Eight early-stage startups have wrapped up 14 weeks of participating in the Andrews Launch Accelerator (ALA) by presenting their pitches to the Triangle entrepreneurial community during its Demo Day Tuesday evening at Raleigh Founded – North Street.
The ALA program is supported by the NC State Acceleration Fund, a product of a $1 million donation from Lyn and Chip Andrews. NC State alumnus Chip Andrews was the former chairman and CEO for FMI Corporation, where he had a nearly 50-year career before retiring. (Read our first story about the Accelerator here.)
Before the pitches started, Chip addressed the downward trend of venture capital flow and noted that startup failures have increased 60%. But despite those negative trends, he said that the “2024 ALA startups are [in the middle of ] a challenging time and that’s good. It’s helping to make them justify their ideas with real data, relationships and money that make sense.”
The accelerator provides equity-free seed capital to help NC State founders kick off their entrepreneurial endeavors with resources, financial support and mentorship over a 14-week summer program. Last night marked the end to the 2024 accelerator cohort as founders presented their startups to the public.
The startups ranged from stuffed animal friends to automated bedets (bedpan/bidet hybrid). Here’s what they’re all about:
- Alpacasews: Created by a former meteorology student with a love for stuffed animals, Alpacasews is a stuffed animal boutique, with over a thousand designs available to order. After going viral on TikTok and as business continued to grow, Founder Emily Foster realized her handmade plush could not meet the overwhelming demand. Thanks to Kickstarter, she has funded 3 successful campaigns and funded thousands of plushies—all based on her own drawings and handmade designs. (You can read our feature on Alpacasews here.)
- BioSensys: According to Founder Vince Ryan, around 500k people out of 5-6 million will die in intensive care units (ICUs) due the lack of continuous lactate monitoring. Lactate is the primary indicator of organ failure and sepsis and its levels can change in minutes. BioSensys is addressing this issue with its wearable sensor for continuous lactate monitoring, which claims to enable better patient care 90% faster.
- CN-Seamless: The founding team at CN-Seamless realized that there are no modern tools that are portable, quick to set up, easy to use, modular and affordable for welders to fabricate steel. Their product Mach 1 will allow metal fabricators to cut out anything they want, anywhere, without having to use software. The machine itself is not only suitable for an industrial environment, but also lightweight and precise, allowing an operator to carry it wherever it’s needed.
- Data Gallery: Incubated from the minds of data engineers from Pendo and Microsoft, Data Gallery collects, cleans and serves engineering metadata as a service. Real-time computable data can then be made available to customers and enables better and faster computing engineering workflow metrics and security assessment tooling.
- Locally Grown: This app-based service provides a direct consumer-to-farmer marketplace for farmers who can’t have direct access to a market or seller. Locally Grown’s mission to support the work of local farms and improve access to high-quality local products has not gone unnoticed, as they have already onboarded 60 farms in NC and has reached over 25,000 customer app downloads.
- Modi: According to the Modi team, most retailers struggle with high return rates and low sell-throughs, as most returned clothing is because of inaccurate fit and sizing. With Modi’s integrated API, customers can enter their measurements onto a retailer’s website and it will recommend or generate more accurate sizing across the supply chain.
- PointHalo: Flying drones for 3D scanning can be time consuming, require precise flight procedures and some can be inaccurate and expensive. But the market who needs 3D scans from drones the most are park services, farmers, universities, roofers, security and more. PointHalo plans to democratize access for hundreds of thousands of small commercial drone pilots in the United States.
- Selah Innovations: According to the co-founders, one of whom is a nurse at UNC Health, current bedpan options have no automatic features and require someone’s help to move, lift and turn a patient, place, remove and clean the bedpan, and more. Selah Innovation’s product, the “Bedet” (a bidet and bedpan hybrid), seeks to eliminate the need for a healthcare provider to eliminate the time, indignity and materials involved in cleaning, drying and changing a patient.
Many of the startups were looking to begin connecting with industry professionals that can help take their products to a broader audience. These calls to connect made the networking portion of Demo Day arguably more integral to each startups’ journeys than the pitches itself.
