A year after its founders relocated the company to Durham from California, a startup aimed at software developers has closed on nearly $1.8 million.
Stashpad, based at Durham’s American Underground, raised the sum from a slew of investors, from individual engineers they’d worked with before to the Tweener Fund, an investment startup led by Triangle serial entrepreneurs Scot Wingo and Robbie Allen.
Cara Borenstein, who cofounded the firm with her now-husband, Theo Marin, said it’s a pre-seed round, which gives the firm a good 18-month runway. She said it was critical to have input from the very engineers the product was created for.
“We’re making a notepad for developers so we really wanted our round to have engineers,” she said.
Borenstein met Marin while studying computer science at Columbia University in New York. The pair headed off to the Bay Area after graduation, working at software startups Twilio and NextDoor before jumping off the startup cliff themselves with Stashpad, originally called Bytebase.
The startup began with one idea – building a better wiki. However, the engineers Borenstein was talking to didn’t buy in. But while they didn’t care about the wiki, they did talk about their process. They were using a notepad to manage their thoughts, scratch out ideas. So the startup took a pivot and Stashpad was born. Borenstein describes it as a notepad to “help developers stay in flow so they can do their best work.”
But the pivots didn’t stop with the central idea.
“During the pandemic, we realized we’re not using all the resources out there right now and we’re really far from our respective families,” she said.
So they looked at East Coast options.
Borenstein is from New York. Marin has family in the Triangle. They decided to try Durham.
“Let’s just give it a shot,” she remembers saying.
And now it’s their permanent home. This spring, the firm began to hire. It’s currently at eight employees, the majority local to Durham, a testament to the local talent pool, Borenstein said. The company launched its app earlier this month, the design of which was led by Eli Williamson, former creative director at Netify.
Stashpad was part of the Techstars Anywhere program last year, and with Tweener Fund is really starting to take advantage of local resources.
Tweener Fund targets early stage startups and already has a slew of firms in its portfolio. Wingo said it’s made 39 investments in 37 Triangle companies.
With Stashpad, it’s crossed the $2 million investment mark.