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	Friday Fix: Curated Clinical, Kevel’s $52M Raise, Launch KPMG’s Cohort 4, and More! Posted Yesterday tl;dr GrepBeat.com is a website that covers startup and tech news, and every Friday a show called the Friday Fix helps people catch up on the week's biggest stories. In the October 23rd edition, host David Schwartz talked about features on two companies, Curated Clinical and Pellucid, plus a recap of a demo day where new startups showed off their work to the public. He also shared the big news that a company called Kevel raised $52 million to help it grow, and you can hear the whole thing on The GrepBeat Podcast.
	Cary’s Pellucid Aims to Create “New Category of Tech” For Procurement Posted Yesterday tl;dr Pellucid Network is a new startup, founded by Nick Miller, that helps big companies buy software through online marketplaces more easily by connecting the teams that find software with the people who approve the purchases. Miller got the idea from his work in the Army, at the venture firm In-Q-Tel, and with Amazon Web Services, where he saw that slow buying processes kept organizations from using new technology quickly. The small team of three has raised its first round of funding, plans to charge subscriptions starting around $20,000, and is focused on perfecting its product and winning customers before it expects to meet its revenue goals in 2027.
	Launch Powered by KPMG Accelerator Holds Demo Day For 4th Cohort Posted Wednesday tl;dr On Tuesday night, the fourth group of startups finished the Launch Powered by KPMG accelerator, a six-week program that helps new companies find customers, improve their products, and plan how to sell them. The companies presented their ideas to the public at a Demo Night in Chapel Hill. Their projects included an app that tracks food to spot inflammation, a business that turns trash like glass and styrofoam into concrete, and tools that use AI for health care, air quality, robotics, and medicine research.
	Curated Clinical Uses AI To Bring Community Voices Into Clinical Trials Posted Monday tl;dr Allison Mathews started a company called Curated Clinical that uses an online platform to ask everyday people for their ideas on making health research, like medical trials, safer and more trustworthy, especially for communities whose voices are often left out. The platform uses crowdsourcing, which means asking the public to help solve a problem, and it has an AI tool that sorts people's answers into themes and helps companies and community groups turn the best ideas into real programs. Mathews, who has spent over ten years doing this kind of work around the world, says the platform keeps people's data private and safe, and it has already signed its first partners, with a test run planned for November 2026.
	Monday Mix: A Startup House Block Party, AI Horror Stories, Cary’s Walking Masterminds, and More! Posted Monday tl;dr This week's Monday Mix (October 19th) highlights several local events, including a Saturday block party in Charlotte and some spooky Halloween-themed fun about AI gone wrong. On Tuesday there's a lunchtime event in Durham, and on Thursday you can join a walking and networking meetup in Cary in the morning, then an "AI Horror Stories" event in Charlotte that evening. The week wraps up on Saturday with the Founder Block Party at CLT Startup House from 5 to 9 p.m.
	Friday Fix: ExpertTheory, Phaseshift, ShotSpin AI, and “Backrooms” Inspired Floor 404 Posted October 16, 2026 tl;dr GrepBeat.com shares lots of news about startups and technology, and their "Friday Fix" segment, hosted by David Schwartz, helps readers catch up on anything they might have missed during the week. This week's recap included a story about Pendo's new game called Floor 404, plus features on three cool companies: ExpertTheory, Phaseshift, and the tennis-focused startup ShotSpin. You can listen to the full podcast episode to hear all the details, and don't forget to subscribe so you stay updated on exciting startup news!
	Return Game: Exited Founder Is Back To Level Up Your Tennis With ShotSpin AI Posted October 15, 2026 tl;dr Anil Chawla, who previously built and sold a successful tech company called ArchiveSocial, returned to his childhood love of tennis after his business deal closed and found himself wanting better tools to improve his game. This inspired him to create ShotSpin AI, a new app that uses artificial intelligence to record tennis matches and provide detailed, professional-level analysis of a player's performance, going beyond basic stats to show patterns and trends. The app, still in development with a beta testing group, aims to help everyday players enjoy and improve at tennis by giving them insights once only available to professional athletes.
	Wake Forest’s Phaseshift Makes Sense of the Messy Data Behind Clean Energy Posted October 14, 2026 tl;dr Phaseshift, a startup founded by Brandon Zschokke and Anirudh Mulukutla, solves a big problem in the clean energy world: different battery, solar, and wind equipment all record data in their own "languages," making it hard to combine and understand. Their technology connects to all this equipment, organizes the confusing data into one consistent format, and makes it easy for people, software, and AI to use—saving companies time, money, and hassle. Starting with battery storage systems, Phaseshift is now growing to work with other energy infrastructure and even data centers, all while keeping its focus on solving real problems for customers rather than just building "cool" technology.
	Raleigh’s ExpertTheory Uses AI To Rapidly Scale Simulation Games Posted October 13, 2026 tl;dr Daveed Gartenstein-Ross started a company called ExpertTheory that uses artificial intelligence to quickly create educational simulation games, where players join teams and make decisions to understand real-world situations like geopolitics. What used to take weeks to build can now be made in minutes or hours thanks to AI, and the company has already created games for universities like Duke and ASU, as well as for the U.S. Air Force and other organizations. Looking ahead, ExpertTheory wants to sell ready-made games that people can play without needing a human referee, making these learning experiences even easier to access.
	Pendo’s New Game Teaches AI Agent Training… in Liminal Spaces Posted October 12, 2026 tl;dr Pendo.io created Floor 404, a free first-person daily puzzle game where players customize and guide an AI agent through a strange, maze-like office, solving puzzles to earn it the "context" it needs to work well—while skipping days turns it into a useless "zombie." The game, built in just a month during a company hackathon, is designed to playfully teach people how AI agents actually improve: through real information like user feedback and behavior signals, not guesswork. Whether you're new to AI agents or already build them, Floor 404 aims to make the serious lesson that "an agent is only as good as the context it has" fun, memorable, and even a little bit heartwarming.

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