The Triangle Tweener Fund is excited to announce the results of its first full year of operations and introduce the Q4 portfolio.
One of the Tweener Fund’s goals is transparency and to put a bright spotlight on all of the Triangle’s startup activity.
In that spirit, here are the detailed Tweener Fund highlights for the year:
• 56 Investments made
• 48 Unique portfolio companies (8 investments were follow-on investments)
• $2.8m invested
• 41 Tweener investments
• 15 Pre-Tweener investments
• $49,975 average investment
• $4.7m average round size
• $33m average pre-money valuation
• Investment Format:
- Priced Round: 25 (45%)
- Convert: 15 (27%)
- SAFE: 16 (28%)
• 128 investors (LPs) that have made a $6.4m commitment
“When we launched the Tweener Fund in January of 2022, we faced two big unknowns. First, we didn’t know if accredited investors would be interested in the idea of a Triangle focused early-stage startup index and second, we didn’t know if we would be able to find enough Tweener startups actively raising capital that would be open to having Tweener Fund on their capital table,“ said Scot Wingo, Tweener Fund General Partner. “Our results from 2022 exceeded our wildest expectations. We ended the year with over 125 investors and deployed $2.8m into 48 Triangle companies.”
Traditional closed-end venture capital funds have a 5-year deployment period. Given Tweener Fund’s $6.4m investor commitments in the rolling-fund, after the first year of operations, Tweener Fund is the equivalent of a ~$30m traditional venture fund.
Triangle Tweener Fund Q4 Portfolio
Additionally, the Tweener Fund is excited to welcome 14 investments across 10 new companies into the portfolio, representing over $780,000 invested in the quarter.
“Even though the macro-economic data is worsening, and overall venture investing is under pressure,“ said Robbie Allen, Tweener Fund General Partner, “we continue to see robust activity at the early-stages (Seed/Seed+/Series A) and this quarter Tweener Fund was able to add some growth stage (Series B/Series C) investments to the portfolio. We have built an unmatched portfolio of the top startups in the Triangle and are only getting started.”
Here are the Q4 new portfolio companies (in order of investment):
Pryon (Tweener) – Founded by serial entrepreneur Igor Jablokov, Pryon has developed an enterprise AI engine that pulls in all of a company’s data and surfaces it via chat or voice to internal/external data workers.
Validic (Tweener) – Validic gives developers of healthcare applications (insurance, hospitals, etc.) an API that works with a wide range of healthcare wearables and the terabytes of data they produce.
Phononic (Tweener) – Phononic applies solid-state electronics to refrigeration, both eliminating the need for environment-harmful gases, and dramatically reduces the energy needed for a wide range of cooling applications.
Impact Karma (Tweener) - Providers of Karma Wallet, Impact Karma helps consumers understand and offset their shopping carbon footprint.
Nomad (Pre-Tweener) - Nomad is building a network of co-living villages with flexible furnished living for remote working digital nomads. Their first co-living village is being developed in Raleigh, NC.
Alcove (Tweener) – Alcove operates a marketplace where renters and owners can find roommates.
HomeCloud (Pre-Tweener) – Founded by serial entrepreneur, George Kirkland, HomeCloud is re-inventing the home inspection process so that a complete digital record stored in a convenient cloud application that current and future homeowners can utilize to maintain the home.
GetSpiffy (Tweener) – Spiffy is disrupting the car-care industry with digital and
mobile solutions for consumers and fleets.
Equity Shift (Tweener) – Equity Shift provides private companies a comprehensive platform for managing fundraising, secondary sales, compliance, and vesting schedules.
Undisclosed (Tweener) – Tweener Fund invested In a Tweener in Q4 and the round has not been announced, we will reveal the investment if/when the round is announced.
In Q4, Tweener Fund also made follow-in investments in these existing portfolio companies:
AllStacks (Tweener) – AllStacks analyzes all the developer tools used by a company and surfaces a holistic view of project health for leadership.
ArenaCX (Tweener) – ArenaCX operates a marketplace that gives companies the ability to shop and procure various business-process-outsourcing options such as customer-service outsourcing.
CureMint (Tweener) – Curemint provides software for dental offices to manage their procurement and AP.