A new fund with ties to major Triangle businessmen Fielding Miller (Captrust), Kel Normann (Normann Financial Group) and Van Isley (Professional Builders Supply) launched this week and is targeting startups tied to East Carolina University.
The newly-formed Pirate Entrepreneurship Fund is the product of years-worth of discussions, said Mark Wdowik, president and CEO of both the PEF and the East Carolina Angels.
“It started with a couple of discussions, maybe three years ago, with some of the largest university donors who are very active in entrepreneurship,” Wdowik said in an interview, confirming the group included ECU alumni Miller, Normann and Isley.
Normann said it wasn’t lost on the group that other schools with entrepreneurship programs have similar funds, such as North Carolina State University.
“If we were going to have a successful school of entrepreneurship … we needed to have this funding mechanism,” he said.
So, over the months, conversations intensified.
“We needed some type of funding mechanism for ideas that came out of the School of Entrepreneurship to get legs, to get traction,” Normann said. “Many students don’t have the relationships, the network of people to tell their story, to get funding.”
Fundraising was actually more successful than the group had anticipated.
“We first thought we were going to try to raise a million and then we wound up at almost $4 million,” Normann said. “It really took off.”
The fund, now at about $5 million, will target startups coming out of ECU as well as researchers working with the university and alumni, Wdowik said. Investments will range from $25,000 all the way up to $500,000.
Wdowik said its launch is a big step for the school, which has been growing steadily in entrepreneurship prowess. In 2019, its Miller School, named for the Raleigh CEO, launched a new undergraduate degree program in entrepreneurship. After just three years, the program has grown to 200 students.
While it’s affiliated with the university, both PEF and ECA are managed externally as private corporate entities.
