WalletFi
WalletFi’s mobile technology allows users to easily identify and move recurring charges, subscriptions, and card-on-file (CoF) payments across cards in their digital wallet. Most importantly, WalletFi reduces customer churn for banks and financial institutions while also increasing Millennial engagement and reinforcing top-of-wallet status. The benefit to consumers is the decreased frustration of having to move recurring payments to other credit cards, when cards are lost, compromised or renewed. WalletFi is uniquely positioned as a B2B2C company providing a simple solution to a pain point for financial institutions and consumers.
Ribometrix
Ribometrix was founded based on technologies and intellectual property from Dr. Kevin Weeks’s lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The company is using a platform technology to discover small molecule drugs that target RNA, creating new avenues to treat human disease. Current RNA therapeutic approaches are largely limited to oligonucleotides used to target secondary structure through base pairing. The SHAPE-MaP technology developed in the lab of Dr. Weeks identifies functional motifs within RNA by mapping the RNA three-dimensional structure. By using three-dimensional RNA structure, the platform enables targeting of thousands of previously undruggable RNAs, expanding the druggable genome by 60-fold.
G1 Therapeutics (exited)
G1 Therapeutics is a clinical-stage company developing small-molecule therapies to address significant unmet needs in oncology. The company is leveraging its proprietary kinase drug discovery platform to advance a pipeline of first-in-class compounds and best-in-class drug candidates.
Bivarus (exited)
Bivarus brings an entirely new science of measuring the patient experience with its patented cloud-based analytics platform. Measuring and improving the patient experience has become one of the top priorities of the healthcare system, and Bivarus is redefining how healthcare leaders capture and operationalize patient-generated insights to improve patient care and service operations. Organizations rely on Bivarus’ real-time analytics platform to gain meaningful insights into the unique drivers impacting the patient experience, buying behavior and provider performance.
Genturi
Genturi. Recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies have revolutionized our ability to discover and analyze specific genetic mutations. While sequencing is sensitive to single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and smaller genetic variants, current approaches are unable to resolve many of the disease-causing structural variants that may be present across an individual genome. With typical read lengths of 150 bases, short-read DNA sequencing platforms provide a very limited view of these structural changes, even with the application of super-computer-scale bioinformatics analysis. So-called ‘long-read’ technologies only analyze on average a few tens of thousands of bases, which is a tiny fraction of intact human chromosomes that range in size from 47 million to 250 million base pairs. Peer-reviewed publications continue to cite the need for a technology capable of extracting and analyzing entire chromosomes to detect the full spectrum of structural variation and transform our understanding of the role it plays in cellular function, disease susceptibility and disease progression.
At the lab bench, simple tasks such as fragment sizing still require the use of cumbersome techniques such as gel electrophoresis. These methods can require large amounts of input sample and, for larger DNA fragments, require run times of a full day or longer. The ability to rapidly analyze DNA from a small number of cells would remove the need for cell culturing and allow the analysis of unculturable samples, such as needle biopsies and primary cells.
Genturi Co-founders, Prof. J. Michael Ramsey and Dr. Laurent Menard at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have dedicated the last decade to developing nanofluidic approaches capable of extracting and analyzing millions of DNA molecules, one-by-one. Genturi’s nanofluidic products will soon enable the rapid analysis of DNA molecules from 100 base pairs up to millions of base pairs, all in a single device.
strideBio
StrideBio, Inc is a gene therapy company focused on creating and developing novel adeno-associated viral (AAV) vector technologies and therapeutics for rare diseases. Our STRucture Inspired DEsign approach holds the potential to generate unique AAV capsids capable of overcoming the challenges of pre-existing neutralizing antibodies and improving gene transfer efficiency in patients. This powerful new approach has broad application, enabling gene addition, gene silencing and gene editing modalities for a wide range of diseases, including rare genetic diseases. StrideBio is headquartered in Durham, NC.