Triangle Tweener Fund announces the addition of Robbie Allen as General Partner and 14 Q2 investments.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK
The Triangle Tweener Fund (Tweener Fund) is excited to announce the addition of Robbie Allen as General Partner.
“I’ve known Robbie for 15+ years and really enjoyed working with him at Automated Insights while on the board. I’m excited to have him roll up his sleeves and help us take the Tweener Fund to the next level.”, said Scot Wingo, Tweener Fund GP.
“Scot’s laid an incredible foundation to support the local startup ecosystem, first with the Triangle Tweener List and now the Tweener Fund. I couldn’t be more thrilled to help grow the Tweener Fund as I move from a Founding Funder to GP.”, said Robbie Allen, serial entrepreneur, and new Tweener Fund GP.
The addition of Robbie Allen will enable the Tweener Fund to recruit more investors, track more potential investments, and build out a technology infrastructure using Robbie’s extensive background in software development and AI/ML.
Robbie is a serial entrepreneur and has been an active member of the Triangle startup community for over 15 years. He successfully founded, grew, and sold Automated Insights. He then co-founded Infinia ML with a group of data scientists from Duke. During his tenure as CEO, Robbie’s companies have been named “Best Places to Work” in the region six times. Before starting his first company, Robbie worked for 13 years at Cisco where he was a Distinguished Engineer. Robbie earned masters in Engineering Management and Civil Engineering from MIT. He earned his bachelors in Computer Science from ECU. Robbie has six patents and has authored eight books.
Triangle Tweener Fund Q2 Portfolio
Additionally, the Tweener Fund is excited to welcome 14 new investments into the portfolio, representing over $800,000 invested in the quarter. This brings the total to 25 portfolio companies and over $1.4m invested since the fund launched Jan 1, 2022.
Here are the Q2 new portfolio companies (in order of investment):
- ArenaCX (Tweener)- ArenaCX is a spin-out of Bandwidth/Republic Wireless. Led by CEO Alan Pendleton, they have created software and a marketplace that helps companies manage their outsourced call center acquisition, procurement, and ongoing management.
- Offline Media (Tweener)- Offline Media has created a hyper-local two-sided marketplace. On one side are millennials and GenZ consumers looking to have new local, exclusive, curated experiences and perks. On the other side of the marketplace are local merchants (restaurants, etc.) looking to meet this coveted demographic and expose them to their offerings. The Offline Media CEO is David Shaner.
- ChekHub (Tweener) – Founded by Jon Trout based on his experience helping Google rollout their fiber, ChekHub provides companies with w2/1099 field operations staff software to manage three components of that complex business operation. 1. Recruitment, training, deployment, and measurement of field operators. 2. Asset tracking 3. Install and support/maintenance ticket tracking. While there are systems that do each of these, nobody has put them together in one system for this vertical.
- Convoy (pre-tweener) – Founded by serial entrepreneur Yasin Abbak, Convoy was founded based on Yasin’s personal experience watching his father operate a small business. Convoy seeks to bring modern procurement technology and leverage to small businesses. Their first vertical solution is group buying in the dental segment.
- RepVue (Tweener) – Founded by ChannelAdvisor CRO Ryan Walsh, RepVue has built a two-sided vertical talent marketplace. On one side are individual sales reps that are looking for opportunities that meet their criteria around total comp, base/variable, deal-size, industry, and other factors important to sales reps. Companies looking to expand/upgrade their sales talent are on the other side of the marketplace. Additionally, the companies can get a real-time ‘health of the sales org’ and compare their various ratings to other cohorts.
- Hip Ecommerce (Tweener)- Collectibles are a > $400b market that is underserved by legacy marketplaces like eBay. Founded by collectible enthusiast and serial entrepreneur Mark Rosenberg, Hip Ecommerce operates vertical collectible marketplaces (Stamps, postcards, and comics) that have a deep vertical experience for the collector in each category. For example, comic collectors frequently are looking for a specific range of CGC grades and HipComics allows you to search and buy that way.
- Pattern Health (Tweener)- Led by Ed Barber and Tim Horan, Pattern Health is a HealthTech company that accelerates digital health innovation. They do this by taking electronic records, clinical data and other critical health data that is hard to access, aggregating it and making it available to researchers, clinical organizations, and others through a set of microservices/APIs. Think of Pattern Health as Twilio/Stripe for healthcare data. Pattern Health had a busy Q – Tweener Fund invested in a convertible note and a priced round with a sidecar SPV for interested LPs.
- Quinsite (Tweener) – Jeff Maze worked for a consulting firm that built unified analytics for a variety of different healthcare organizations. Quinsite was founded to build a comprehensive healthcare analytics platform that is actionable. For example, are the members of your healthcare provider team meeting the right number of clients and getting great reviews?
- InsightFinder (Tweener) – Today’s SaaS businesses have complex hosting and development environments. Managing that is a role called DevOps (Development and site/app Operations). Companies are investing heavily in this role and tooling. InsightFinder, founded by Helen Gu (national expert in predictive analytics and distributed systems from NCSU) has built the Unified Intelligence Engine (UIE). UIE is an AI system that monitors all a company’s systems, logs and even DevOp engineering communications to then predict problem areas and root cause analysis. Imagine the UIE saying: “Hey Bob, server number 10 is acting wonky, you should look into that before it becomes a problem”. Sounds like sci-fi right? Hope, it’s InsightFinder.
- Viably (Tweener) – Serial entrepreneur Doron Gordon (sold Samanage to SolarWinds) is back with Viably. Viably is a FinTech that provides SMBs a platform for managing their finances. It starts with all-in SMB-friendly banking, insights and to get paid faster.
- Klearly (Tweener) – Klearly was a previous Q1 investment that raised an additional round the Tweener Fund participated in for Q2 and led a SPV vehicle for our interested LPs.
- Diveplane (Tweener) – One of the scariest AI stories is when Google developed an AI that could beat the best humans at the game GO, but they didn’t know how the AI came up with its strategy. Diveplane, led by former Epic Games President, Michael Capps, creates solutions that leverage the latest AI technology, but always making sure there are breadcrumbs to understand what the AI is doing and why.
- Reveal Mobile (Tweener) – Founded by serial entrepreneur, Brian Handly, Reveal Mobile aggregates anonymized mobile device location data to measure, optimize and expand their online->offline advertising. For example, let’s say you have a billboard on Capital Bld. Reveal allows you to measure the number of consumers that drove past that billboard and then measured your store in the last 30 days compared to a period before/after the billboard.