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The Startup That Texts College Dropouts Before They Drop Out
Melvin Hines was one of 68 kids in his high school class to graduate. He built Upswing so the other students - the adult learners, the first-gen, the ones nobody texts back - get a fair shot at the finish line.
Implus
Implus is a Durham, North Carolina-based consumer products company that builds and buys active-lifestyle accessory brands - insoles, performance socks, shoe care, home fitness, recovery tools and outdoor traction gear - and sells them through more than 60,000 retail outlets across roughly 60 countries. Founded in the late 1980s around the Sof Sole insole brand, it grew into a house of around 18 brands including SKLZ, Yaktrax, Balega, Spenco, TriggerPoint, Harbinger and RockTape, largely through a long string of acquisitions under private-equity ownership.
InnovationForce
InnovationForce is a Durham, North Carolina software company behind InnovationWorks, an AI-powered SaaS platform that helps organizations run structured innovation at scale. Founded by CEO Kim Getgen and Harvard Business School professor Dr. Linda Hill, the platform turns organizational documents into sharp problem statements, then matches those challenges against a library of thousands of peer-validated solutions - claiming teams reach decisions roughly 85% faster and complete pilots far sooner. It has become especially well known in the energy and utilities sector, and was named to Fast Company's Top 10 Most Innovative Workplace Solutions of 2024 and Inc.'s Best in Business 2024.
BrightView Technologies
BrightView Technologies is a Durham, North Carolina optical-film company that designs and manufactures micro lens array (MLA) films using a discipline it calls computational optics. By engineering microscopic structures into rolls of film, BrightView gives engineers precise control over how light spreads, hides, brightens, and bends - powering automotive displays, consumer electronics, AR/VR headsets, LiDAR sensors, and LED lighting. The company pairs in-house optical design software with high-volume roll-to-roll production, supplying global manufacturers from a single Research Triangle Park facility.
Folio
Folio is a B2B fintech and procure-to-pay platform built specifically for the hospitality industry, primarily hotels and their restaurants. Often described as the 'Amazon for hotels,' it unifies purchasing, invoice processing, supplier payments, inventory, and expense management into one system, using AI to automate invoice matching and surface savings. Founded in 2023 by two former Plaid colleagues and based in Durham, North Carolina, Folio raised a $14M Series A led by Thrive Capital and Construct Capital in July 2025 and powers hundreds of hotels.
Kate Adamson
Kate Adamson is the CEO and co-founder of Folio, a financial operations platform built for hotels. A former pre-professional ballet dancer who studied engineering at Princeton before switching to economics, she spent five years at Plaid scaling sales and product teams, where she once shipped a Paycheck Protection Program product from idea to market in about eight days. In 2023 she teamed up with Plaid's founding designer Al Hertz to build Folio, which turns the messy world of hotel purchasing, invoices, and payments into one procure-to-pay platform. Folio won the E20X Judge's Choice Award at HITEC 2024 and raised a $14M Series A led by Thrive Capital and Construct Capital in July 2025.
Heather Havrilesky
Heather Havrilesky is an American advice columnist, culture writer, and author best known for her wildly popular 'Ask Polly' column, which began at The Awl in 2012, moved to New York magazine's The Cut in 2014, and migrated to Substack in 2021 where it has amassed over 100,000 subscribers. Writing with unflinching emotional honesty and a distinct all-caps intensity, she dismantles myths of American success, explores the paradoxes of modern love, and reassures readers that being a walking tangle of contradictions is not just acceptable but very human. She is also the author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller 'How to Be a Person in the World' and 'Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage,' named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker.