RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, October 4, 2023
The Triangle Tweener Fund (Tweener Fund) is excited to announce the results of the third quarter of 2023.
Tweener Fund made 18 new investments:
• 12 new portfolio companies (two investments were follow-on investments)
• $875k invested across the 18 investments.
• 12 were Tweener investments and 6 were Pre-Tweener investments
• $675k (77%) invested in Tweeners, $200k (23%) invested in Pre-Tweeners
• $48,600 average investment
• $6.4m average round size
• $41.2m average pre-money valuation
• Number of investments by instrument:
o SAFE: 8 (45%)
o Convert: 4 (22%)
o Priced Round: 6 (33%)
“The third quarter was our most active yet for investing in companies that meet our Tweener threshold“, said Scot Wingo, Tweener Fund General Partner. “This resulted in us deploying a record amount of capital for the fund. We were particularly excited to see very strong rounds from Pryon, Arpio, Givebacks/Memberhub and Reveal Mobile.”
Welcoming the Triangle Tweener Fund Q3 Portfolio
The Tweener Fund is excited to welcome 18 investments across 12 new companies into the portfolio, representing over $875,000 invested in the quarter.
“It's been exciting to see the Tweener Fund consistently invited to participate in the most sought after rounds, so that local entrepreneurs have a Triangle-based fund actively backing them,“ said Robbie Allen, Tweener Fund General Partner.
Here are the 12 Q2 new portfolio companies (in order of investment):
● Wild Earth (Tweener) – Founded by Ryan Bethencourt, Wild Earth is disrupting the dog food category with an allergen free vegan dog food.
● Rownd (Tweener) – Rownd is a YCombinator company, and you can think of it as Twilio for sign-ups and logins. This seemingly simple ‘on every site’ coding problem is extremely complex in today’s multi-device, secure, authenticated world. Companies turn to Rownd to simplify and improve the process.
● LogistiView (Tweener) – LogistiView offers a SaaS platform that uses AI to optimize warehouse operations with Automated Decision making.
● Trayecto (Tweener) – Trayecto provides software to financial advisors to help them guide their customers, wealth accumulators, into making smart decisions around equity compensation and their tax impacts.
● Trio Labs (Pre-Tweener) – Trio labs has created novel and innovative technology for creating ultra-precise micro metal parts, on-demand, in volume and with costs close to mass production options. The current first customers are in the surgical device space.
● Keebler Health (Pre-Tweener) – Keebler is building AI-enabled coding and auditing for medical billing teams.
● BallotReady (Tweener) – BallotReady has built the most comprehensive database of hyper-local election data. They can provide APIs to all of this data that are then used by many municipalities and other entities to enable every part of the voter/constituent voting journey.
● Galaxy Diagnostics (Tweener) – Galaxy Diagnostics has developed advanced tests that detect flea and tick-borne diseases in people and their pets.
● PerfectScale (Tweener) – PerfectScale helps Development Operations (DevOps) teams improve their infrastructure built on a popular technology, Kubernetes. PerfectScale provides and optimization and management platform that can both save customers significant cloud infrastructure and increase reliability.
● Voxel (Tweener) – Voxel uses Pulsed ElectroChemical Machining (PECM) to create complex parts with very specific requirements. These parts are used in the aerospace, energy, industrial and medical fields.
● Nimble Energy (Pre-Tweener) – Nimble uses AI analytics to analyze and improve building energy efficiency.
● Stealth Startup (Pre-Tweener) – This company is founded by three ex-JupiterOne engineers, Austin Kelleher, Charlie Duong, and Akash Ganapathi. They will reveal what they are building soon - stay tuned!
In Q3, Tweener Fund also made 6 follow-on investments in these existing portfolio companies:
● Seal the Season (Tweener) – Founded by Patrick Mateer, Seal the Seasons is a sustainable food company that brings the farmer’s market to your freezer. Seal the Seasons innovation is leveraging a supply chain designed to bring locally grown and frozen produce direct to your local grocery store. Founded in Patrick’s dorm-room at UNC, Seal the Seasons is now available in 30 states and over 4,000 retail locations.
● Arpio (Tweener) – When Doug Neumann was at Bandwidth, he architected and built a disaster recovery (DR) system that worked in concert with cloud platforms like AWS. That idea was spun out as Arpio in 2018 and has proven the theory that there is huge demand for automated DR on AWS.
● Reveal Mobile (Tweener) – Founded by serial entrepreneur, Brian Handly, Reveal Mobile aggregates anonymized mobile device location data to measure, optimize and expand their online->offline advertising. For example, let’s say you have a billboard on Capital Blvd. Reveal allows you to measure the number of consumers that drove past that billboard and then measured your store in the last 30 days compared to a period before/after the billboard.
● Pryon (Tweener) – Founded by serial entrepreneur Igor Jablokov, Pryon has developed an enterprise AI engine that pulls in all a company’s data and surfaces it via chat or voice to internal/external data workers.
● Memberhub/Givebacks (Tweener) – Provides parent teacher associations with CRM software, other solutions and provides a fundraising solution for the education market.
● Stashpad (Pre-tweener) - Founded by CEO Cara Borenstein, Stashpad is building an essential developer notepad.
Tweener Fund Lifetime Statistics
As of the end of Q3 2023 after 21 months in operation, The Tweener Fund has made 104 investments across 84 companies and invested over $5.4m into Research Triangle
Park HQ’d companies.
About the Triangle Tweener Fund
The Triangle 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 serial entrepreneurs who are the General Partners (GPs): Scot Wingo and Robbie Allen. Tweener Fund leverages the Angel 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. In its first year,
Tweener fund invested over $2.8m across 48 portfolio companies.
More information can be found at www.tweenerfund.com