raleigh durham startups

Raleigh EdTech Startup Heads to NYC for Prestigious Kaplan-Techstars Accelerator

Posted by Laura Baverman | Jul 24, 2014

If you’ve seen Lea(R)n Founder Karl Rectanus in the last few days, you’ve probably noticed the big grin on his face and fast pace in his step. Today it all makes sense. The news he’s been sitting on for weeks came out this morning – that his startup would join the elite Kaplan EdTech Accelerator powered by Techstars. By afternoon, he’ll be on a plane to New York City to join 11 other startups from around the nation for funding from Kaplan and Techstars and three months of intense mentorship and business-building. They were chosen from a pool of...

SOAR MENTEE: Building the Sportswear Brand of Tween Athletes Everywhere

Posted by Laura Baverman | Jul 22, 2014

And she set to work sourcing materials that provided odor control, wicking and the right amount of elasticity. And she mocked up a design that accounted for athletic girls’ A-line shape, rounder butts and broader shoulders. Gucciardi began to provide her creations to the girls on her daughter’s soccer team. Soon, word spread. More and more parents wanted her camisoles for their tweens. It all started in Hong Kong. Though Gucciardi spent several recent years as a fundraiser at Stanford University and then at the UNC School of Medicine, earlier in her career, she completed a Harvard MBA, worked...

ArchiveSocial Raises $1M From Strategic California GovTech Investor

Posted by Laura Baverman | Jul 18, 2014

The tip came from City of Raleigh CIO Gail Roper. You have to talk to Dennis. ArchiveSocial CEO Anil Chawla was running into the same problem over and over again—despite connections made at the nationally-recognized Code for America accelerator and early users of his software that archives social media for government workers and officials—it was really hard for the small company to get attention in the civic sector. But Dennis McKenna had access unlike many others. He started 30 years ago and still runs the leading media, research and education company serving state and local government, Folsom, Calif.-based e.Republic....

STORIFY: How We Rally for Cali Investors

Posted by Laura Baverman | Jul 16, 2014

A cool thing happened on Twitter yesterday. Mark Suster, a well-known California venture capitalist, serial entrepreneur and popular blogger on all things startups (his LinkedIn photo left), asked his 166,000 followers for help planning a September trip to North Carolina. And the Triangle rallied. We’ve aggregated all the Twitter chatter in the fancy little Storify below. But here’s the bigger question: what should a big-name venture capitalist do when he visits our state? On a May visit, 500 Startups’ founder Dave McClure visited the universities, participated in a fireside chat with 100 or so startup community members, played late...

How to Get a Piece of BCVP’s $26M Fund

Posted by Laura Baverman | Jul 16, 2014

And it’s proof that this region—and other second and third-tier cities across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast—have businesses worthy of investors’ time and dollars. “One of the greatest return potentials in the venture marketplace is the small end of the market. We think we can generate outsized returns for our investors by investing in these smaller U.S. venture funds,” BCVP investor Roland Reynolds told me last week. He’s a managing director at Industry Ventures, a Silicon Valley firm with $1.75 billion under management and a fund of funds now invested in the most recent two of the men’s funds. What...

Help Make 80Pct Solutions a Dream Big America Champ

Posted by Laura Baverman | Jul 11, 2014

Fred Stutzman is on a roll since his startup 80Pct Solutions won an NC IDEA grant in June. The former University of North Carolina professor pitched his Freedom App this morning on national radio in hopes of becoming a Dream Big America champion and winning $20,000 in cash and marketing support. His is one of three pitches to air on radio stations around the country over the next week (and online here), and listeners will vote for their favorite on the Dream Big America website (You can too through the link above). Each month, one champion is chosen from...

Five Takeaways from Duke’s Startup Showcase

Posted by Laura Baverman | Jul 3, 2014

This post originally appeared on Josh Zipin’s Stealth Mode blog June 10. Zipin is a Davidson College graduate and Charlotte native now living in San Francisco. He handles business development and produces content for Curious.com, which connects teachers with lifelong learners through online video lessons on any subject imaginable. By Josh Zipin Last week, I had the good fortune to be invited to the 9th Annual DukeGEN Startup Showcase event. This event is put on by a Duke alumni organization called DukeGEN which was formed by a couple of Duke alumni volunteers who wanted to make it easier for...

ExitEvent’s Top 10 Stories from June 2014

Posted by Laura Baverman | Jun 30, 2014

At ExitEvent, we want you up on all the topics trending and news happening in the Triangle, so here’s a new feature we’ll run after each month ends recapping the most popular 10 stories and posts on our site. They’re ranked below based on page views. ChannelAdvisor CEO and co-founder Scot Wingo’s new column was a highlight of June, along with stories about the changing media landscape. You enjoyed some helpful tips and insights, profiles on local startups and some good news for clean tech. Check out the full list below. And to make an attempt at the Top...

Just Launched: The Online Publishing Platform of the Future

Posted by Laura Baverman | Jun 30, 2014

A decade of work at digital marketing agencies in Los Angeles lent Blake Callens a career-altering insight. That someday, there had to be another option besides WordPress and Drupal. Little did he know that he and now co-founder Brian Hyder would be the ones building it. Today, they launch the public beta of PencilBlue, a software they hope will become the leading online publishing platform for at least the next decade. Read Callens’s blog post about it here. It’s a tall task for the two-man startup in Raleigh- more than 74 million sites around the world are built on...

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