Laura Baverman

Smile wide and eyes big as he looked up at “Bandwidth blue” billboards draping Times Square skyscrapers in the heart of New York City on Friday morning, David Morken uttered a single word, “Surreal.” Surreal to be standing alongside his Bandwidth co-founder Henry Kaestner, investors, direct reports and family members who believed in his vision for a new sort of telecommunications company over the last 18 years. Surreal to have just “rung” the opening bell on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Surreal because November 10 is already a special day for the U.S. Marine turned entrepreneur: the 242nd birthday of...

Diet, exercise and plastic surgery will get you so far in maintaining health or youth but a Chapel Hill entrepreneur recently out of the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator is offering up another way to live longer—storing (and eventually reusing) your own stem cells. It involves a simple outpatient procedure where stem cells are removed from the bone marrow in the back side of the hip bone. The cells are processed at Forever Labs in Michigan and then sent to an FDA-approved facility in Massachusetts, where they are frozen in liquid nitrogen. Eventually, the team envisions doctors around the world...

Each week, we’ll round up startup news from the UNC journalism students behind North Carolina Business News Wire. To read all of the students’ work covering public and private companies around the state, sign up for the daily newsletter. ————————————– Wilmington-based Petrics raises over $650,000 By Addison Lalier Petrics Inc., a North Carolina-based pet technology startup, raised over $650,000 in a private equity offering, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Petrics is a pet health company that develops digital products and software that allows owners to manage, track and respond to their pets’ health needs. The Petrics...