Join us on Thursday, January 18, 5:00-7:00 pm. RSVP @ https://www.eventbrite.com/e/celebrating-founders-tickets-761271943877

Applications for the Launch Chapel Hill Spring 2024 startup accelerator have opened!

Aurora Leadership Partners is already

Another Friday Nooner is in the books! This week, Joe returned to the show in some amazing ForeverGrep swag and as always Jackie presented in front of a unique background.

DURHAM, NC – April 27, 2023 – NC IDEA, a private foundation committed to supporting entrepreneurial ambition and economic empowerment in North Carolina, announced today that the organization has awarded $150,000 to fifteen North Carolina startups in its tenth NC IDEA MICRO grant cycle. Since the inaugural cycle in Spring 2018, NC IDEA MICRO has awarded over $1.6 million to 162 young companies across the state.

Through small, project-based grants, NC IDEA MICRO awards $10,000 in funding to young companies looking to validate and advance their idea. The program, piloted in Spring 2018, was created as an expansion of the Foundation’s long-standing SEED grant program to provide funding to younger, promising startups not yet positioned for the Foundation’s traditional $50,000 grants.

The Target Accelerators team is thrilled to announce the fourth Target Forward Founders cohort. This program is built to equip historically under resourced founders to become the next wave of generational wealth-building companies, by utilizing Target’s size and scale to democratize access, education, and resources.

As Target Forward Founders participants, our fourth cohort will go through an extensive 10-week program that provides personalized education, tools and connections to help them learn how to scale into retail. Representing a variety of product categories including food and beverage, personal care, home, health and beauty, the Target Accelerators team is thrilled to welcome and introduce this group of unique brands as the program launches April 25. Meet the cohort!

Homayoon Ershadi is the founder of Jabin, a Raleigh-based beverage startup offering a family twist on an ancient Persian beverage. Ershadi was born and raised in Tehran but moved to the Triangle in 2009. An avid runner and cyclist, he found something unique to aid in post-workout recovery: his mom’s take on a traditional Persian beverage.

Oftentimes tech startup founders are creating the solution they needed in the past but could never find themselves. That is the case for the founders of Chapel Hill-based NxtNow, a platform that Co-Founder Kevin Thomas said intends to disrupt the entire music industry. The startup, which completed the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator program last fall, was born out of necessity.

As UNC focused more and more on its community’s mental health last fall, UNC sophomore Rob Sullivan was inspired to develop a more modern approach to journaling.
While taking 17 credit hours, working at the campus IT desk and helping lead two clubs, Sullivan somehow found time to develop a new goal-setting app—Arete.

Launch Chapel Hill remains open for business in its new space in downtown Chapel Hill’s first innovation hub building. Founded in 2013, Launch is still the same award-winning accelerator that supports the startup community and is the first tenant in the newest building in downtown Chapel Hill, offering even more programming and resources to the Chapel Hill community.

With news about the impacts of climate change and other environmental challenges breaking every day, it is not uncommon to feel overwhelmed, unsure of where to begin and what to do first to help.
To ease with the confusion, conflicting information and occasional guilt associated with becoming a better environmentalist, Kevin Berman created Project Trace, an interactive resource guide for learning about how a person’s everyday actions can impact the environment. The startup participated in the latest cohort of the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator.

After 20 years of school counseling, Kristin Hiemstra was bursting with inspiration from the goals and dreams of her students. But she found herself heartbroken thinking about all the lost goals and jaded morale of the adults around her.

“So I’m like—there’s gotta be a way that we can teach people how to keep those dreams alive, to give them traction to do it, and also how to navigate the actual work world,” she said.

Hiemstra’s secret ingredient? Alignment.

Why choose between Rosemary (our first location) and Franklin (our second location) when you can have both?! As of 1-Feb-2023, Launch Chapel Hill has relocated from our old home (306 West Franklin) to 137 East Franklin (Suite #611) and then to 136 East Rosemary in Summer 2023. Keep up with our progress here!

During quarantine, some people took up knitting, others restructured their workout routines, and even more spent a great deal of time watching Tiger King. Bryan Krehnbrink, a UNC School of Medicine psychologist, used his pandemic time to hone a different type of skill.
“I guess other people were baking bread and I was at home trying to learn how to code,” Krehnbrink said.

Naomi Kraut set out to make mothers feel seen through videos with singing—and swearing—puppets. That became a startup called Fun Mom Band that earned a $10K MICRO grant from NC IDEA to help flesh out a go-to-market merchandise strategy to help monetize the community spurred by the videos.

Durham-based Fun Mom Band is a product of the pandemic. It started with a puppet musical that expressed the struggles that moms face in an original way. It was released in May 2020 on YouTube and it also had an outdoor showing in a music hall.

If you have ever been on a long road trip with extra space in your car or are interested in a way to make money during your travels, then Krsor is for you.

As play on the word “cursor”—which in Latin means “runner” or “messenger”—Krsor provides an opportunity for travelers to connect with shippers so that cars with excess capacity can help ship items in the direction they are already traveling. The startup is participating in the current cohort of the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator, which runs through the end of the month.

One startup from Launch Chapel Hill’s spring accelerator hopes to change the game when it comes to businesses’ go-to-market forecast models.
After all, Kinetik Founder David Hughes is no stranger to forecasting models. It’s what he’s been building for the majority of his career.

Industry: Fitness

Founding Student Name(s): Anna Shuford (BA ’20, MBA ’22)

Brief Description of Solution: BOOMROOM is an integrated platform that provides a business management toolset and personalized business coaching for today’s health and wellness entrepreneurs. Our toolset includes CMS, CRM, scheduling, payment, insights and marketing software, enabling fit pros to streamline all business operations within one platform.

Funding Dollars: 380k

What led you to launch this venture? The idea first sparked while taking a Zoom workout lifting wine bottles as weights in my living room with 50+ people on the meeting. I saw trainers struggling to organize the process and the experience for the client (which I was) wasn’t anything special. This is especially true because I was already taking MBA classes via Zoom. I didn’t want to be on Zoom for my workouts, too! But overall this is what lead me to be confident in pursuing this venture.