This week I sit down with Will Duckett, co-founder and COO of Equity Shift, an NC Tweener Fund portfolio company building the infrastructure behind private market secondaries. It's a good mix of both worlds with real company detail (broker-dealer licensing, cap table complexity, go-to-market) alongside the founder lessons that come with seven years of building through two economic shocks. If you've ever wondered what actually happens when a private equity firm buys a company out from under 8,000 employees, this one's for you.

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Who is Will?

Will Duckett is co-founder and COO of Equity Shift, a Raleigh-based fintech building the technology and regulatory infrastructure for secondary liquidity in private markets. Will grew up in North Carolina and studied entrepreneurship and ancient Roman history at UNC Chapel Hill, then spent about four years in the back office of a fund of hedge funds in New York before earning his MBA at Columbia Business School. He moved home to North Carolina to start a family and work in private-business operations, including a stint at menswear brand Peter Millar, before co-founding Equity Shift with Tom in 2019. Today he’s also co-Chief Compliance Officer for the company’s FINRA-registered broker-dealer, and leads customer success, operations, and, in the early days a lot of the marketing too.

Highlights

• The origin story: Will met co-founder Tom Gordon at a blockchain working group in 2018; Tom previously built the online hotel reservation technology behind modern travel booking and sold it to Travelocity.

• 41 patents: Equity Shift holds roughly 41 U.S. patents describing how blockchain, or as Will prefers, “immutable ledger technology,” can underpin digital private markets.

• The pitch in one line: “Think of it as almost a digital operating system for a private business or a private entity.”

• The Carta line: On how Equity Shift differs from cap table incumbents: “This is Carta that keeps itself as you use it to actually do the work.”

• The SpaceX cautionary tale: SpaceX reportedly went public without knowing all of its own shareholders after secondary shares were resold through daisy-chained SPVs, the kind of regulatory risk Will says Equity Shift is designed to prevent.

• The market math: Secondaries account for roughly 2% of total AUM in private markets, compared with about 95% secondary trading volume in public markets, a massive gap Equity Shift is chasing.

• Finding the bigger space: After realizing Carta had already saturated the roughly 60,000 to 100,000 VC-backed companies, Will and Tom targeted what they estimate is a market of 15 million private U.S. businesses, ultimately focusing on private-equity-backed buyout companies.

• The taxi medallion analogy: Mentor Bill Spruell told Will to think of FINRA broker-dealer registration “like a New York City taxi cab medallion,” painful to obtain, but a durable asset once you have it.

• Team and traction: Equity Shift has grown from a two-person founding team to 26 people, became a registered broker-dealer in 2021, and now works with some of the world’s largest private equity firms and asset managers.

• Founder advice: “Just think of it being at least 2 times harder than you think it will be.” After seven years, Will’s biggest lessons include relentlessness and the value of having a co-founder to share the load.

• Building in North Carolina: Will sees the state as a great place to build a company and hire talent, but says raising local capital for a big, ambitious idea has been harder, something he hopes changes as more successful NC outcomes recycle wealth back into the ecosystem.

Seven years, two economic shocks, and 41 patents later, Will’s still convinced private markets are headed digital. Enjoy the conversation.

Where to Watch/Listen:

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We have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!)

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Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

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Episode 10

This week on Redacted, we bring back longtime friend Parker Mayes, founder of Signify, for a guest episode that's almost entirely a live demo. It's a company-talk-heavy conversation where Parker walks through the actual agents running his sales pipeline in real time, but the founder lessons land just as hard: where AI should live versus where a human has to step in, and why a non-technical founder with the right AI sidekick might not need a technical co-founder at all.

Who the Guest Is

Parker Mayes is the founder of Signify, an AI sales intelligence platform that sits between a prospect database (Apollo, ZoomInfo, or your own list) and your CRM, scoring and enriching companies every day based on real buying signals. Signify launched a few months ago and already counts 25–30 companies as a mix of beta testers and paying customers. Before Signify, Parker spent four years running a go-to-market agency built around high-volume cold email, calls, and LinkedIn outreach for B2B clients and the frustration with low-trust, low-response outbound at scale is what pushed him to build Signify in the first place. Before that, about five years ago, he co-founded LetsGo!, a startup focused on date nights for couples, living with four other founders in a Raleigh startup house. He also runs the Triangle Startup Collective's monthly AI meetup, where Taylor spoke earlier this week, which is also the reason this episode came together.

What We Cover

• From agency to product: Parker spent four years running a high-volume cold-outreach agency, doing around 5,000 touches a month for B2B clients, before realizing the real value was the targeting engine underneath it, which became Signify.

• What Signify does: It sits between a prospect database like Apollo, ZoomInfo, or a scraped list and your CRM, scoring and enriching companies daily based on custom buying signals like new hires, company news, job postings, and website changes, so reps know who to reach out to today, not just who exists.

• Real numbers: Signify launched a few months ago with 25–30 companies already using it, a mix of beta testers and paying customers. Pricing is flat at $200/month per seat, including 100 company scans and roughly 10 phone/email unlocks a day.

• Why the incumbents haven’t built this: Parker says it costs “a couple dollars a day” to scan 100 companies given how much scraping and searching is involved, which works at his scale but would be “completely unreasonable” for a database with 300 million prospects.

• Four daily automations: Every rep on Parker’s team runs the same pipeline each day: run the scan, send roughly 30 LinkedIn connection requests, add newly connected people to the sequence and send message one, and advance everyone else already in the pipeline to message two or three.

• “Interested is a human activity”: Parker never lets AI touch a warm lead. Cold outreach is automated end-to-end, voice-matched to his own texting style, down to lowercase openers and “LMK,” but the moment someone replies, a human takes over, including scripted, personalized selfie-video follow-ups.

• The screenshot build: His newest automation runs a live custom demo for a prospect, screenshots the exact signals pulled for them, and sends it as a personalized LinkedIn message, with three concurrent browser tabs running in parallel so it can message three people at once. It took about a week and a half to get working end to end.

• On not needing a technical co-founder: Pushing back on a VC who told him he needed one to raise, Parker’s take is, “I’m just a sales co-founder... there’s now no reason that you can’t have that as one person as long as you have a sidekick that’s your developer, who’s just cracked and never wants to talk to anyone and just grind.” He uses Claude Code himself for small features, saying recoloring pipeline badges took “6 lines of code” and “5 seconds.”

• The restaurant tangent: David and Taylor compare notes from Offline. Expanding an existing restaurant account into its other locations takes far more context, including open support tickets, contract status, and staff turnover, than cold outreach, and the industry itself is “so incestuous” that true cold leads are rare.

• The stack: Signify runs almost entirely on Anthropic’s API. Claude Sonnet is the workhorse model, with a GPT fallback, and the live pipeline automations ran on Claude in Cowork with browser automation through Claude and Chrome.

• Origin story: Parker and David’s first real conversation happened roughly five years ago through a mutual NC State connection, a memory Parker still brings up of David cutting the call short to go be with his kids.

As Parker puts it, the biggest thing holding most people back isn’t the build time; it’s the assumption that it’ll take months when it might take an afternoon. Enjoy the conversation.

It’s best viewed on YouTube to fully see the examples (make sure to subscribe!)

But also available on all audio podcast players through Tweener Talks!

PLUS we have a new spot for show notes and files discussed in the episode. Check it out: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

We need your [Redacted] AI experiences for upcoming episodes! Who’s the most underrated AI builder you know? Someone running real systems inside a real business? Send us a message at contact@tweenerfund.com because we want to get them on the show!

What’s Next?

New episodes drop twice a month/every other Wednesday. If you want to be on the show as a guest and show your [REDACTED] builds, email us here.

This week on NC Tweener Talks, I sit down with Steven King, the UNC professor and CEO of Blue Sky Robotics, a computer vision company that's pivoted twice in three years, from metaverse avatars to warehouse robots to hospital automation. It's a company-heavy episode: Steven walks through the technical bets, the client-funded path to product-market fit, and the specific numbers behind a 99.5% accuracy commitment that forced his team to rebuild their system from scratch. He also shares hard-won lessons on co-founder relationships and knowing when to let go of a name, a market, or an idea that isn't working.

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Who is Steven?

Steven King is CEO and co-founder of Blue Sky Robotics, a Chapel Hill-based computer vision company that helps hospitals automate operational tasks like surgical tray prep and dining tray verification. Steven has spent about 15 years as a professor at UNC, where he runs an innovation lab focused on emerging technologies, and he's currently a distinguished tenured professor there despite not holding a PhD. His graduate work, a master's in computer science focused on computer vision, came through an executive program at the University of Liverpool. Before UNC, he was director of innovations at The Washington Post, leading designers, developers, and data scientists on the future of digital media, and before that he studied photojournalism at Western Kentucky University. He co-founded Blue Sky Robotics three years ago.

Highlights

• The pivot, twice over: Blue Sky Robotics started as a volumetric capture system for metaverse avatars, using 4–5 cameras to do what once took 100–200, before pivoting to robotic vision when the metaverse market never materialized, and later pivoting again from warehouses into healthcare.

• 99.5% accuracy over 10,000 picks: An early warehouse client selling fishing tackle through Bass Pro Shops and Mystery Tackle Box demanded 99.5% accuracy across 10,000 picks, with 10,000 SKUs rotating every four hours. Steven’s team rebuilt its vision system from scratch to hit the target, a number robotics conference audiences still ask him to repeat: “Point?”

• The “IoT toaster”: Steven describes the ideal product as an appliance that plugs into a hospital’s network, solves one operational problem exceptionally well, and can scale across roughly 6,100 U.S. hospitals instead of requiring a custom build for every client.

• Real numbers from the healthcare pivot: At Blue Sky’s hospital clients, 20,000 dining trays go out each day, with 12% containing errors and 3% violating dietary restrictions. Separately, 20% of U.S. surgeries begin without the correct instrumentation on the tray, causing delays and keeping patients under anesthesia longer.

• Cascading models: Blue Sky trains on large vision-language models, distills them into local models running on NVIDIA Jetson edge cards for real-time on-site inference, and escalates unfamiliar objects to the cloud. What the cloud learns is then folded back into the local model.

• Real data is the moat: “Synthetic simulation data gets you 80, 85% there,” Steven says, but Blue Sky’s advantage comes from real action data generated by robot picks in the field, experience that can transfer from handling floppy, reflective fishing tackle to surgical instruments.

• Built on clients, not VC: Blue Sky bootstrapped through paying customers rather than raising venture capital first. Steven says the approach slowed early progress but forced the team to build products with immediate business value. The company now plans to raise capital this fall to fund its healthcare expansion.

• Discipline over revenue: The team has walked away from one-off projects that couldn’t scale, even when doing so caused a visible drop in sales. Steven’s rule: “If you don’t need 100 robots, then we’re not gonna do it.”

• UNC Health and Mayo Clinic: UNC Health CEO Christy Page greenlit a pilot almost immediately, saying “Pilot tomorrow.” This gave Blue Sky’s engineers a deployment just a five-minute walk away where they could observe the work and iterate in real time. Mayo Clinic followed as a second deployment and potential investor.

• A 16-person team built on Triangle talent: Blue Sky now has 16 employees and draws heavily from UNC for computer vision, NC State for mechanical engineering, and Duke’s Fuqua School for business talent. Several interns and fellows stayed with the company after successful summer experiences.

• On co-founders: “Co-founder selection is massively, massively important,” Steven says, comparing the relationship to a marriage built on a commitment to work through both financial and personal challenges together.

As Steven puts it, pride is the enemy of a good pivot, and Blue Sky Robotics has proof that listening to your clients can take you somewhere you never planned to go. Enjoy the conversation.

Where to Watch/Listen:

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

We have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!)

📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

In Feb 2026, we partnered with NC IDEA to take Tweener Fund state-wide and it became the NC Tweener Fund. We announced in Wilmington, we live in the Triangle and now we’re starting to roam the various regions of the state to meet the other startup ecosystems. In today’s post, we’re going to report on our roadtrip to the Triad region’s Winston Salem, where we met hundreds of startups and were impressed by all the activity going on in this part of the Great State of NC!

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Winston Salem Converge South 2026 Trip Report

Last week Tweener Fund attended Converge South 2026 and in this part of our road trip, we’re going to talk about what’s going on in the Winston Salem Startup Ecosystem.

About Converge South

Started in 2016, Converge South, now 10 years old, is a two day investor fly-in/pitch event held in Winston Salem’s innovation district.

There are three tracks:

• HealthTech/ BioTech

• Artificial intelligence / B2B Saas

• Food / Beverage/ Agtech

The event also featured over 125 investors, 150 startups pitching (many more were working the rooms) and well over 500 attendees. I’d peg it at 750-800, but being in several building sit was hard to get a bead on how many people there were - every event we attended was jammed.

Winston Salem’s Innovation Quarter

The first thing you notice in Winston Salem, is the city ‘gets it’.

For example, as you head down towards the downtown area, on Research Dr. you are met with signage everywhere that tells you exactly what that area is for:

In every building in the Innovation Quarter there are maps detailing all the buildings, assets that supports startups and more:

Here you can see there’s a three phase plan that includes mixed use building, greenways and connectivity to not only the Tier 2 research school of Wake Forest, but to Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) as well.

Converge South’s Three Main Buildings

For the show, we spent most of our time in three buildings:

• 500 W 5th

• Wake Forest Biotech Place

• Bailey Power Plant

Bailey Power Plant

In 1940, the building was built for the RJR Tobacco company to run the cigarette companies facility’s steam and electricity. It was preserved and in 2018 converted to be part of the Innovation district. Inside it features a co-working facility and an open well-lit atrium for events.

This is where the Mainstage for this leg of the Converge South content was held. It has a cool retro industrial almost ‘steam punk’ feel to it with a lot of modern additions added to the mix giving it a very cool ‘past meets the future’ vibe.

Innovative Tenants in the Power Plant

Note for Triangle startup ecosystem folks, The Sparq co-working facility is amazing and has a partnership with the Raleigh/Cary founded coworking folks, so you can come for a nomadic work session to see for yourself! Other tenants include:

• Wake Forest Innovations - the WF tech-transfer group

• CML Microsystems - a semiconductor (wireless and flash-memory controllers) company that moved their HQ into the Power Plant.

Wake Forest Biotech Place

Being a software person, I’ve been in many Biotech buildings and often wonder: “Am I going to catch some derivative of ebola in here?” They usually are 1000 years old, have lots of weird smells and labs and are dark and drab.

The WF Biotech Place is made of all glass bricks which is pretty cool, but what’s really amazing is the building’s atrium:

Here you can see through the roof through the metal and glass structure giving it tons of natural light and a very modern feel. You can see the shared biolab offices, and labs through that surround the atrium. At one end of this very long atrium were the startup exhibits and another keynote stage was on the other end.

500 W 5th - The Vertical Startup Factory

500 W 5th is a 18 story building that one of the organizers of Converge South described as a Vertical Startup Factory. One of the startup ecosystem’s biggest Benefactors is a car dealership. Ok, not just any car dealership, the Flow Automotive Company, HQ’s in Winston Salem, but runs over 50 dealerships across the SE. Mr. Flow (Don), is a big supporter of entrepreneurship and it’s his vision that bought 500 W 5th to live.

In 2017, Flow acquired the building, and put over $10m renovating it for both their own HQ, but also as a centerpiece for the innovation district. The vision for the first 6 floors is:

• Incubator - The lower floors house the Winston Starts incubator

• Angel Investing - The region’s top angel group, Winston Salem Partners Roundtable (WSPR) features ~100 accredited investors that operate and meet out of the building, where you can imagine they serendipitously mix with all the startup acrivity.

• Coworking - Flywheel, the Converge South facilitator and major sponsor, is next, providing the incubated startups a place to work.

• Support - There are supporting orgs like Liberty Mutual and a later stage fund called River Park Group that operate out of the building as well.

From 6 on are larger suites such that a company could literally be conceived, incubated, be funded, move to coworking and then ‘move on up’ to the higher floors for more and more space.

Up Next…

We hope you’ve enjoyed this tour of Winston Salem’s Innovation Quarter and Converge South’s three main locations. In part 2, we’ll cover some of the content we were able to attend and talk about the many many many company pitches we were able to hear or judge.

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This week on NC Tweener Talks, I sit down with Ben Scruggs, CEO of Altis Biosystems, a Durham-based company developing human stem-cell-derived models of the gut. Pharma, biotech, and nutrition companies use Altis’s technology to better predict how a drug or ingredient will behave in the human body before it ever reaches a patient. The conversation is split pretty evenly between the company and the person behind it. We dig into how Altis’s technology works and why the gut is such an overlooked bottleneck in drug development, while also exploring Ben’s path from bench scientist to venture investor to first-time CEO.

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Who is Ben?

Ben Scruggs is CEO of Altis Biosystems, a Durham, NC company that grows human intestinal models from donor stem cells as a more predictive alternative to animal testing and cancer-cell-line models in drug development. Ben is a cell biologist by training, with a PhD in cell biology and a postdoc in RNA biology and genomics at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS); the postdoc that first brought him to the Research Triangle. He spent close to a decade as a venture investor with Hatteras Venture Partners, where he worked across drug development, medical devices, and healthcare IT, before stepping into operational roles inside the portfolio, including a Duke-spinout epigenetic editing company now in clinical trials for hepatitis B. He became CEO of Altis, a UNC spinout, about three years ago, and still maintains his relationship with Hatteras today.

Highlights

• Ben’s pivot from scientist to investor to CEO: He trained as a cell biologist, earning a PhD in cell biology and completing a postdoc in RNA biology and genomics at NIEHS before spending nearly a decade as a venture investor at Hatteras Venture Partners and, about three years ago, stepping into the CEO role at Altis Biosystems while maintaining his Hatteras relationship.

• Hatteras Venture Partners, by the numbers: More than 25 years old, 100+ healthcare investments, investing from its seventh fund, and, according to Scot, roughly $900 million under management, split about evenly between biotech and health-tech software.

• Altis builds human intestinal models: Using real donor stem cells, the company recreates the gut’s epithelial barrier, the interface anything taken orally must cross to enter the body. Unwound, the human gut lining is roughly the size of a tennis court.

• Three markets, one biological barrier: Altis serves absorption and metabolism studies, inflammation research such as inflammatory bowel disease, and toxicity screening. GI side effects are among the most common reasons drugs are discontinued during development.

• GLP-1s are a timely stress test: Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are working to get notoriously difficult-to-absorb GLP-1 peptides into pill form, making bioavailability exactly the kind of question Altis’s models are designed to answer.

• Altis has a dual business model: It operates as a full-service CRO, with in-house PhD scientists designing and running studies, while also selling self-serve kits in familiar 12-, 24-, and 96-well plate formats.

• Altis has scaled from dozens to thousands of compounds: The company now routinely screens hundreds or thousands at once, requiring investment in automation and robotics rather than simply adding headcount.

• The name “Altis” means “all tissues”: It reflects the company’s long-term vision to expand beyond the gut into other epithelial barriers, including the skin and lungs.

• Altis is a UNC tech-transfer story: The company was founded by UNC scientists, its technology is exclusively licensed from the university, and its first investment came through a Hatteras-affiliated fund that manages capital for UNC.

• “Advice is easy. Accountable operations is a whole other ball of wax.” Ben’s description of the difference between advising founders as a venture investor and actually running a company.

• Ben’s unexpected CEO lesson is that the job is mostly selling: Persuading investors, recruiting talent, winning and retaining customers, and keeping employees engaged are all core parts of the role, skills scientists rarely receive formal training for.

Where to Watch/Listen:

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

We have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!)

📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

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Episode 9

This episode is almost entirely a product teardown. On this episode we bring on Josh Guter, founder of Elephants, for a live demo of the AI assistant running his ops platform, and then spend the back half grilling him on the stuff every founder building an AI chat feature actually loses sleep over: which model, what it can touch, how you stop it from doing something dumb, and how you audit a system that's too complex to fully read anymore.

Who the Guest Is

Josh Guter is the founder of Elephants, operations software built for small teams (think one to five people) who are managing big networks of relationships and projects without the bandwidth to set up (or maintain) a proper Notion or Airtable system. Elephants ships ready to go out of the box, with an AI assistant at the center that acts as a thought partner and de facto ops person for teams that can't afford to hire one. Josh studied graphic communications, not computer science, and taught himself to write software along the way. His first startup built embedded firmware for wearable devices that let hikers in remote areas signal for help with the press of a button. He's also the program manager for NC State's Entrepreneurship Clinic, which has been running on Elephants for about six months.

What We Cover

• 64 tools, one job each: Elephants’ assistant works through roughly 64 discrete backend tools: search relationships, search projects, stage a card, and so on. Each has tight instructions for when the model should reach for it. It’s the same architecture Josh first built as Make.com scenarios wired to OpenAI, just ported into full-stack code.

• Nothing writes without a click: By default, the assistant can’t touch the database directly. Ask it to “create 10 catering tasks” and it comes back as a batch of cards you have to review and hit “add” on. Even in auto mode, deletions and archives always require human approval. No exceptions.

• Breadcrumbs instead of a black box: Every tool call, error, and decision path gets logged to a table Josh can pull up when a customer says the assistant did something weird. It’s his stand-in for the old Make.com flow he used to watch run step by step in real time.

• “That’s kind of scary”: Josh’s own words about how much of the current codebase has become genuinely opaque to him. His fix is opening a fresh Claude Code session and asking it to explain the system to him “like I’m 5” before he goes digging himself.

• Illustrator mockup → Claude plan → Codex teardown: His build loop starts with sketching the UI in Adobe Illustrator, a holdover from his graphic communications degree. Then he has Claude draft an implementation plan and gets Codex to “tear it apart” for broken conventions and repeated logic before a line of code ships.

• Red-teaming himself: Before any change touches the assistant’s tools or system prompt, Josh tries to break it in a dedicated “assistant stress test space,” including trying to get it to mass-delete every note in a workspace just to confirm it gets rejected.

• From Glide + Make.com to full-stack: Elephants started as a low-code app on Glide Apps with an AI “brain” wired through Make.com automation scenarios. The full rebuild ran on Opus 4.8 with Codex reviewing, using the old Make scenarios as the literal spec for what to replicate.

• Six months running a real entrepreneurial clinic: Elephants has managed NC State’s Entrepreneurship Clinic for about half a year. Josh’s proof point: he asked the assistant which program contacts to check in with ahead of a leadership transition, and it correctly surfaced four or five based on past conversation history.

• A PWA on purpose: Elephants skipped the App Store entirely. It’s a progressive web app that works identically on desktop, mobile browser, or installed to a phone home screen.

• The honest solo-founder moment: Josh admits to sometimes wondering if he’s “neck deep in AI psychosis” building something this consequential alone. He says hearing other founders describe the exact same workflow is what keeps him grounded.

Josh's closing line sums up why this one's worth a listen: the more teams trust these systems with their real operational knowledge, the more useful they get, and the harder it becomes to know exactly what's happening under the hood. Enjoy the conversation.

It’s best viewed on YouTube to fully see the examples (make sure to subscribe!)

But also available on all audio podcast players through Tweener Talks!

PLUS we have a new spot for show notes and files discussed in the episode. Check it out: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

We need your [Redacted] AI experiences for upcoming episodes! Who’s the most underrated AI builder you know? Someone running real systems inside a real business? Send us a message at contact@tweenerfund.com because we want to get them on the show!

What’s Next?

New episodes drop twice a month/every other Wednesday. If you want to be on the show as a guest and show your [REDACTED] builds, email us here.

Three things happened recently that inspired the idea for this one:

First, at ReFiBuy, we completed our Seed round on May 5th. With the completion of this round we had a board and thus, recently had our first board meeting. I haven’t had a first meeting since 2014 and it was fun to think about how to start out fresh, how to streamline the process, etc.…

Read more

This episode leans heavily into the company. I sit down with Adam Steege, founder and CEO of Trio Labs, a Morrisville-based additive manufacturing company that 3D prints super-small, complex metal parts for medical devices. This episode is part of my ongoing series on North Carolina companies building in the physical world, and Trio Labs might be the most literal example yet, since they build the printers that print the other physical things. Along the way, Adam shares real founder lessons on failure, focus, and how a mechanical engineer talked himself into running a company.

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We couldn’t bring you 100% original founder-to-founder content like this without the support of our awesome-sauce sponsors:

Loving our content? It wouldn’t be possible without our amazing sponsors and our paid subscribers, so THANK YOU!

Featured Platinum Sponsor

Featured Gold Sponsor

Featured Silver Sponsor

NC Tweener Times is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.And special thanks to our friends at Walk West for partnering with us to produce this pod!

Who is Adam?

Adam Steege is the founder and CEO of Trio Labs, a Morrisville, NC company that does micro-scale metal 3D printing for medical devices. He grew up in North Carolina, left for six years to study math, physics, and mechanical engineering across a dual program at Carleton College and Columbia University, then came back home. Trio Labs is Adam's second company; his first was a med-tech startup building laparoscopic surgical devices, which grew directly out of his undergraduate senior design project. He ran that company for five to six years, getting through early animal trials before it stalled out on a classic med-tech problem: the people with the need weren't the people with the buying power. He founded Trio Labs in 2015, spent roughly five years getting the core technology to proof of concept, raised a Series A in 2021, and launched commercially in early 2023.

Highlights

• Second time’s the build: Trio Labs is Adam’s second startup. His first, a laparoscopic surgical device company born from his college senior design project, ran for five to six years and reached early animal trials before stalling.

• The failure that taught him the lesson: Adam calls it a “stakeholder visibility mismatch”: the people who felt the problem most weren’t the people with the power to buy, acquire, or partner. Now, he pressure-tests stakeholder alignment early in every venture.

• The tech he wished he’d had: Trio Labs came directly out of Adam’s first startup. He wanted to 3D print metal components for medical devices, but the existing technology simply couldn’t deliver the performance he needed.

• The timeline: Founded in 2015. Roughly five years to bench-scale proof of concept. Series A in 2021. Commercial launch in early 2023. Now rolling out the “Gen 3” industrial printer.

• “Half ASML, half TSMC”: That’s Adam’s description of Trio Labs. The company builds ultra-precision printing equipment and operates it, selling finished parts as a service rather than selling the machines themselves.

• The HP analogy: A Trio advisor, formerly president of HP’s 3D printing division and previously head of its ~$24 billion inkjet business, taught Adam that “the third dimension is nonlinear.” Moving from 2D to 3D printing introduces layers of complexity you don’t see coming.

• Why metal, not plastic: Plastics already have cheap, mature manufacturing methods like injection molding and micro-molding. Metal doesn’t scale as easily with legacy processes, creating a “blue ocean” opportunity, especially when devices require mechanical strength or electrical conductivity.

• A wafer fab in a box: Trio’s printers are roughly the size of a large refrigerator. Adam points out the same irony seen in advanced semiconductor equipment: the smaller the part you’re trying to make, the bigger and more sophisticated the machine becomes.

• Two core markets: Robotics and endovascular devices, particularly flexible guidance systems for dexterous control through the body and the “business end” tools that perform procedures, such as biopsy instruments.

• The go-to-market bet: Trio Labs sells parts, not printers. Additive manufacturing systems can cost $100K to $500K and sometimes seven figures, making them a tough sell for an unproven application. Selling parts lets engineers test the value immediately for a few thousand dollars instead.

• Staying in the lane: Adam is deliberate about focus. He’s watched additive manufacturing companies spread themselves across oil and gas, aerospace, defense, and consumer markets, only to become mediocre everywhere. Trio Labs is staying focused on med tech.

Eleven years, one failed company, and a printer the size of a refrigerator later, Adam's build is finally reaching real patients, proof that in hardware, the founders who last are the ones who stay stubbornly focused. Enjoy the conversation.

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This week on NC Tweener Talks, I sit down with Nick Genty, co-founder and CEO of AgEye Technologies, a Raleigh company building robotics and AI software for indoor farms. It's the latest in my series on North Carolina companies working at the intersection of hardware and software, following Lucid Bots, Plantd, and Natrx. Nick brings a founder's-eye view of what it actually takes to turn an idea about light and plant biology into a business selling to growers from Nebraska to Qatar. Expect a solid mix of company specifics, how the robotics work, what the data moat looks like, and hard-won go-to-market lessons on finding customers nobody else was looking for.

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Who is Nick?

Nick Genty is the co-founder and CEO of AgEye Technologies, a Raleigh, North Carolina company building robotics and AI software for indoor farms. A Raleigh native, Nick studied general business at East Carolina University before starting his career in IT project management for the North Carolina court system, where he met his longtime collaborator John, a connection that would carry through several ventures over the next two decades. He later joined RPath, an early Triangle startup (later acquired by SAS) that gave him his first real exposure to venture-backed software companies. From there, he co-founded Iconic Solutions, a B2B professional services firm that helped enterprises like Carfax, Harris Teeter, and Live Nation port their businesses to mobile, before steering the company into regulated markets like medical devices and pharma. That work in building IoT and embedded systems for a red-light-therapy hair and skin device is what led Nick and his team to discover the link between hardware, software, and biology that eventually became AgEye.

How We Met

My introduction to AgEye was pure serendipity. On the way to Korean barbecue with a friend, I passed a modest storefront in a Raleigh strip mall and noticed robots and plants through the window. Curious, I walked in, and while Nick wasn't there, a team member explained they were doing indoor farming with AI. Without a business card in hand, I tracked the company down online and reached out cold. I like to call it "invest by walking around," and it's become a running bit on the show: the AgEye team has since moved out of that original space, though Nick notes the old storefront regularly drew confused visitors hoping to get their cell phones repaired.

Highlights

• Two ventures with the same co-founder: Nick met his eventual AgEye co-founder while doing IT project management for the North Carolina court system in 2006–2007. The pair have since launched multiple companies together, including Iconic Solutions and AgEye.

• From services to product: Iconic Solutions began as a mobile-development shop serving companies like Carfax, Harris Teeter, and Live Nation before moving into regulated industries such as medical devices and pharma, including IoT development for an FDA-track red-light-therapy hair and skin device.

• The pivot to agriculture: The red-light-therapy work showed the team how environmental variables like light could influence biology. Faced with a long and expensive FDA pathway, they searched for a non-regulated biological system where they could apply the same thinking and landed on indoor farming.

• Ahead of the market, twice: AgEye’s early customers were still running farms on spreadsheets, pushing the company to build a full stack of sensors and software instead of just a data layer. A few years later, edge AI hardware like the NVIDIA Jetson, alongside AgEye joining the NVIDIA Inception program in 2019, made it possible to run AI models directly on low-power devices in the field.

• Reddit as a sales channel: Because head growers and farm owner-operators had little presence on LinkedIn, AgEye found some of its earliest customers by actively participating in grower discussions on Reddit.

• The cannabis pivot, twice: AgEye initially expected to focus entirely on cannabis and still holds a full North Carolina hemp-growing license. But state-by-state licensing chaos undermined that market, pushing the company toward leafy greens, tomatoes, and strawberries. Nick credits cannabis growers’ early investment in LED lighting and sensors with helping make today’s indoor-ag hardware affordable.

• Why indoor farms exist even in “good” growing regions: Roughly 80–85% of U.S. leafy greens come from Salinas Valley or Arizona, regions vulnerable to drought and water restrictions. At the same time, food deserts for produce like basil can persist even in agricultural states such as North Carolina.

• The moat is built linearly: Nick sees AgEye’s combination of hardware and proprietary plant data as a moat competitors can’t simply reverse-engineer: “someone couldn’t just look at what you’ve done and really ascertain how you got there and decode it.”

• $5M raised, mostly through corporate VCs: After struggling to excite RTP’s SaaS- and pharma-heavy investor base, AgEye found its fundraising breakthrough through corporate venture arms, including Dutch agricultural giant Nurion and German filtration company Mann+Hummel, whose businesses had direct strategic ties to indoor farming. Nick estimates 95% of AgEye’s investors and customers came through warm introductions.

• What’s next: AgEye has signed two large-scale distributor contracts and a new Middle East partnership in Qatar, opening a hospitality and food-and-beverage segment centered on compact, self-contained farms for restaurants and resorts.

As I like to put it, this is the kind of company sitting right in your own backyard, so keep your eyes open on your next lunch walk. Enjoy the conversation.

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Episode 7

Redacted is the show that doesn't clean things up before hitting record. Episode 8 is almost entirely show-and-tell: Taylor demos the agent system now running Offline's lead gen and HubSpot cleanup on autopilot, and David walks through a redesigned mobile app, a new email system, and a surprisingly candid hour-by-hour accounting of what AI-assi…

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Editorial note: This article is a continuing series we have around the post-AI challenges pre-AI companies are facing. If you want to catch up on the series, here’s the previous articles in this series:

• 2/10/26 - The Tweener Founder Bat Phone is Ringing off the Hook here.

• 4/30/26 - Competitive Moats in the AI Era (from RDSW) here.

• 5/9/26 - The Hardest Thi…

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This week we continue our series on North Carolina startups solving hard physical-world problems with Andrew Ashur, co-founder and CEO of Lucid Bots, a Charlotte-based Series B company building drones and robots that clean, paint, and coat buildings. It’s a company-heavy conversation where Andrew walks through the mechanics of flying a tethered, industrial-scale drone and the economics of a robots-as-a-service business, but it’s threaded with founder lessons on storytelling, hiring, and fundraising that any early-stage founder will recognize.

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Who is Andrew?

Andrew Ashur is co-founder and CEO of Lucid Bots, a Charlotte-based robotics company building drones and robots that automate cleaning, painting, and coating for the built environment. He started the company as a junior at Davidson College, where he was studying economics and Spanish, after watching a window-washing crew get slammed against a building in high winds. He graduated a year early to run Lucid Bots full time, and the company has since raised more than $30 million in venture capital, deployed over 600 units across 44 states and five countries, and grown to a team of 75. Andrew is a first-time founder, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, an alum of Y Combinator, and now serves as Davidson College's Innovator-in-Residence.

Highlights

• The origin story: Andrew was a junior at Davidson College studying economics and Spanish when he watched window washers get slammed against a building in high winds and asked the obvious question: how do we make this safer?

• The stakes: “Somebody dies every 4 days in our country cleaning a building,” roughly 80 people a year in the U.S. alone, doing work Andrew calls less advanced than the technology that gets people to space.

• Real estate as the prize: Real estate is the largest asset class in the world, worth more than all stock and bond markets combined, and none of it holds its value without maintenance.

• The duct-tape prototype: The first version was a DJI drone zip-tied to a pressure washer. “It looked terrible. It didn’t really work... but we saw the potential of it.”

• A Christmas gift that changed everything: When their last DJI drone broke two days before Christmas, Andrew’s uncle gave him the book DIY Drones with Arduino, which sparked the decision to start building drones in-house in 2019.

• Hardware as a moat: Lucid Bots is now on version 16 of its hardware and well over 1,000 software revisions. “Hardware done right is where the moat still exists.”

• The numbers: $30M+ raised, 600+ units deployed, a team of 75, and customers in 44 states and five countries, with Canada as the biggest market outside the U.S.

• The ROI: Customers report at least 2x efficiency gains and up to 8x faster completion on large industrial jobs like water towers compared with a traditional boom lift.

• Two ways to buy: Customers can either purchase robots outright or use “Lucid Refresh,” a 24-month robots-as-a-service subscription that swaps in the latest hardware at renewal.

• Physical GDP vs. venture dollars: Roughly 85% of global GDP sits in the physical world and only 15% is digital, yet venture capital has flowed disproportionately into software.

• 1,000 pitches: Andrew estimates he pitched roughly 1,000 times before closing the company’s Series B. “Almost half my time was spent fundraising.”

Andrew's closing bet: the biggest opportunity of this generation isn't another app; it's giving software and AI a physical body. Enjoy the conversation.

Where to Watch/Listen:

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📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

This week's episode is part of an ongoing series spotlighting North Carolina companies that aren't your typical software startups. I sit down with Huade Tan of Plantd, a materials company that takes carbon out of the atmosphere and turns it into structural building panels that are grown, harvested, and pressed entirely in North Carolina. The conversation leans heavily technical and founder-lesson-heavy rather than company-pitch-heavy: expect plant science, hardware iteration, and a lot of SpaceX-honed engineering philosophy.

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Who is Huade?

Huade Tan is the co-founder and CTO of Plantd, a North Carolina materials company that captures carbon by growing a perennial grass and converting it into structural building panels. Before Plantd, Huade spent years at SpaceX building environmental control and life support systems for the Crew Dragon spacecraft, working on cargo and crew systems for missions to the International Space Station. He studied mechanical engineering as an undergraduate at Boston University, did a stint in computational optimization at Notre Dame, and began a PhD program at Columbia before deciding to leave academia for SpaceX. He co-founded Plantd with Nathan, his SpaceX colleague, after the two relocated to North Carolina in 2019 and formally launched the company in 2021.

Highlights

• Two former SpaceX engineers left Los Angeles to pursue carbon capture and instead invented a process that turns a perennial plant into a plywood-like structural panel manufactured entirely in North Carolina.

• Huade compares SpaceX’s 10-cubic-meter Crew Dragon life-support capsule to Earth because both are closed-loop systems with no external supply pipeline except incoming solar radiation.

• Plantd rejected carbon credits as its core business model and instead chose to build cost-competitive construction materials that naturally sequester carbon while delivering customer value.

• Plantd’s feedstock is a sterile perennial grass that produces no seeds and is propagated entirely through cloning, with root systems that regrow for decades without replanting.

• The crop survived an early 2026 drought and continued growing without any irrigation.

• The manufacturing process converts harvested grass into structural panels by shredding the fibers, drying them to a precise moisture level, blending them with 4 to 6% PMDI resin, and pressing them under heat and pressure within a matter of hours.

• Plantd built a 15-foot-wide, 70-foot-long press capable of producing up to 250,000 structural panels annually. It is the first of its kind built by a U.S. company outside two German manufacturers and the first domestic attempt since the 1960s or 1970s.

• Industry experts said building the press was impossible, but Plantd says it has successfully demonstrated otherwise.

• Plantd has raised $40 million to $45 million from seed funding through its Series B to build its farms, manufacturing process, supply chain, and production equipment.

• In 2024, D.R. Horton agreed to purchase 10 million Plantd panels, enough for approximately 90,000 homes while sequestering an estimated 165,000 metric tons of CO₂.

• Plantd applies SpaceX’s five-step engineering framework: make the requirements less dumb, delete the part if possible, improve the part if necessary, increase production takt time, and then automate. The company says it is currently focused on the final two steps.

I feel like I learn about 50 new things every time I talk to Huade and the Plantd team, and this conversation makes it easy to see why. Enjoy the conversation.

Where to Watch/Listen:

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📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

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Episode 7

Redacted is the show that doesn't clean things up before hitting record. Redacted's first-ever guest is Ben Pope, who spent five years in marketing at Levitate before pivoting a month ago to lead the company's brand-new AI Solutions business unit. This one leans heavy on show-and-tell: Ben screen-shares a lead-scoring tool he built solo with Cl…

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This episode kicks off a new North Carolina Tweener Talks series spotlighting the state's under-the-radar physical manufacturing companies, the ones that need serious engineering talent, a coastline or mountains (or farmland!) nearby, and room to build.

First up is Natrx, a Tweener Fund portfolio company that manufactures concrete structures designed to work with natural water systems rather than simply and disruptively block them. It's a deep company-and-technology episode, with Tad walking through props on screen, because the product has more of a physicality to it than we see in the software world.

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Who is Tad?

Tad Schwendler is the COO of Natrx, a North Carolina-based coastal engineering and manufacturing company and a Tweener Fund portfolio company. Tad grew up in the Atlanta area and first came to the Triangle for business school at Duke, then moved back to the region permanently in 2007. Most of his career before Natrx was in corporate development; strategic finance, M&A, and business development on the buy side for large corporate organizations, most recently leading corporate development at MaxPoint prior to its acquisition. He got involved with Natrx as a consultant during the company's earliest days, helping build out its business model, financial projections, and early partnerships, before joining full-time as part of the leadership team. At Natrx, he leads finance and is deeply involved in strategy, capital raising, and the operations of the company's manufacturing facility in Louisiana. He studied economics at Tulane, but has a long-standing personal interest in marine science and ecology that made the Natrx mission, and its Louisiana roots, a natural fit.

Highlights

• The founding story runs through two engineering cultures: Natrx traces back to two coastal engineers who met doing oyster reef restoration in LSU’s bioagricultural engineering program, growing frustrated with traditional techniques built to “stop nature” and “keep it out.” One of them followed his professor to NC State for a PhD, where he met co-founders with software and digital backgrounds. That pairing became Natrx, founded in late 2018.

• “Dry forming” flips concrete manufacturing on its head: Instead of mixing a wet slurry, Natrx starts with dry material and uses medical-dosing-style pumps to inject moisture at precise points, guided entirely by digital instructions sent from the cloud.

• The voxel: Each injection point creates a roughly 1.5–2 inch reaction node called a voxel. As voxels fuse together, they form the finished unit, enabling far more complexity and void space than any mold, form, or extrusion printer could produce.

• Every unit is a little different: The injection process introduces natural variation into each piece. As Tad explained, “every unit has minor variations... that’s a natural outcome of the production process.” Balancing that variability with customers’ preference for standardized, repeatable products is an ongoing business challenge.

• Roughness is the whole point: The textured, organic-looking surface is functional rather than cosmetic. It slows water energy through friction, creates habitat for organisms at the base of the food chain, and offers a more natural aesthetic than piles of rock or standard precast concrete.

• Real scale, real weight: Standard units are roughly 3-foot cubes, weighing just under 2,000 lbs before hydration and up to around 4,000 lbs after. The coral restoration units built for the Waikiki Beach project weigh approximately 12,000 lbs each.

• The numbers: Natrx has completed 85+ physical deployments spanning Maryland to Texas, placed more than 100,000 physical units, employs approximately 30 people, including an 18-person core team and an 8 to 10 person manufacturing crew, has grown at roughly 80% revenue CAGR, and projects mid-to-upper single-digit millions in revenue this year.

• Manufacturing is deliberately centralized for now: Natrx originally envisioned a network of small manufacturing nodes along the coast but chose to mature its single Louisiana facility before expanding. Units are shipped via flatbed truck or, in Louisiana, directly from the dock by barge to destinations such as Texas and Florida.

• Built to disappear: Without rebar, the usual culprit when marine concrete breaks down, units are designed to blend into their environment over time as sediment accumulates and marine life grows. On the Hawaii coral restoration project, live coral is planted directly into built-in features so installations can eventually become visually indistinguishable from natural reef.

• What’s next: Natrx is preparing to raise a Series A to accelerate growth, recently hired its first senior sales leader, and sees its addressable market expanding beyond coastal restoration to any land-water interface, including data center infrastructure.

As Tad put it, Natrx is trying to stay focused on the core rather than chase every new application that comes calling, and that discipline is part of what's made this one of the more capital-efficient manufacturing startups in the portfolio. Enjoy the conversation.

Where to Watch/Listen:

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📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

Before we jump in, shout out to our sponsors! 👇 None of this would be possible without them 💪🏻

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🦞 Tweener Claw Recap! 🦞

Our second Triangle OpenClaw meetup brought together builders and security folks for three talks on making agents reliable, hardening them against attacks, and tracking the ecosystem’s fast (and bumpy) growth.

Speakers:

• Scot Wingo opened with an ecosystem update, covering the project’s explosive growth, a rough patch of malicious skills and CVEs, and a move toward a leaner, more vetted core going forward. He also noted big tech moving in alongside rivals, and wrapped up with an open discussion on where the ecosystem is headed. Watch Here

• Robbie Allen shared a framework for building production-grade agents, explaining how to turn repeatable work into reusable skills, add supervisor agents that catch drift before it becomes a problem, and use a second model as a critic before shipping anything. Watch Here

• Ryan Eade gave a talk making the case that OpenClaw is really remote code execution, not just a chatbot, and pointing to over 100,000 exposed instances worldwide. He broke down the three ways you get owned and shared fixes like binding to localhost, using scoped keys, and requiring human approval before irreversible actions. Watch Here

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📅 Events Around the State

An exciting couple months across NC. Here’s what’s on our radar:

• July 17 - 18 — OSPREY X

• July 20 — Micro Grant Workshop

• July 21 — First Flight “Itineraries”

• July 23 — Dinner with an Entrepreneur

• July 27 - 28 — Future Grid 26

• August 4 -5 — Triangle Content Creators Meetup

• August 20 — NC State Innovation and Entrepreneurship Open House

• August 27 – 28 — ConvergeSouth

• September 10 — 4th Annual Wilmington INVESTOR BUZZ IN

• September 29 — Ocean Innovation Conference
  

🔍 What Stuck With Us This Week

The AI Wrapper is Dead

NFX General Partner Pete Flint argues that vertical integration and not simple ChatGPT wrappers is what’s actually surviving into 2026. A few things that stuck with us:

• The “wrapper generation” (Jasper and friends) got wiped out once frontier labs started productizing their own models.

• Winners like Blitzy, EvenUp, and Tomo built AI as a service, not a feature and now they own the whole workflow, not just the model call.

• Three verticalization playbooks worth stealing: out-execute raw intelligence, remake the business around automation, and build a system of record before turning it into a system of action.

  👉🏻 Check out The AI Wrapper is Dead here!

Harvey’s $100M Quarter

Guillermo Flor breaks down how Harvey added $100M in net-new ARR in a single quarter without growing its sales team. A few things that stuck with us:

• They rebuilt every feature as a tool their agents could call, so the agents started surfacing capabilities users never found on their own.

• That agent-led product loop drove expansion revenue most Series D startups don’t hit in a full year.

• Result: 53% DAU/MAU and an $11B valuation, built on product architecture instead of GTM headcount.

  👉🏻 Check out Harvey’s $100M Quarter here!

The SaaS Apocalypse, According to Databricks

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says the barriers that used to protect software incumbents have collapsed. A few things that stuck with us:

• Over 81% of databases launched on Databricks are now created by autonomous agents, not humans.

• AI has made writing software 10x faster, letting new entrants disrupt markets old moats used to protect.

• His survival strategy: “advisor architectures” that lean on cheap open-source models for basic tasks and save the expensive frontier models for when teams get stuck.

  👉🏻 Check out The SaaS Apocalypse, According to Databricks here!

Building a Startup Content Engine in 30 Days

Zach Chmael’s playbook for founders starting a content engine from zero — no calendar required on day one. A few things that stuck with us:

• Start with a belief and an enemy, not a topic list, a claim gives the market something to react to.

• Build five “banks” first (customer language, proof, POV, objections, taste) before writing a single post.

• The engine only works if it has a real learning loop, so, what traveled, what sales reused, what should die.

  👉🏻 Check out Building a Startup Content Engine in 30 Days here!

The Case for VC in the Age of Superintelligence

NFX’s Omri Drory argues early-stage investing is society’s “targeting system” for where superintelligence gets pointed first. A few things that stuck with us:

• Aiming has to happen before AGI arrives, proprietary data, regulatory position, and trust take years to build and can’t be conjured after the fact.

• Abundance doesn’t erase scarcity, it relocates it to networks, proprietary data, regulatory position, trust, and the irreducibly human.

• His bet: venture gets stronger through the transition to superintelligence, not weaker, for investors who back the right moats early.

  👉🏻 Check out The Case for VC in the Age of Superintelligence here!

Everything is Recorded Now

A16z’s David Haber on the taboo shift already underway inside companies: most work conversations are being recorded by default. A few things that stuck with us:

• Onboarding AI works like onboarding a new hire because it learns culture and edge cases by sitting in meetings, not reading the wiki.

• “Verbal culture” companies (Shopify, OpenAI) stand to gain the most once AI can attend every meeting and synthesize what happened.

• The default is flipping from “opt in to recording” to “assume you’re being recorded”, expect real governance fights over what counts sensitive.

  👉🏻 Check out Everything is Recorded Now here!

🗺️ Tweener News: Q2 Goes Statewide 🗺️

We just closed the books on Q2, and it’s our best proof yet that the “Triangle, Charlotte, Wilmington, Triad, Mountains, and beyond” promise from Q1 is real:

• $475K invested across 12 total investments: 8 new, 4 follow-ons

• New checks landed in Charlotte, Raleigh, Wilmington, Durham, Cary, and Weaverville (a small mountain town west of Asheville)

• We’re approaching $12M invested across 170+ companies, holding a ~10% failure rate which is far below traditional VC benchmarks

• Pre-Tweener deal flow is surging, driven by the AI reset: it’s never been cheaper to get an early product built, which means more very-early-stage founders in the pipeline than ever

• M&A is warming back up after a quiet late 2025; the Validic exit closed and distributed, with a couple more deals in process

• We also launched a new podcast this quarter: Redacted, a practitioner-focused show on AI automation in startups hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner of Offline

👉 Full Q2 breakdown (new investments, portfolio add-ons, and more): NC Tweener Fund Q2 Update

Final Thoughts

Statewide deal flow, an AI-fueled wave of new founders, and a full calendar of ways to plug in 👀 the ecosystem's growing in every direction at once.

In this episode, we’ve got something special for you! The 8 Stages of the AI-ification Engine 👀

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Episode 6

Redacted is the show that doesn't clean things up before hitting record. This episode is heavier on company-talk than founder-lessons, but the lessons are baked into the build. David walks through the "AI-ification engine" and demos Offline's new Cli…

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At the June 10th TweenerClaw meetup in Research Triangle Park, Ryan Eade gave a focused, practitioner-level talk on something most of us avoid: securing our OpenClaw instances. Rather than covering what to build with OpenClaw (everyone already has a list), Ryan walked through the three main attack vectors he's seen in the wild and the concrete steps to close each one. Short, tight, and actionable, this one's worth your time if you have OpenClaw running anywhere.

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Loving our content? It wouldn’t be possible without our amazing sponsors and our paid subscribers, so THANK YOU!

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Summary

Ryan Eade is the Chief Product & Technology Officer at PtEverywhere and a regular in the Triangle's OpenClaw community. At the June TweenerClaw meetup, he gave a candid talk on the security gaps he's encountered and had to fix while running OpenClaw in production. The talk covers three threat vectors: leaving your instance exposed on an open port, installing unvetted third-party skills (36% of early skills carried prompt injection), and prompt injection delivered through external content like X posts and README files. Ryan closes with a practical defense framework built around one memorable mental model, to treat OpenClaw like staff, not software, with specific guidance on API key hygiene, one-time credit cards, separate email accounts, upgrade cadence, and why your system prompts matter more than your session instructions.

Stick around for the highlights below. 👇

Highlights

• The false comfort of “local only”: Most people assume that running OpenClaw on a home network means security isn’t a concern. Ryan’s first point is that this is wrong. OpenClaw enables remote code execution and likely has access to your API keys, personal files, and credentials, regardless of where it’s hosted.

• Check port 18789 immediately: Run curl against your OpenClaw instance on port 18789. If you get a response, you’re running a very old version with full unauthenticated access to your machine. This is the most urgent security check to perform.

• Know the critical upgrade windows: Versions from late January exposed port 18789 with unauthenticated remote code execution. Versions before the March 12 release contained a gateway key bypass vulnerability. The April 5 release introduced a large batch of security fixes. If you’re running a version older than April, you should assume you’re exposed and upgrade.

• Docker doesn’t automatically make you safer: Running OpenClaw in Docker can bypass your local machine’s firewall protections. What feels like an extra security layer may actually increase your exposure.

• Treat every third-party skill as untrusted: At one point, 36% of early OpenClaw skills contained prompt injection. Although submissions are now scanned, Ryan recommends always pulling the GitHub repository, reviewing the code yourself, and treating every third-party skill as untrusted until you’ve verified it.

• Prompt injection from the web is a real attack vector: If OpenClaw reads content from X, email, GitHub, or other external sources, any of that content can inject instructions into your agent. GitHub README files are a known vector. A typical attack chain is: hidden instructions embedded in a README → the agent writes a local file → that file creates a backdoor → the attacker gains persistent access → you only notice when your API bill spikes.

• Session instructions can disappear mid-run: As the context window fills up, OpenClaw compresses conversation history, and session-level instructions can silently be dropped. Put critical security guardrails in the system prompt, not session instructions, since system prompts persist.

• Think of AI agents as staff, not software: Ryan’s mental model is to give agents only the access they need. Just as you wouldn’t hand a new employee your personal credit card, don’t give OpenClaw unrestricted access. Use dedicated email accounts, scoped API keys with minimum permissions, and one-time-use or limited virtual credit cards for purchasing tasks.

• Build human approval gates into risky actions: Require explicit confirmation before destructive operations like deleting files, sending emails, or modifying data. Ryan routes these actions into dedicated Slack channels where OpenClaw proposes the action and waits for a human “yes” before proceeding. This extra approval layer has caught the most mistakes.

• Expect every upgrade to break something and upgrade anyway: Ryan says every OpenClaw upgrade has required a couple of hours of cleanup. He budgets for that maintenance because the alternative is running software with known vulnerabilities on a machine that holds API keys, credentials, and sensitive data.

Security's not the fun part, but Ryan makes a pretty convincing case that it's the part that keeps everything else running. Go check that port, and enjoy the talk.

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As we put it on our Q2 LP call, describing what we’re looking for as the map expands:

“We’re looking for companies that have one of a few competitive moats, and the best are either existing proprietary data or the ability to build a set of proprietary data over time. That’s kind of the best moat right now.”

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Thank You, LPs 🙌

Before we jump into the recap: thank you to our investors! This milestone doesn’t happen without you. With your support: We’re approaching $12M invested across 170+ companies, while maintaining a ~10% failure rate, far below traditional VC benchmarks

Always open for new investors/LPs!

• Must be an accredited investor - SEC rule, not ours

• 1yr commitment, $30,000 for the year or $7,500/Q

• 1% management fee, 20% carry, and a small AngelList administrative fee

For more details - visit www.tweenerfund.com where you can see our pitch and hit the invest button to get started!

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Q2 NC Tweener Fund Investment Highlights

Our Tweener Fund Q2 2026 Snapshot:

• $475K invested

• 12 total investments

  • 8 new

  • 4 follow-ons

• 4 Tweener / 8 Pre-Tweener

What stood out this quarter?

1. Statewide deal flow is already diversifying

New checks went out well beyond the Triangle this quarter. Charlotte, Wilmington, and Weaverville (Mountains) joined the usual Raleigh/Durham/Cary mix. Early proof the NC IDEA partnership is doing what we hoped.

2. Pre-tweener deal flow is surging, driven by the AI reset

The 2024/25 AI wave changed how cheap it is to get an early product built, which means we’re seeing more very-early-stage companies than ever. We’re staying disciplined about it and leaning into founders with real distribution chops and proprietary data, not just a fast MVP.

3. M&A is warming back up

The Validic exit closed and distributed earlier this year, and we’ve got a couple more deals in process we’ll share once they’re done. Cyclical, but trending the right direction after a quiet late-2025.

Introducing our Q2 Fresh New Investments!

In Q2, we’re ex

• Druid (PT) - Modern IoT solutions for farmers. (Charlotte)

• Pellucid Network (PT) - AI solutions marketplace for enterprises and government. (Raleigh)

• RCOAST (PT) - Coastal erosion tracking and remediation using drone data and AI. (Wilmington)

• AIXI (PT) - Proprietary dataset of aviation repair parts. (Raleigh)

• RoundUp (PT) - Automatic charitable giving through credit card round-ups. (Durham)

• Smart Family Tech, Inc. (T) - Fintech for complex family banking situations. (Charlotte)

• Amissa (PT) - Clinical data platform for women’s menopause care. (Charlotte)

• NextPower360 (PT) - DC power generator eliminating AC-DC conversion losses. (Weaverville)

Existing Investment add-ons

Also, Tweener Fund made additional investments in 4 portfolio companies:

Details:

• ReFiBuy (T) - Product catalog optimization for AI-driven shopping. (Raleigh, refibuy.ai)

• OOGA Technologies (T) - Second Q/Q investment, split across a SAFE. (Cary, oogatechnologies.com)

• Protect3D (PT) - 3D-printed custom orthoses via iPhone scanning. (Durham, protect3d.io)

• HighArc (T) - AI solutions for builders. (Durham, higharc.com)

Q2 Tweener Events

Q2 is always our busiest event season, and this one didn't disappoint, seven events in the quarter!

[REDACTED] Launched!

Continuing on our mission to bring NC’s best builders content they can’t get anywhere else that’s hyper-local, we launched a new podcast this quarter: Redacted. Redacted is a practitioner-focused show on AI automation in startups, with hosts David Shaner and Taylor Cotner of Offline. If you're curious what it actually looks like when founders put AI agents to work day-to-day, it's worth a listen.

It’s best viewed on YouTube to fully see the examples (make sure to subscribe!)

But also available on all audio podcast players through Tweener Talks!

PLUS we have a new spot for show notes and files discussed in the episode. Check it out: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Become a Sponsor

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Our audience is made up of NC founders and operators, primarily at startups doing over $1M/year and many much larger. When a company hits Tweener status, they’ve got real traction, funding (usually), a growing team, and momentum.

Thanks to strong demand, we’re upgrading our sponsorship opportunities across Tweener Times, Tweener Talks, and more.

If you’re looking to connect with this high-impact community, now’s the time. Send us a message or an email to contact@tweenerfund.com.

Let’s build together!

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🙌 Thank You!

Instead of a traditional interview, we're sharing a live talk delivered by Robbie Allen, who is a General Partner at NC Tweener Fund and Managing Director of Automated Consulting Group, at the June 10th Tweener Club meetup in Research Triangle Park. Robbie has spent the last year and a half deploying AI agents inside real mid-market companies, and he came armed with three lessons he's learned in just the last 60 days. Less theory, more field report, and a few things that might surprise you.

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And special thanks to our friends at Walk West for partnering with us to produce this pod!

Summary

Robbie Allen, the Founder and Managing Director of Automated Consulting Group and General Partner at NC Tweener Fund, gave a live talk at the June 10th Tweener Club meetup in Research Triangle Park. In it, he shares three lessons from 60 days of building and running AI agents in production with real clients across the Triangle. The talk covers skill building (mapping your own workflows into reusable AI packages), agent monitoring (why 3–5 of his 25 agents fail on any given day and how he built a monitor agent to catch it), and using LLMs to check each other's work (his "Codex Opinion" and "Gemini Opinion" skills, and an LLM Council that synthesizes outputs from multiple models). Robbie is about as far out on the cutting edge of real-world agent deployment as anyone in the Triangle, and he's sharing what's actually working, what keeps breaking, and what he'd wire in from the start.

Stick around for the highlights below. 👇

Highlights

• “The sawdust of business”: Robbie’s term for meeting transcripts: raw, unstructured data that reveals how a company actually thinks and operates. He argues that as AI approaches superhuman capability, organizations will need this context to train and ground models, yet most companies aren’t systematically collecting it.

• Skills as reusable modules: He treats AI skills like software packages: reusable blocks of functionality that can contain prompts, tools, or both. His approach is to map a human workflow and then build skills to automate each step.

• A practical skills pipeline: Robbie created a three-skill workflow for meeting follow-up:

  • Detect new Otter transcripts

  • Extract action items

  • Run a weekly review of unfinished tasks
    The entire system uses composable skills rather than custom-built software.

• Agent reliability remains a challenge: In his setup of 25 agents, 3–5 fail every day, resulting in a 12–20% daily failure rate. Common causes include API outages, LinkedIn scraping restrictions, and dependency failures. He argues that claims of running hundreds of agents without a support team are unrealistic.

• “Build costs are down, support costs aren’t”: AI has dramatically reduced development costs, but maintenance remains expensive. Non-deterministic systems introduce new forms of brittleness, making operational support just as important as ever.

• Monitor agents need monitors: To manage failures, Robbie built a 26th agent dedicated to monitoring the other 25. His takeaway: observability should be designed in from day one, with comprehensive logging across the system.

• “Einstein and Feynman” multi-LLM strategy: Robbie compares using multiple AI models to consulting multiple brilliant scientists. He:

  • Built a “Codex Opinion” skill to critique Claude Code sessions

  • Added a “Gemini Opinion” skill for additional perspectives

  • Created an “LLM Council” that runs Sonnet, Gemini, and Codex in parallel, with a leader model synthesizing the results
    He reports that the additional models consistently uncover blind spots.

• Skills marketplace security is unresolved: Robbie highlights a largely overlooked risk: downloaded skills are effectively third-party code running in your environment. He expects enterprise security teams to scrutinize this area heavily in the coming years.

• Microsoft Copilot skepticism: Based on experience with Microsoft-centric clients, Robbie believes Copilot’s agent environment still lags behind expectations despite Microsoft’s early access to OpenAI models. He remains cautious about announcements until features reach general availability (GA).

Every practitioner has lessons they've learned the hard way. Robbie's just willing to share his before the bruises fade. Enjoy the conversation.

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

We have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!)

📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.