest post that’s part of WRALTechWire’s partnership with ExitEvent.

WILMINGTON  - Tobin Geatz will join your advisory board, sit as your CEO, sell your product at trade shows or serve as your CMO.

But first, you’ve got to get the attention of his new Seahawk Innovation Funds. Geatz and co-founder Tom Looney have hinted at the creation of a new $20 million fund in Wilmington for nearly a year. Their plan was to partner with the University of North Carolina at Wilmington to launch the fund, and to provide some proceeds of successful investments back to the university’s research foundation to fund more entrepreneurial efforts at the college (including the operations of the new Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.).

It took nine months or so, but UNCW’s board of directors have approved the arrangement—one Chancellor Gary Miller says has few prior examples nationally. And the men have since set up shop at the new off-campus offices of the Center. There, they’ve created a “Seahawk Alley,” where startups from Wilmington and across the Southeast will come for funding or other help from the partners. Some may end up building their businesses in the space.

Why Geatz? Because he built 20 businesses over the last 32 years—from software to water purification to clinical research to semiconductor companies— and sold 15 of them. He was a general partner at Aurora Funds II in Cary, and a limited partner in two other funds. And most recently, he merged his Wilmington-based contract research organization Inclinix with PMG Research, using private equity funds.

Looney had an impressive career as a sales executive at Silicon Valley giants like Oracle Corp, Steve Jobs’s NeXT, Active Software (now Software AG) and NextChannel Partners (now Microsoft).

They’re joined by a third general partner, Cape Fear Micro-Angel Fund co-founder and Cornerstone Advisory Partners CEO Dallas Romanowski.

The full story can be read at ExitEvent.