Announcing: NC IDEA and Tweener Fund Partnership
How we got here. What IS changing and what's NOT changing plus how can YOU help...
We started the Tweener List in 2015 with the idea of local founders paying it forward to help amplify and support our local startup ecosystem. Based on the popularity of that list and a grassroots effort to innovate a new way to help fund and support local founders, in 2022 we started the Tweener Fund.
This January we celebrated our 4th anniversary 🎉. In those years we’ve invested over $11.2m across 165 companies and supported by ~200 investors.
Great, but What’s Next?
That’s good, but it’s not enough, it will never be enough. As growth-obsessed founders, Robbie and I are always pushing to do more. We’re always asking the community of founders we support - what else can we do to help you grow your companies, raise capital, provide more resources, enhance the community, etc.
In the last 2 years we’ve launched:
Tweener Times - Founder content (news and long-form pieces) by founders for founders with an operating bent to help our local companies elevate their game.
Tweener Talks - A podcast where we interview local founders and tell their stories, which we think are every bit as interesting and important as the Mark Zuckerberg’s of the World.
Tweener Hub - A centralized, founder-focused area where new-to-the-area founders or OG’s can find a curated (and updated!) calendar of events, list of resources like co-working locations, lawyers, accountants, executive coaches, wealth managers, etc. You name it, we have it!
Tweener Madness - An annual March-Madness inspired geo-focused pitch competition.
What’s Next? 👉 NC Tweener Fund, Powered by NC IDEA!
Our official press release on the big news can be found in NC IDEA’s press release. This $4 million five-year limited partner investment will enable the Fund to broaden its investment mandate to support companies statewide under the rebranded name “NC Tweener Fund, Powered by NC IDEA.”
Fun fact, back in 2009 (17 years ago) Robbie’s first startup, Automated Insights, received a $50k NC IDEA SEED grant that was instrumental in his leaving Cisco to get onto the founder-path! He talks about it in NC IDEA’s Where are They Now Podcast. You could say our roots with NC IDEA go very deep.
🎥 Prefer to watch instead of read? We walk through the full announcement and what it means for founders across North Carolina in this short video:
What’s Going to Change?
Aside from the fancy new brand, name and logo, what’s going to change. We are:
Enlarging our geographic area to all of NC vs. just the Triangle
Thanks to NC IDEA’s financial support, we’re expanding the amount we invest each quarter.
Investing in more companies per quarter (due to the amount we have available increasing)
Opening our doors to more potential investors (LPs) (www.tweenerfund.com for more details if you are accredited)
We now have much more resources to support founders - that means more content, more events, more TweenerHub features - essentially more of what ‘scaling’ (aka Tweener) founders are asking for from us.
As a result of this partnership, we’ll have even more big news coming soon - stay tuned for that!
What’s Not Going to Change?
In our experience, whenever there’s a big step-level change like this, people frequently make assumptions that something IS going to change, but that is incorrect.
Therefore, we want to explicitly state these aspects of NC Tweener Fund are not going to change:
Robbie and Scot are staying in their existing roles at NC Tweener Fund
NC Tweener Fund will continue to be HQ’d in the Triangle (at Raleigh Founded, North St)
The Triangle area of NC will be a large % of our portfolio and investment activity (more details on the regions and a detailed analysis below)
The NC Tweener Fund will continue to co-invest alongside lead Investors, and welcome connections to Funds and advisors/vendors (legal, accounting, etc.) that invest in NC firms.
Why We’re Excited to Expand Our Coverage to ‘All of NC’
There are four strategic reasons we’re excited to expand our coverage to be “All of NC” and in some ways it may have been inevitable:
Over the last four years, we’ve been approached by some great companies across the state that are clear Tweeners, great founders, but alas, outside the Triangle. It’s clear that since COVID and with more virtual co’s, founders are increasingly picking the mountains, the coast, and all the areas in between, not just 1m+ metros.
If the Triangle is underfunded for great startups, the rest-of-NC is super-underfunded. Half our mission is to help founders, this is appealing, we’re ‘needed’ more here. The other half of our mission is to deliver an outsized return for our investors, and for investors this is also appealing, less competition means better entry valuations.
We’ve had many large high-net worth individuals and family offices interested in investing, but previously our geography (Triangle only) didn’t match their focus area/desire to invest in the broader state region.
The Tweener List has ~300 Triangle Tweeners and on the fund side we now have 165 (55%). But, when you peel the onion on those 300 companies, there are large ‘un-investable’ chunks that are either bootstrapped or Series B+ and for a fund with $50k checks, don’t make sense. Take those out and we’re at more like 165/190 or 87% - that’s simultaneously amazing to us that we’ve been able to do this and also concerning. We can do bigger checks which we’re working on, but the idea of the index strategy is to go wide. Said another way - we’re running out of Triangle Tweeners to invest in!
State Regional Venture Analysis
We did an analysis based on Pitchbook data for NC companies that raised pre-seed/seed rounds in the $500k-5m range excluding biotech and service businesses. Here’s the breakdown:
If this NC region trend-mix continues for the next four years, this distribution curve of our next 165 companies will look like this:
The regional data clearly illustrates:
NC Tweener Fund will have 2X the opportunities with the state wide expansion
At the same time, the Triangle will continue to be the largest % of our portfolio company regional mix.
NC enjoys a lot of startup activity West to East and North to South
How CanYou Help?
NC Tweener Fund’s success is driven by our community of LPs, founders, LPs, sponsors, vendor-partners, Tweener Times subscribers, and more!
Investors - Accredited investors interested in investing should review the details on the fund and the pitch at NC Tweener Fund site. If you know a potential LP, advocate for us and let them know what we’re up to.
NC Tweeners - NC has 11m people and is 500mi wide and 187 mi tall. That’s a LOT of area to cover. We need your help uncovering and introducing us to great companies. Tweeners are companies at/or close to $1m/yr in revenue or $80k/m. We don’t invest in service businesses or anything that requires FDA approval (biotech/drug discovery) but everything else is fair game. We’re going to be implementing a sourcing program to reward ‘friends of the fund’ that introduce us to companies we end up investing in. Contact us via contact@tweenerfund.com
Sponsors - Do you want to reach NC’s top startup founders with your message, we have the only multi-modal (content/pod/investment) vehicle for such wide reach to the top startups with capital to invest in your solution. Contact us via sponsor@tweenerfund.com
Paid and free Subscribers - Our content (long-form Tweener Times and the podcast at Tweener Talks) is supported by the community for as low as ~$11/m. If you’re not able to support us with paid sub, you can subscribe for free which helps us as well - subscribe here→ www.tweenertimes.com/subscribe
Spread the word on socials - Help us spread the word about NC Tweener Fund far and wide across the state by following/subscribing on: LinkedIn, YouTube, and X and subscribe to our pod on your favorite player here.
Thanks to NC IDEA and YOU!
Finally, we want to thank the NC IDEA team who worked incredibly hard to make this a reality:
Thom Ruhe (President and CEO)
Ben Redding (CFO)
Andrea Cook (Sr. Director, Marketing)
Barry Ryan (Sr. Director, Partnerships)
and the entire management team and board.
We also want to thank our 165 founders, our ~200 LPs, all our volunteers, sponsors and staff.
Our partnership with NC IDEA is going to accelerate 🚀 the NC Tweener Fund to 2030 and beyond!