Summer News Roundup
DebtBook Series A Funding Round, PettyGigs Selected for Techstars, and our Summer News Roundup. Plus Jobs!
We are super excited to get back into our regular monthly cadence after a brief hiatus this summer. There has been a ton of recent activity across the Charlotte startup ecosystem, so let’s dive right in!
BREAKING: DebtBook Raises $7.5 Million Series A Round
Local FinTech startup DebtBook raised $7.5 million in new equity financing in August according to a company press release and SEC filing submitted last week. This funding round is a “Series A” round. The new funding comes on the heels of a $2 million seed round in late 2021.
We previously profiled DebtBook in a Dispatch earlier this year. DebtBook provides debt and lease management software tools to finance teams in local government, higher education, and healthcare and has been aggressively hiring. According to LinkedIn data, DebtBook grew headcount by more than 60% in the last 6 months and has around 70 employees.
The round was led by Elephant VC based in Boston with participation from Meeting Street Capital in Charleston and CreativeCo here in Charlotte. Only 3 total investors are listed on the Series A funding round, however a source in the know shared that almost all of the original investors re-invested in this round (22 investors were listed in the 2021 seed round filing.)
According to the company, the new funding will help scale product development and client success functions:
This investment will help accelerate the delivery of DebtBook's product roadmap and provide additional resources for DebtBook’s product and client success teams to continue their commitment to a best-in-class customer experience.
Congrats to the entire DebtBook team on this major milestone!
Note: We updated portions of this story due to new information in DebtBook’s press release.
PettyGigs Making Moves
Charlotte startup PettyGigs has had a big week, with two major announcements:
PettyGigs is teaming up with Atomic to launch a platform for teens to earn, save and invest (press release). This moves seems to take PettyGigs from a pure Gig Economy play into the FinTech space.
PettyGigs was also selected into Techstars Austin Fall 2022 cohort. The accelerator program requires temporary relocation to Austin, but we expect PettyGigs to permanently bring back all the lessons learned to Charlotte.
Congrats to the PettyGigs team — Techstars is a big deal!
🗞️ Summer News Roundup
Korea’s SK invests $100 million in EV-focused startup Atom Power based in Huntersville (Reuters)
Charlotte public safety startup CivicEye raises $12.4M Series A round (WRAL TechWire)
Charlotte-based PetFolk raised $43 million Series A round with lead investor White Star Capital along with Michael Wystrach, Idea Farm Ventures, TriplePoint Capital, and celebrities Miranda Lambert, Dierks Bentley, Cameron Duddy, Jimmie Johnson, Erik Jones, and Danica Patrick. (Medium, Charlotte Inno)
Charlotte startup vets Dan Rutledge and Angel Rutledge, founders of SignUpGenius, announced that they are launching a new startup called Meetify. (LinkedIn) Think Calendly with the added dimension of physical location. If the app can reserve the comfy leather chairs and order lattes for me and my meeting compadre, then we’ll really be talking! Hat tip to Tech Leaders Forum / Charlotte for alerting to this one.
40+ Charlotte businesses make the Inc 5000 List of fastest growing U.S. businesses (Charlotte Ledger)
The Inc 5000 List includes several companies we have written about previously on the Dispatch and our job board: Ekos, Carewell and PetScreening
Rain or Shine Golf Hires new COO and continues to experience high demand.
Former NASCAR exec, Blake Davidson, joins RealReponse as an Executive VP of Emerging Markets (Charlotte Inno).
RevTech Labs Cohort 17 kicks off in September (Twitter)
Abby’s Better is moving to a 10,000 production facility and hiring a production specialist (coverage)
RTP-based Zaloni’s data platform acquired by Truist (GrepBeat)
CreativeCo’s portfolio company SingleOps raised $74 million in growth capital (LinkedIn). CreativeCo is a Charlotte-based growth equity studio.
Early-stage startup Margik recently appeared on the show Unicorns (Charlotte Inno).
Axios acquired by Cox Enterprises for $525 million. Axios acquired the Charlotte Agenda back in 2020 and retained founder Ted Williams to help with local news strategy. (Ted Williams on LinkedIn)
What did we miss? Email us, and we’ll add it to this roundup.
😎 Post of the Summer
PonyBox Founder Hellen Moffitt posted on Instagram that she had the opportunity to chat with entrepreneurial powerhouse and Shark Tank investor Barbara Corcoran.
Job Opportunities
We parse the internet so you don’t have to.
Despite a tough macro-environment, there are still plenty of exciting startup job opportunities in the Charlotte area:
Rethink Ledgers, Development Manager
Botsplash, Data Analyst / Python Developer
DebtBook, Director of People
CivicEye, Account Executive
Have a friend hunting for a startup job? Share the newsletter with them — they’ll be glad you did!
In case you missed it:
Thanks for reading this Dispatch. We’ll be back in September with some Q&As and our standard company profiles. Happy early Labor Day weekend!
