Funding for North Carolina entrepreneurs, especially those in the Triangle, is on the rise. The Council for Entrepreneurial Development released its midyear report at last month’s Tech Venture Conference in Raleigh. In the first six months of this year, 85 companies raised about $427 million from 90 investors, a 70% increase over the same period in 2014. Life-sciences companies led with 26 transactions worth more than $268 million, more than a sevenfold increase from last year. Capital raised by technology companies declined 37%. Most funding came from the Northeast and California, but 19 N.C. groups have stakes, including Durham-based Intersouth Partners and Raleigh-based Triangle Capital Corp.
Big winners include:
• Novan Therapeutics, a Durham company developing a treatment for acne; $39 million
• nCino in Wilmington, which sells a cloud-based system to help banks make loans more efficiently; $29 million
• Nomacorc, the world’s largest producer of synthetic wine corks, based in Zebulon; $22 million
• Samanage, a business-software company that moved its headquarters to Cary from Israel last year; $16 million
At the conference, California-based Sequoia Capital partner Jim Goetz called the Triangle the second-most important U.S. region for innovation:
“You are truly world class and superior in so many ways to what we have in the Valley. Embrace and embellish that rather than try to emulate the practices of Silicon Valley.”