The Triangle Tweener Fund (Tweener Fund) is excited to announce the results of the third quarter of 2024.
Tweener Fund made 19 new investments:
· 11 new portfolio companies (8 investments were follow-on investments)
· $778k invested across the 19 investments.
· 11 were Tweener investments and 8 were Pre-Tweener investments
· $40,951 average investment
· $4.8m average round size
· $13.4m average pre-money valuation
· Number of investments by instrument: SAFE: 7 (37%) Convert: 4 (21%) Priced Round: 8 (42%)
“In Q3, we saw two interesting trends. “, said Scot Wingo, Tweener Fund GeneralPartner. “First, we saw many of our portfolio companies raise ‘up new rounds’. Second, we are seeing a wave of innovative AI-First startups born in the Triangle. Like typical Triangle startups, they are solving very specific problems the founders have deep domain knowledge in and looking at building hyper-efficient businesses. Both trends are quite positive developments for the Triangle’s startup ecosystem.”
Tweener Fund also announced some milestones:
· Q3 was a record number of investments.
· Tweener Fund has invested over $8m since inception (all in the Triangle).
· There are now 124 portfolio companies (all in the Triangle) across 166 investments.
· Pitchbook named Tweener Fund as the most active investor in the Southeast for Q2.
Welcoming the Triangle Tweener Fund Q3Portfolio
The Tweener Fund is excited to welcome 19 investments across 11 new companies into the portfolio, representing over $778k invested in the quarter.
Here are the 11 Q3 new portfolio companies (in order of investment):
· Sonic Power (Tweener) – Spencer Martin cut his teeth building devices at Magic Leap. In 2022 he had an idea for a specialized mini vacuum for the auto category. The product took off and now Sonic Power has a wide variety of offerings. They are rapidly expanding into new categories and growing very rapidly. www.sonicpower.co
· Wander (Tweener)– Being from Utah, AJ Brau loves all things outdoors. When she moved to the Triangle in 2020, she brought Wander here with her (a pattern we are seeing a surge in these days).We’ve been tracking this one closely and were excited when there was a little piece of a round left – we were excited to participate. wandermaps.com
· Atlas (Pre-Tweener)– Michael Hoy is an early Pendo team member that has founded Atlas. Atlas is building software that helps other software companies solve a common problem implementing, tracking, and optimizing pricing. For example, in the face of AI disruption, many legacy SaaS businesses are looking to move from ‘seat’ licensing to ‘usage-based’ pricing. www.runonatlas.com
· Kingscrowd (Tweener) – Founder Chris Lustrino is building Kingscrowd to be the ‘Morningstar’ for the crowdfunding world. They capture and analyze all the data on fundraisings from WeFunder, StartEngine, and Republic. This allows crowdfund investors to evaluate potential new opportunities. www.kingscrowd.com
· Querious.ai (Pre-Tweener) – Hilary Bowman is a lawyer turned founder who saw a clear LegalTech AI opportunity missed by the many mega horizontal players. Querious.ai doesn’t require busy lawyers to totally change their workflow or look for AI hallucinations inAI generated docs. Instead Querious.ai’s QUICK offering helps uncover new billable opportunities and makes sure the client’s expectations are met/exceeded. www.querious.ai
· Dimmo.ai (Pre-Tweener) – Founder Troy Munson is a ninja-level sales guru who did an experiment – he invited a ton of prospects to see 2-3 demos of companies that don’t compete but have the same ICP. That went so well, he scaled it and scaled it and decided to productize it with Dimmo. Software buyers win by experiencing great demos without the sales gate keepers. Participating organizations receive qualified leads that are already deep in the funnel. www.dimmo.ai
· Axil Health (Tweener) – Axil Health places pharmacists directly in clinical settings and leverage their software to monitor patients remotely, helping to improve health outcomes and reduce healthcare costs for patients, providers, and insurance companies. www.axilhealth.com
· Virnika.ai (Pre-Tweener) – Have you ever been to a busy restaurant that either has the phone ringing endlessly with the staff too busy to answer, or right in front of the in-person customer they prioritize calls? Virnika is leveraging AI to provide an near-human level experience for callers that want to place take-out orders or ask non-transactional questions, freeing up the staff to focus on food prep and in-person customers. www.virnika.ai
· eBoxChain (Tweener) – Suraj Chandra, Sam Vijay and Venkat Palabindala founded eBoxChain to solve a problem they knew well – the need for a specialized delivery company serving the independent pharmacy market. eBoxChain helps deliver not only prescriptions, but lab samples and medical devices. All while being safe, secure, HIPAA compliant and integrated with Pharmacy Management Systems (PMS). www.eboxchain.com
· Blue Sky Robotics (Tweener) – UNC Professor, Stephen King, has a unique vision – using modern AI vision algorithms to train a versatile robot arm to perform complex tasks that previously would have either been impossible or extremely expensive to solve before breakthroughs in the last 2 years. www.blue-sky-robotics.com
In Q3, Tweener Fund also made a record 8 follow-on investments in these existing portfolio companies (In order of investment):Bionic Health, CompostNow, RepVue, PeopleLogic, Acre, uMethod, Spiffy and Viably.
About the Triangle Tweener Fund
TheTriangle Tweener Fund was founded in January 2022. It is a rolling fund that has a very narrow focus:
1. Companies must be headquartered in the Triangle
2. The fund invests 70%+ in early-stage, high-tech, ‘Tweener’ companies (10 people or $1m ARR)
3. The fund is building an index of Triangle Tweeners, so favors writing more ‘small’ checks vs. the traditional venture model of fewer large checks
4. Our accredited investors(LPs) are top entrepreneurs, service providers and other participants in our startup ecosystem and are not only looking for great returns, but also see the opportunity to accelerate the Triangle startup ecosystem flywheel.
Triangle Tweener Fund is managed by two Triangle area serial entrepreneurs who are theGeneral Partners (GPs): Scot Wingo and Robbie Allen. Tweener Fund leverages theAngel List ‘rolling fund’ platform. The minimum investment is $20,000 (4 quarterly investments of $5k for the first year) and then ‘rolling’ (quarter-to-quarter) thereafter. Tweener Fund has invested over $8m across 167investments in 124 companies in Triangle HQ’d high-tech early-stage startups. Unlike closed funds, the Tweener Fund isa lways open for new accredited investors.