Tweener Fund Announces Q2 Results

Medium subscribers/readers, thanks for stopping by. In today’s post we have news from the Tweener Fund on the Q2 2023 portfolio additions. Most of you are probably wondering: “hmmm, where the heck is the new Tweener List for 2023?!” — good question, the short answer is stay-tuned, big news will be forthcoming shortly. Until then, read about 14 great new co’s you may not have heard of in the Triangle and we’re always looking for new accredited LPs to join in the Tweener Fund…

Tweener Fund made 18 new investments:

• 14 new portfolio companies (two investments were follow-on investments)
• $860k invested across the 18 investments.
• 7 were Tweener investments and 11 were Pre-Tweener investments
• $450k (53%) invested in Tweeners, $410k (47%) invested in Pre-Tweeners
• $47,809 average investment
• $2.3m average round size
• $12.8m average pre-money valuation

Number of investments by instrument:

• SAFE: 8 (45%)
• Convert: 6 (33%)
• Priced Round: 4 (22%)

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Tweener Fund ended the quarter with 144 investors (LPs) — up from 134 in Q2 (+)

“In the second quarter, we had less drama for startups post SVB.“, said Scot Wingo, Tweener Fund General Partner. “But we are seeing deals for Tweeners take longer to get done and valuations for pre-tweeners have become even more attractive. These trends enabled us to deploy a record amount of capital ($860k) across a record number of deals (18).

Welcoming the Triangle Tweener Fund Q2 Portfolio

The Tweener Fund is excited to welcome 18 investments across 14 new companies into the portfolio, representing over $860,000 invested in the quarter.

“Even given the macro-economic pressures, interest in the Triangle Startup Ecosystem is growing as we have reached a new record of 144 LPs, “said Robbie Allen, Tweener Fund General Partner, “because we are a rolling fund, we’re always actively adding new accredited investors and invite anyone that’s interested to reach out to learn more.”

Here are the 14 Q2 new portfolio companies (in order of investment):

● CoWorks (Tweener) — Accelerated by Covid, there’s a dramatic increase in co-working. Founded by DeShawn Brown (NCSU Grad 🐺), CoWorks provides software that coworking facilities to manage memberships, space utilization, payments and more.

● Map My Customers (Tweener) — CEO Ben Hartmere is leading Map My Customers on its mission to provide field-sales reps a map-driven CRM that enables them to optimize their activities by geography.

● SWIR Vision Systems (Tweener) — A MCNC spin-out that developed technology that is quantum-dot-based infrared image sensors that is in the short wavelength infrared band (SWIR) that is increasingly needed for industrial applications such as industrial cameras, 3-d imaging and autonomous vehicles.

● ValueCore (Tweener) — ValueCore has created a Sales/MarTech offering that companies can use to embed a ROI calculator on their websites. After a deal closes, the account management team can leverage the ‘pre-sales’ ROI calculator artifacts to make sure the customer is on track to exceed their ROI.

● Blue Co (Pre-Tweener) — Serial founder, Jason Widen (Raleigh Founded) has a new coworking concept for service companies. Blue will lease large buildings and up-fit them to be used fractionally by a variety of service companies with shared ‘flex’ space (mix of office and warehouse, loading docks,etc.)

● XComp Analytics (Pre-Tweener) — Developed with ECU as their first customer, XComp Analytics provides a SaaS platform that delivers assessment and analytics used for EdTech accreditation process.

● SIFT Media (Tweener) — Serial entrepreneur, Jud Bowman (Motricity, Pinpoint), started SIFT to help app developers more economically distribute and advertise their apps.

● RefundWiz (Pre-Tweener) — RefundWiz is building an AI-generation tax filing solution focused on communities that are underserved by the big tax franchise locations.

● Natryx (Tweener) — Serial Founder Leonard Nelson (Covisus, etc) founded Natryx based on proprietary technology (think rock-like 3d printing at crazy scale) that delivers rapid, high-performance solutions for coastal protection. Their customers are in the oil/gas and other sustainability focused organizations.

● uMethod (Tweener) — uMethod is a HealthTech company that has a proprietary analytical platform for determining a patient’s likelihood to develop dementia and/or alzheimer. uMethod also provides custom treatments for the treatment of these chronic diseases.

● TSV Analytics (Pre-Tweener) — Founded by two NCSU students, TSV Analytics provides companies with analytics and other tools to help improve their social media brand building.

● Agilix Health (Tweener) — Agilix is a HealthTech company with a digital nutrition management and counseling service that’s driven by real-time data and personalized for each patient.

● Gradient Health (Pre-Tweener) — Gradient is a HealthTech company that takes over 300m diverse and standardized patient studies of imaging data and packages it up for use by next generation companies looking to train AI algorithms, and others. They have over 1,000 partner hospitals in the network.

● Spring & Mulberry (Pre-Tweener) — Founded by Kathryn Shah and Sarah Bell, Spring and Mulberry have created a date-sweetened chocolate. In addition to being no-sugar, this premium treat is vegan as well.

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In Q2, Tweener Fund also made 4 follow-on investments in these existing portfolio companies:

● Plum Co-Ownership (Pre-Tweener) — Plum helps groups that want to co-own a vacation/second home discover each other, find potential properties, buy the property and then manage the property.

● Quinsite (Tweener)– Quinsite was founded to build a comprehensive healthcare analytics platform that is actionable. For example, are the members of your healthcare provider team meeting the right number of clients and getting great reviews?

● Bristles (Pre-Tweener) — First time entrepreneur, Tina Tang, is on a mission with the creation of Bristles to leverage the latest in ML/AI to help non-designers design their home improvement projects. Art walls, furniture refurbs, and dozens of other projects can be planned and visualized in a single app without having to know photoshop, background removal, and all the other complexities involved with visualizing something today.

● 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.

Tweener Fund Lifetime Statistics

As of the end of Q2 2023 after 18 months in operation, The Tweener Fund has made 86 investments across 72 companies and invested over $4.6m 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