Triangle Startups · for NC State students

Startups built by NC State alumni, and who is hiring now

9 Triangle startups in the directory have a direct NC State tie that has been checked against a primary source:5 founded by people who studied here, and 4 commercializing research out of NC State labs. The real number is higher. Founder education is recorded for fewer than half the founders in the directory, so this is what has been verified, not the whole list.

Early-stage founders here often start with contract or contract-to-hire work before a full-time posting exists. If a company below fits and nothing is listed, reaching out directly is normal.

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Founded by NC State alumni

5 companies with Wolfpack founders

From growth-stage anchors to lab spinouts still raising their first round. Each links to its directory profile: founders, funding, and what it just shipped. Know an NC State founder who belongs here? Tell me who is missing.

Pendo

Raleigh · SaaS

Product analytics and user guidance platform, one of the Triangle’s anchor software companies. Troan was Red Hat’s first engineer before founding rPath and then Pendo.

Erik Troan, B.S. computer science and engineering. CTO and co-founder.

Second Nature

Raleigh · Consumer

Subscription service for home air and water filters. Started as FilterEasy in 2012 out of a confusing trip to buy an air filter, and grew past 300 people.

Thad Tarkington and Kevin Barry, co-founders. Both attended NC State and ran the campus entrepreneurship organization; Tarkington left in his junior year to build the company.

Ariso

Raleigh · SaaS

AI work partner that automates meeting summaries, action items, and email drafts. Zheng previously founded the security company JupiterOne.

Erkang Zheng, B.S. and M.S. in computer science. Founder and CEO.

CN-Seamless

Raleigh · DeepTech

Portable CNC torch-cutting that mounts to a steel workpiece and brings the machine to the metal. Went from a senior design class to a Raleigh business and won the VenturePack Challenge.

Josh Cooper, Dario Muller, and Sam Marcom, co-founders. All three earned B.S. degrees in mechanical engineering and met in the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program senior design course.

Social Cascade

Raleigh · Healthtech

Patient education for pediatric clinics, automating vetted medical content to families. The founders previously built education technology at SAS that reached millions of students.

Scott McQuiggan, Ph.D. computer science, and Lucy Shores Kosturko, Ph.D. educational psychology. They met in grad school at NC State.

Out of NC State labs

4 research spinouts

Founded by NC State faculty to commercialize work from their own labs. The faculty founders earned their own degrees elsewhere, so a lab tie is not an alumni tie, but these are the most direct path from NC State research to a working product, and they hire. Verdia is both: its CEO took his Ph.D. here before founding it with two of the professors.

InsightFinder

Durham · SaaS

AI observability and reliability for enterprise IT, commercializing work from her NC State research group. One of its anomaly-detection methods has been licensed to Google.

Helen Gu, founder and CEO, professor of computer science at NC State. Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Verdia Diagnostics

Raleigh · AgTech

Real-time plant-disease monitoring for growers, built on NC State sensing research.

Zach Hetzler, co-founder and CEO, earned his Ph.D. at NC State. He built the company with his doctoral advisor Qingshan Wei and fellow NC State professor Yong Zhu, whose own Ph.D. is from Northwestern.

Synoxa Sciences

Raleigh · Biotech

Discovery-stage antibiotics against multidrug-resistant pathogens, spun out of the Pierce lab at NC State.

Joshua Pierce, founder, professor of chemistry at NC State. Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh.

Galaxy Diagnostics

RTP · Biotech

Diagnostics for flea- and tick-borne disease, out of the vet school’s intracellular pathogens research.

Ed Breitschwerdt, co-founder, professor at the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine. D.V.M. from the University of Georgia.

Where to go from here

Browse the full directory

More than 200 Triangle startups with founders, funding, and signals. Search by sector or city.

Watch the money

Who raised, how much, and who led the round, sourced from original announcements.

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