The Group that’s Shining a Spotlight on N.C.’s Innovation Ecosystem

Thank you for joining us this Saturday morning.

North Carolina has a problem that most states would envy: more innovation than it knows what to do with. But we’ve historically lacked the culture and infrastructure to translate promising ideas into real companies. 

NCInnovation is not the topic of this week’s column, but it’s part of the story. The organization identifies university research – particularly outside of the Triangle – that shows commercial promise but requires more work before it has a chance of exiting campus and entering the private sector.

Today’s focus is what happens after that, not just for NCInnovation-backed projects but for all research. Developing cutting-edge research is hard, but so is attracting private investment once an idea leaves the kids’ pool and enters the ocean for the first time in a sink-or-swim environment. To extend the metaphor, nascent companies have a better chance of making it if they’re surrounded by piers, docks, and markers: experienced venture capital firms, business mentors who have navigated these waters before, and a general culture of finding and grooming promising ideas to try to turn them into the next big thing.

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The Research Triangle is one of the densest concentrations of research university talent anywhere in the country. From that base, a steady stream of applied science companies has emerged – in biotech, agtech, advanced manufacturing, energy, and beyond. In 2023, North Carolina’s life sciences industry exceeded 100,000 jobs for the first time, and the state was ranked the top state for business in the U.S. in 2022, 2023, and 2025. 

And yet, if you asked most of the state’s business executives to name five Triangle-based applied science startups, most would struggle. That gap – between what North Carolina is quietly building and what the broader business and investor community actually knows about – is a challenge if the state’s innovation economy is going to mature. 

A family office called 2ndF is trying to change that.

To understand why the gap exists, it helps to understand what applied science companies are and why they operate in relative obscurity.

Applied science startups – companies that translate cutting-edge research in biology, materials, energy, computation, or agriculture into commercial products — are fundamentally different from the software companies that dominate tech media coverage. 

They require larger upfront capital, longer development timelines, and deeper technical expertise to evaluate. A software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup can reach revenue and other key milestones much more quickly. A company developing gene therapies or precision electrochemical machining cannot. The result is that applied science companies rarely generate the kind of breathless coverage that a new consumer app might, even when their potential impact dwarfs it.

The Triangle’s universities are widely recognized for their economic impact as major employers, but their more enduring contribution comes from the companies they help create. The problem is that most of that wealth creation flows out of state. North Carolina has significant concentrations of capital, but relatively little of it has historically flowed into local applied science companies. That means the companies that emerge from Triangle research labs often end up funded by investors in Boston, San Francisco, or New York – and eventually headquartered there.

“Alignment – not invention – is the constraint,” the 2ndF Spotlight report argues. 

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2ndF has spent the past several years investing in North Carolina’s applied science ecosystem. Founded by Bill Spruill, who built and sold Global Data Consortium to the London Stock Exchange Group in 2022, 2ndF operates as a family office focused on creating more wealth in North Carolina, especially the Triangle. 2ndF primarily invests in applied science companies, where the Triangle region holds a unique advantage in frontier technology. Since its inception, 2ndF has supported dozens of founders and research labs, deploying over $10 million.

Each year, 2ndF publishes an annual report called The Spotlight, which analyzes the state of play and offers a curated list of compelling early-stage companies.

As the report notes, “The hardest and most valuable problems today are rooted in biology, materials, energy, computation, and measurement—domains where progress begins as research long before it resembles a product or a company.” 

As 2ndF recounts on its website, UNC-Chapel Hill’s gene therapy research program produced AskBio, which was ultimately acquired by Bayer. NC State’s decades of silicon carbide research led to the founding of what became Wolfspeed, a publicly traded semiconductor company that employs thousands. Duke’s work in trapped-ion quantum systems gave rise to IonQ, which went public in 2021 and helped put quantum computing on the commercial map.

This is what the Triangle looks like when its research commercialization engine works. And a new generation of companies is now in the pipeline.

The 2025 Spotlight highlights companies across sectors that showcase the breadth of what is being built here. Voxel Innovations, for example, is commercializing precision electrochemical machining for aerospace and defense applications. Pairwise is applying CRISPR-based gene editing to develop improved fruit and vegetable crops. Extellis, a Duke spinout, is building all-weather Earth observation systems using advanced radar. Each is solving a hard, capital-intensive problem. None is a household name – yet.

One detail in The Spotlight is particularly telling: next to each company listing, 2ndF notes which local investors have backed it. For several of the featured companies, the answer is none. 

That gap is a still-unsolved problem at the center of the Triangle’s innovation story. According to a report in BioBuzz, “capital has always been the missing piece” for the Triangle. But there are signs that is beginning to change. Hatteras Venture Partners – the region’s best-known life sciences venture firm – recently closed its largest fundraise in 25 years, pulling in more than $200 million across two new funds. 

Still, North Carolina’s venture landscape pales in comparison to the Bay Area and the Boston-Cambridge corridor, with Austin, Seattle, and a handful of other metros competing for the next tier. The Research Triangle sits in that second tier by most measures, but it holds core advantages over peer cities: three top-50 research universities in proximity, billions in annual federal R&D, and a cost structure that is dramatically more favorable than the markets where most of the capital currently concentrates.

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There’s a useful parallel in a completely different arena. Fred Minnick, one of the most respected voices in the whiskey and bourbon world, has built a reputation on a refined and trusted palate. His reviews are not just opinions, they move markets.

A few years ago, Minnick named a relatively accessible bottle of Russell’s Reserve, as one of the best whiskeys of the year. At the time, it was widely available on shelves across the country. Within months, it had effectively disappeared. Demand surged, availability tightened, and the producer, Wild Turkey, ultimately had to respond by increasing production.

The lesson is straightforward. When a trusted voice consistently identifies excellence, the market listens. Recognition is not just validation, it is acceleration. The same dynamic applies in business. Thoughtful, credible highlighting of high-performing companies has the power to elevate visibility, influence perception, and ultimately shape outcomes.

Here, the ingredients are present. What’s needed is the storytelling infrastructure to make them visible and greater alignment across the local capital ecosystem to support them at scale. 2ndF is doing the former. The latter remains an open opportunity – and an open invitation – for the business community.

2ndF’s Spotlight cites a 1945 report called “Science, The Endless Frontier.” In it, presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush argued that university research underpins national economic strength – that discovery, properly supported and connected to commercial application, compounds over time into industries, jobs, and prosperity. The Research Triangle was built on that idea.

The question for North Carolina’s business and investor class is whether they will engage seriously with the ecosystem being built in their backyard, or continue to watch it get funded and scaled somewhere else. 2ndF is making the case that the window is open. The Spotlight is worth reading, and the companies it highlights are worth knowing.