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.

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.

Where can startup ventures focused on tech, mental health, talent development and North Carolina-made products all come together and grow in the same space? Launch Chapel Hill, an international award-winning startup accelerator, bolsters all types of early startups in many ways. By encouraging innovative thinking, individual empowerment, community outreach, economic development and impactful change through its community of innovators, Launch offers its founders a little bit of entrepreneurial everything. The accelerator – formed through a partnership between UNC-Chapel Hill, the Town of Chapel Hill and Orange County – puts mentorship and educational programming at the forefront. But it doesn’t stop there. It also offers tech resources, a connected community and other amenities to innovators and entrepreneurs who need a steady foundation to grow their startups.

First-generation sisters Niki (right) and Ritika Shamdasani started Sani to cater to the 82% of South Asian Americans that wait to go abroad to shop for Indian weddings. In 2020, Sani became the first South Asian brand on Rent the Runway, selling out in 48 hours.

Applications are now open for Launch Chapel Hill’s 21st startup accelerator! The application period runs until January 5, 2023, and the accelerator will begin in early February 2023. Questions anytime to tim@launchchapelhill.com

DURHAM – NC IDEA has awarded $150,000 in grant money to 15 North Carolina startups in the ninth NC IDEA MICRO grant cycle, the organization announced earlier on Tuesday afternoon.

The $10,000 grants are intended to be small, project-based grants awarded to “young companies looking to validate and advance their idea,” according to NC IDEA.

Initially piloted in 2018 as an expansion of the nonprofit foundation’s long-standing SEED grant program, the organization has now awarded a total close to $1.5 million in small grants to companies.

Sheryl Waddell has been named director of economic development and innovation hubs for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this role, Waddell will lead the implementation of

Sheryl Waddell is the new face behind UNC’s Innovation Hub, which plans to open a space on East Rosemary Street in early 2023. As Innovate Carolina’s newly anointed Director of Economic Development and Innovation Hubs, Waddell hopes to foster an even greater spirit of innovation and economic prosperity in Chapel Hill, which in recent years has sometimes been a bit in the shadow of the entrepreneurial growth in Durham and Raleigh.

But for those who came out to the Launch Demo Day event one early May evening to hear from one of the most diverse sets of companies you’ll find anywhere, the startup accelerator offered a different kind of focus. This event was less about what the companies were doing, and more about where they’re going.