Durham Startup Archives - Serious Startups

Durham Name Your Price Startup BuyStand Raises $450,000 Looking To Raise $2M More

Durham startup, BuyStand, that is brining the name your price, Priceline, model to retail buying has just raised $450,000. WRAL Techwire is reporting that the company is looking to raise $2.5 million dollars in a mix of debt, options and warrants.

They’ve also added a new CFO, Charlie Farrell, who was most recently a financial executive at Edmunds.com

BuyStand is the latest startup from North Carolina serial entrepreneur, Joe Davy, His most recent startup EvoApp failed, of course as any good founder and entrepreneur knows failure leads to success. Failing fast is just one of the methodologies entrepreneurs in 2012 live by.

BuyStand is completely different than Davy’s previous startup.

For concept demonstration purposes Davy used one vertical market, outdoors. Obviously the platform will work for any retail good but outdoors was a great place to start.

As you can probably imagine, reading this far, BuyStand takes the “name your price” concept and applies it to outdoor goods. Whether you’re looking for the latest running shoes or the best all terrain jacket or back pack, you’ll find it at BuyStand. But you won’t find a typical priced out click through e-commerce portal.

With BuyStand the user selects the item that they want, names the price they’re willing to pay and then BuyStand sets that payment aside. Once a buyer has named a price, the BuyStand system lets the buyer know they have a taker and from there the “bid” is either accepted or rejected. If the “bid” (price) is accepted than BuyStand pays the vendor and the buyers product is shipped to their home.

It’s a two click process, name your price and click.

Davy says the need for BuyStand arises from the fact that buyers waiting for items and buying them second hand, used or “off the truck” at sites like e-Bay and Craigslist account for $200 billion dollars in lost profit.

“BUYSTAND solves this problem by eliminating the price and creating an open, efficient, free market.” Davy told the CED Start Something Blog.

Davy joined BuyStand as CEO in September. The startup was originally launched by Ted Kraus in 2011.

Linkage:

Find BuyStand on the web here

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Understand Your Dog Better With North Carolina Startup Dognition

Brian Hare, the founder and director of Duke University’s Canine Cognition Center is introducing a new startup to help normal folks understand their dogs better. His North Carolina based startup, called Dognition, isn’t going to magically give your dog a voice, however it will provide ways for you to better understand your canine friends.

Dognition will feature a website and mobile app. The first step with Dognition will be an assessment test. The test will be offered via the mobile app and will tell dog owners exactly how to administer it. According to the News and Observer, through the administration of the test, dog owners will be able to discover their dogs cognitive strengths and weaknesses. From there, dog owners will be able to set up a “Dognition Profile” report.

Dognition will go into free beta testing today and plans to open to the public for between $40 and $60 in January. That may seem a little steep to you however the American Pet Product’s Association has said that despite the recession spending on pets has risen 4.8% or more in the last few years and is on pace to raise another 3.8% this year.

Hare is also hopeful that the research they do at the Canine Cognition Center will benefit from having hundreds of dogs across the globe using the platform.

“The collective data that Dognition accumulate also hold the promise of expanding our scientific understanding of dogs” Hare said. “Academic centers such as the one he leads at Duke only have the capacity to test a few hundred dogs a year, so opening up such tests to dog owners worldwide via the Internet has the scientist practically drooling.”

Local serial entrepreneur Kip Frey has come aboard at Dognition as CEO. Also McKinney, the largest advertising agency in the Research Triangle will also support Dognition with market research, marketing, brand development and helping with the UI for the website and mobile apps.

McKinney’s CEO Brad Brinegar has three dogs and told the News & Observer: “I wake up every morning and think, ‘This is going to be big”

Science has suggested in the past that to draw parallels between humans and other mammals you need to look to dolphins and apes. According to Hare, research over the last 15 years has suggested that dogs are more intelligent than once thought.

“Dogs are more sophisticated than even the most dedicated dog lover might imagine,” Hare said.” Actually dogs, in many ways, solve problems really similarly to human children. And they’re more similar to human children than … apes.”

Frey has already raised $1 million dollars for Dognition in an angel round.

Linkage:

Check out Dognition here

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Durham NC Startup: School House Apparel; Collegiate Home Grown Apparel With Purpose

Duke University Alum Rachel Weeks set out on a mission to create a line of fashion apparel that’s socially conscious. School House started when Weeks went to Sri Lanka in 2007 on a mission to build a socially responsible clothing company. She was able to do that with her first college t-shirt from her alma mater Duke University.

The first School House line was manufactured in Sri Lanka and it helped support a living wage factory there. While she was maintaining an ethically social responsible clothing line while using a living wage factory in Sri Lanka she found the opportunity to come full circle in 2011 and brought her clothing line back home to North Carolina, but that wasn’t before Weeks was able to triple the wages in that Sri Lankan factory.

While Weeks felt great about what she was doing for the Sri Lankan factory she found out later on that the factory had taken on more and more orders from other companies and the School House orders were getting pushed to the back. With an angel investment Weeks was able to hire textile and apparel expert Susan Williams who had over 25 years of experience with brands like Jockey, Levi Strauss and the Gap. The two of them together did a cost analysis and decided that home was where School House needed to be.

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