RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – WRAL TechWire has an exclusive list of the startups that will be presenting, organized here by general category. Over a third of the startups are in biopharma or healthcare; the rest represent a diverse field of consumer goods, B2B platforms, materials science, food science, agtech, and more.

Let’s take a look:

Biopharmaceuticals  

  • Aer Therapeutics: Clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing inhaled mucolytics for lung diseases. 
  • Altis Biosystems: Biotechnology startup company with a stem cell platform recreating both the small and large human intestinal epithelium for drug screening and microbiome research.
  • Anelle0, Inc: Developing and manufacturing customized Intravaginal Rings (IVR) for sustained delivery of therapeutics; flagship product for fertility treatment provides a self-administered, non-invasive alternative to daily progesterone supplementation. 
  • Avior Inc: Developing the first liver-friendly treatment for chronic itching and skin inflammation for patients who suffer from primary biliary cholangitis (a rare autoimmune liver disease).
  • Bryn Pharma, LLC: Pharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing an alternative to epinephrine auto-injectors, providing patients a needle-free option that is easy to use, portable, and affordable for the management of anaphylaxis. 
  • Cerillo: Spun out of the University of Virginia’s Biomedical Engineering program in 2016, originally developed products for laboratory scientists before first commercial sale in 2018, now pivoted towards high-scale commercial growth with focus on enabling transformation within the field of scientific research.
  • Deep Blue Medical Advances: Deep Blue has developed the novel T-Line® Hernia Mesh, a surgeon-invented mesh design to address the unacceptably high rate of hernia occurrence and recurrence by preventing mesh fixation failure.
  • Dignify Therapeutics Inc.: Developing novel bladder and bowel therapies to restore voluntary control of bladder and bowel function and prevent urinary and fecal incontinence.
  • Drive Therapeutics: Focused on developing a long-acting, bispecific nucleic acid therapeutic for the treatment of retinal disorders, with the goal of mitigating poor patient response to existing anti-VEGF therapy, improving outcomes, and reducing patient burden. 
  • EydisBio: A small biotech that has used its unique drug discovery platform technology to identify a number of tyrosine kinase inhibitors as promising therapeutics; currently developing inhibitors in a number of autoimmune/inflammatory diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, chronic inflammatory and neuropathic pain, and COVID-19-induced acute respiratory distress syndrome. 
  • Gemelli Biotech: A biotechnology company that strives to achieve a thriving global family of healthy individuals by unlocking the potential of the microbiome through the discovery of novel diagnostics and therapeutics for the human microbiome.
  • GeneVentiv Therapeutics: A pre-clinical company advancing the first universal gene therapy treatment for all types of hemophilia and the first designed for the most difficult to treat inhibitor patients. 
  • Gradient Medical: Developing breakthrough interventional oncology therapies to revolutionize the treatment of primary and metastatic tumors using minimally invasive nanosecond pulsed electric fields.
  • H3Pelvic Therapy Systems: Revolutionizing the way pelvic pain is managed by reducing opioids, lowering the cost of medical care, and giving lives back through innovative use of advanced principles of science. 
  • Life Edit Therapeutics: An ElevateBio portfolio company, Life Edit Therapeutics has built a world-class genome editing platform with one of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of novel RNA-guided nucleases (RGNs) and base editors. The company’s next-generation editing systems will propel the development of novel human therapeutics by enabling ex vivo engineering for cell therapies and regenerative medicines and in vivo gene editing therapeutics.
  • Lindy Biosciences, LLC: Over half of all antibody therapeutics are given intravenously, in part because the high dose required cannot be formulated as a solution in a volume small enough for subcutaneous injection. Lindy Biosciences is developing high-dose suspensions of protein that are suitable for subcutaneous injection, decreasing administration costs, increasing patient comfort and compliance, and enabling new high-dose molecules to reach the market. 
  • Lucerno Dynamics: A commercial-stage medical device and software company with an initial product that solves a nuclear medicine problem—radiopharmaceutical extravasation—which occurs in about 15% of the 5 million PET/CT exams and 25 million other nuclear medicine exams performed globally each year (meaning thousands of patients each day have infiltrated exams) and which jeopardizes patient safety and compromises patient care. 
  • OneFul Health: Personalizes multi-drug chronic therapies formulated using digital health data, combining 3-7 prescriptions of individually dosed high potency drugs into a single, more cost-effective daily capsule or flavored gel packet.
  • PhosphoGam, Inc.: Manufacturing gamma/delta-T cells (GDTs), a unique cell type that are capable of recognizing and killing any cancer type and are naturally allogeneic,  for adoptive cell transfer and application as cancer therapies. 
  • PhotoniCare: Building a low-cost diagnostic platform that uses light to see through tissue; the first product, the OtoSight Middle Ear Scope, will enable physicians to see through the eardrum to directly visualize the middle ear and determine whether antibiotic use or surgical intervention may be necessary. 
  • Plakous Therapeutics: A biotherapeutic start-up that has developed a regenerative medicine platform product, Protego-PDTM, with the goal of treating multiple diseases that are driven by inflammation, which is common to aging, and which may be positively affected by regenerative growth. 
  • Revibe Technologies: A medical device developer and manufacturer; has developed software that is integrated into a smartwatch with the intent to treat ADHD children with focus and attention issues, providing real-time feedback and personalized therapy to the child, based upon inputs received from the smartwatch and AI.
  • Ten63 Therapeutics: A preclinical therapeutics company leveraging BEYOND, their proprietary AI platform, to advance its pipeline of first- and best-in-class therapeutics against biomedically validated yet previously chemically intractable targets; BEYOND can search an unprecedentedly large chemical space (~100 trillion) of synthetically feasible, druglike molecules, and this unprecedented exploration yields bespoke chemistry against previously undruggable pockets.

Healthcare Platforms

  • Brightpay Health Corp: Web-based platform for specialty practices, designed to make paying for care more convenient through price transparency and self-managed payment options.
  • CareNexis: Digital health SaaS platform that enables brands, retailers, and healthcare providers to enhance the consumer health journey through predictive personalization, recommendations, and education.
  • CINCH Community Care Management (CINCH CCM): Cloud-based, mobile technology providing caregiver assignments and real-time tools to help agencies easily and efficiently manage home care services in independent living communities.
  • CliniSpan Health: A software platform for People of Color interested in clinical trials.
  • Custom Clinical Decision Support: A health informatics company intent on forwarding innovative clinical decision support for healthcare providers; first product is CustomID, a decision support tool that bridges the gap between site-specific guidance to the point of care for the management of infectious diseases.
  • DNAli Data Technologies: Next-generation DNA data storage platform capable of organizing petabytes and greater amounts of data through a novel hierarchical file address system and in-storage functionality at practical scales.
  • IVY Clinicians: A market network for clinician jobs, focused on becoming the simplest way for employers to recruit excellent clinicians and for physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants to find jobs they love.
  • Parrots Inc.: Has built “Polly”, an inclusive platform using AI/ML to give a smart voice and telecare to people with neurological disorders—empowering them with real-time communication and control of their environments, and providing telecare services to improve patient-centered care and to maximize independence. 
  • Polaris Quantum Biotech (POLARISqb): The first drug discovery platform built on a quantum computer; revolutionizing drug design with the acceleration of lead time for preclinical drug candidates by using the latest innovations in cloud, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to operate 10,000 times faster than any alternative solutions in the market.
  • Skintelligent Corporation: Develops AI skin analysis solutions to analyze a range of skin conditions based on a smartphone photo, powering the future of intelligent & virtual skin health in a range of use cases.
  • Translational Imaging Innovations: TII is building a platform for transforming ophthalmic images and clinical data into insights, empowering clinicians and researchers to improve quality of clinical care and accelerate innovation.

Industrial and Materials Science

  • Bay Nano Technologies Inc.: Manufactures low-cost electrochromic (EC) smart glass and smart EC plastic laminates that blocks all UV and NIR (heat), and that can be automated or programmed to adjust for desired light. 
  • Be Global Safety: AI-powered manufacturing safety platform to detect safety incidents and near-misses in real time using existing camaras and sensors.
  • Metallum3D Inc.: A startup developing a patent-pending “All-In-One” multi-material additive manufacturing and microwave digital casting system for the rapid manufacture of parts in metal, ceramic, plastic, and flexible materials.
  • Nala Membranes: An award-winning, women-led, cleantech company developing new membranes for water treatment and management.
  • ProAxion: Connecting the nation’s manufacturing machines with IIoT and leveraging cloud-based predictive maintenance analytics to improve machine availability. 
  • Renaissance Fiber LLC: A North Carolina clean-tech manufacturer of hemp and other natural fibers with a vision to reimagine the textile industry as working for, and not against, nature, with the only domestic sustainable hemp fiber supply chain in operation, one that uses a patented hemp degumming process that is exceptionally low in cost, Ecologically Invisible™, and can sequester carbon for geologic time frames, resulting in a net positive impact on the planet to pass on to our partners and consumers.
  • Stitch Partners: Licenses a healthy indoor air technology from North Carolina State University, a patented textile that creates a non-thermal plasma (NTP) that rapidly absorbs smokes in enclosed spaces, and which is currently being tested to prove the efficacy of those properties. 

Food Science

  • BIOMILQ: Women-owned, science-led, and mother centered start-up that aims to increase infant feeding options for new parents by offering human milk produced outside the body as supplemental nutrition—creating cultured breastmilk with the nutrition of breast milk and the practicality of formula.
  • Induction Food Systems: Advanced fluid heating equipment than helps manufacturers decarbonize profitably.
  • IngateyGen LLC: An agricultural biotechnology company whose mission is to deliver innovative peanut varieties with improved safety and nutritional value that offer enhanced health and wellness benefits for consumers—improving the quality of peanuts and peanut derived products using gene editing technology. 
  • JellaTech: A B2B biotech business producing pure, high-quality, animal-free collagen and gelatin—eliminating the dependency on animals, to make better ingredient products, starting with collagen and gelatin.
  • Pearlita: The world’s first cultivated oyster and mollusk company.
  • Plantils: Developing crop produce that contains vitamin B12, which is critical for proper body function but which, currently, is only available in animal-based foods; Plantils’ B12-enhanced products will be available as raw produce (e.g., carrots, potatoes, and pulses) or to serve as basic ingredients for the alternative meat industry.

AgTech

  • Innatrix: Produces durable, eco-friendly novel biopesticides to control devastating crop pathogens using patented protein evolution and RNAi technologies developed in-house. 
  • mesur.io: An emerging leader in the application of machine learning and advanced analytics to the Food and Agriculture market; flagship product, The Mesur.io Earthstream™ platform, is an AutoML platform that discovers, analyzes, and predicts the issues that impact agricultural production.
  • Metalytics: Provides critical information about cellular metabolic rates in living cells and organisms, providing actionable results that can be implemented to accelerate research, development, and manufacturing timelines. Metalytics’ CoreMFA™ Big Data platform enables the identification and elimination of metabolic inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and wasteful byproduct pathways in industrial cellular factories, optimizing upstream process development programs and improving production rates and yields. 
  • Phinite: A sustainable AgTech company that recycles nutrients to close the animal byproduct process.
  • Seal the Seasons: Changing the way we grow and distribute frozen fruits and vegetables, and raising awareness to the negative impacts big food has on flavor and our planet, by eliminating international shipping; we build markets for American family farmers through distributed local supply chains, partnering with family farms to freeze, package, and distribute locally grown frozen produce to over 4000 grocers.

B2B

  • Beam Dynamics: Web-based equipment intelligence platform provides studio engineers a single user interface for notifications and data across all of their equipment and manufacturers; designed to provide deep insights into equipment lifecycle and ownership that reduces costly downtime on set.
  • BlueRecruit: A software platform that connects America’s blue-collar skilled workers with the companies desperate for their talent.
  • Chekhub, Inc: B2B SaaS software company creating an operational management software platform to help operational leaders improve their organization’s performance.
  • Cirrus Insight [formerly ZynBit]: Cirrus Insight powers data-driven sales teams to optimize sales capacity; integrates with existing sales workflows to capture high-value customer interactions, collecting meaningful customer data needed to optimize sales operations. 
  • F3TCH: A mobile app for hotels and resorts that focuses on the “last mile” connectivity between a checked-in guest and the hotel by converting a guest’s device into a hotel device.
  • Finmark: A technology company that provides financial planning and modeling software for startups, distilling complex financial concepts and calculations into a simple to use interface.
  • Floodlight Software: An end-to-end SaaS business management platform for companies that perform testing and inspection operations for their own product(s) or for other companies.
  • Happyly: An innovative corporate wellness benefit, designed for working parents, that supports physical and mental health.
  • Hatha Systems, LLC: Dedicated to disrupting the current approaches to Digital Transformation and Operational Risk Management, Hatha Systems is providing a first-to-market, patent-pending technology platform – Knowledge Refinery® (“KR”) — that delivers a comprehensive ‘Google mapping’ of business operations and its underlying software mechanisms. 
  • iValu8, Inc.: The creator of VivaSpot; a cloud-based marketing platform for SMB merchants that automates the collection of emails, phone numbers and other relevant customer information, and then markets back to customers using a combination of proximity, email, social media and text message marketing – with the goal of boosting revenue, foot traffic and customer intelligence. 
  • Klearly: Providing automated, prescriptive insights for today’s leading B2B revenue teams, using machine learning and predictive analytics to help B2B revenue understand what is happening and providing prescriptive, actionable recommendations on what to do next. 
  • Map My Customers: A SaaS offering that provides CRM functionality to outside/field sales teams, including lead generation, reporting, and route optimization capabilities.
  • MuukTest: A SaaS test automation platform that enables anyone, even those with no coding skills, to automate tests 20x faster, highly increasing software development teams productivity by reducing the time invested on test design, execution, scripting, and maintenance.
  • Plainsight: Helping people make curated business connections online or in-person at events, workspaces, and travel spaces, with a free-to-use platform that businesses can pay to leverage targeted promotions, consumer analytics, ticket sales, or coworking day passes.
  • Scoutr: Helps connect the right candidates with the right employers through “bias-free” matching algorithms, full-picture skill and culture-fit assessments, and more.
  • smoodi: Empowering healthy habits at any type of retail store or office through its proprietary, self-cleaning blender that creates healthy, fresh, delicious and customizable on-the-go smoothies—with a low footprint (under 2 sqft) and no need for a human operator.
  • Storlytics: Aids in the design of grid-tied energy storage and microgrid projects, allows engineers, developers, creditors, and investors in renewable energy and microgrids to estimate how their battery systems will operate and degrade throughout their lifetimem enabling customers to size their systems accurately, deduce degradation, estimate augmentation requirements, and estimate end of life expectancy, which is extremely important for financial institutions providing loans for energy storage projects.
  • The Convoy: Pools together the group purchasing power of independently owned businesses to command better rates on software and services, allowing the otherwise under-resourced and under-represented small business owners to decrease costs, increase margins, and compete with larger enterprises; with an eventual eye toward group purchasing power for physical products and goods. 
  • TriggerMesh: An enterprise software company that specializes in developing open-source, cloud-native cloud computing solutions.
  • Trilliott SmartSITE™: An RFID-first supply chain and warehouse management SaaS for businesses to digitize high-value, high-demand inventory and assets, improve accuracy and control, secure and analyze transactions, and manage asset lifecycle using Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) to capture every thing, uniquely identify each thing, and execute value-added workflows for things.
  • Vino: Eliminates a massive source of waste and security vulnerability in software, helping developers build faster and more securely, from full code to no-code, for less cost, time, and effort.

Cybersecurity

  • ActiveKloud: Cybersecurity startup with a CAASM platform for API inventory and cataloging, designed to protect APIs against attackers.
  • Secmation: Provides engineering, technology, and tools to add information security to new and existing products, specializing in emerging security applications that are not well served by traditional IT solutions. 
  • Velocity by Stern Security: A cybersecurity company headquartered in Raleigh, NC with a mission to secure the planet and flatten the breach curve; with Velocity, an innovative SaaS product that is the most effective and accurate way to measure internal and third-party (vendor) risk.

Education and Community

  • Element451: Student engagement CRM provider leveraging AI to hyper-personalize and scale higher ed student recruitment and enrollment, with the goal of increased engagement and admissions success. 
  • NextGen Interactions: Empowering people through the use of mind, body, and technology by creating virtual reality simulation and training experiences to prepare the workforce.
  • Spherio: Focused on creating spheres of empowerment for people and communities via integrated people, digital, and physical infrastructure solutions; providing data infrastructure for the unconnected.
  • The Nurtured Nest: Connecting healthcare systems and families with on-demand, parent education.
  • Toggle Book Factory: A bridge between technology and children’s books.
  • TRAKID: Designs interactive and educational adventures for children visiting zoos and amusement parks, with a goal of enhancing the guest experience, building empathy, and educating families on conservation.

B2C

  • Ane Swimwear: Flagship product, Ane, is a swimming cap with a patent-pending water barrier technology that protects hair while keeping it dry. 
  • Cardstalk: Like Redbox for Greeting Cards—a greeting card printing kiosk that lets gift-givers choose card designs from independent and local artists, and print them on the spot, on 100% PCW Recycled paper. 
  • Celerpurus: Developing the Purus One Ultraviolet chamber, a point-of-care solution for decontaminating masks and other personal items quickly and efficiently. 
  • Just Her Rideshare: A rideshare community of women drivers and riders providing a safe alternative rideshare experience.
  • Plum: A software platform that helps potential property co-owners to find one another and then buy and own properties together; described as “the easy button for co-owning vacation homes.”
  • Raw Paw Life: A direct-to-consumer ecommerce company in the niche market of raw pet food, with sustainably sourced products that have less than four ingredients total, with meat as the number one ingredient.