Sep 2, 2024

Backed By $2M, Ex-JupiterOne Trio Leaves Stealth Mode With New Startup Opine From left, Akash Ganapathi, Charlie Duong and Austin Kelleher are the co-founders of Durham-based Opine, which is emerging from stealth mode armed with a $2M+ pre-seed funding round. All three were early employees at Morrisville-based unicorn JupiterOne. After four months of stealthy working—and fundraising—former JupiterOne employees Akash Ganapathi, Austin Kelleher and Charlie Duong have announced the launch of their new Durham-based startup, Opine . The startup aims to build trust between deep tech vendors and potential buyers by providing proofs-of-concept (POCs) for enterprise software transactions. “I think people just really feel this problem where they know that they’ve been running POCs in a very ad-hoc way that’s messy and takes too long,” Ganapathi said. “And it’s painful.” Instead of tossing around Google sheets of jumbled product data, Opine will better automate the process, allowing vendors to reuse their past POC information and supplying their buyer with testimonials to their software’s utility. And though POCs are required for over 90% of closed-won deals, vendors often view the process as “static” and something they’d prefer to avoid. “We’re trying to change that mindset around the POC,” Ganapathi said, “and make it something that’s actually really valuable for the vendor.” The team hopes their startup will disrupt how POCs are conventionally handled and make the process more streamlined for both sides. The ultimate goal is software companies—Opine’s customers—closing more deals more quickly and efficiently for happier buyers. ‘Yeah, this is it’ Just a few months ago, Opine CEO Ganapathi along with “quarterback engineers” Kelleher and Duong were all working for Morrisville-based unicorn JupiterOne, a high-flying cybersecurity startup led by CEO Erkang Zheng that launched in 2020 and has arguably been the biggest Triangle tech success story of the past five years. (See some of our coverage of Zheng, a keynote speaker at last year’s Grep-a-palooza 2, and JupiterOne here .) Duong, JupiterOne employee #2, met Kelleher—JupiterOne employee #3—at Penn State University, and the two moved to North Carolina together where they worked for a couple other startups before joining Zheng on JupiterOne. At JupiterOne, Duong, who focused on core technology and data engineering, and Kelleher, who led the integration team, met Ganapathi, employee #18. Ganapathi led sales engineering and oversaw all POC work. The trio would often find themselves working odd hours or weekends together, and would sometimes go out and grab a beer to talk shop. “We realized that there are fundamental process problems,” Ganapathi said “and technology that we could build to fix those things.” The team was sitting outside of the Morrisville restaurant Bottles and Cans when they decided to tackle POCs as their startup idea. Ganapathi spent all of that night writing a document on his vision for their startup, and after reading Ganapathi’s words, Duong said he had his “Yeah, this is it” moment. ‘We know the expectations’ When the crew felt confident that their exit from JupiterOne wouldn’t hurt the company, they decided to take the leap. Ganapathi—who dropped out of UNC-Chapel Hill to start his first company a decade ago—said that out of the handful of startups he’s worked for, JupiterOne has had the best company culture. Not only are JupiterOne employees productive and work hard, Ganapathi said, they also loved chatting with each other. “People really cared about the mission,” he said. Thriving in such an enjoyable company culture is what ultimately brought the trio together, Ganapathi said, and they hope to replicate the same atmosphere at Opine. But company culture isn’t the only lesson the team hopes to apply to their startup. Kelleher said working with JupiterOne at such an early stage showed him how much of “a massive undertaking” it is to create a company. “Building a startup requires you to be uncomfortable in many different ways and to wear many different hats,” he added. Rather than cycle through the stereotypical ‘build software, sit behind computer, repeat’ role of a software engineer, Kelleher said JupiterOne made him branch out into a sales mindset while also representing the company. For Duong, he said he never would’ve fathomed how much JupiterOne pushed him out of his comfort zone. “We’ve learned a lot from our prior experiences,” Duong said. “And now we know the expectations—we know the effects of what early decisions can make.” Ganapathi said he sees the team as three people with a diverse set of skills but with unifying values. Because of their parallel philosophical beliefs, Kelleher said they can “cut through noise really quickly and get to solutions really quickly.” And all three have an unwavering entrepreneurial spirit. “I’m not scared of the risk of founding,” Ganapathi said. “I’m scared of the risk of not founding.” ‘Time to really build the product’ Since their first announcement that they were working together on a new project, the crew has raised over $2 million in pre-seed funding while waiting to publicly disclose the specific concept behind the startup. GrepBeat sister company Primordial has invested as part of the round, which it announced last Thursday here . (Ganapathi also went public on LinkedIn on the same day.) “Stealth mode was not really a grand ploy,” Ganapathi said. He said the concept gets a bad rap for founders who go into stealth mode just to cause “a big splash” for their B2C companies. Ganapathi said operating in stealth mode was “less about the splash” and more about mitigating any kind of bad messaging because the team didn’t exactly know what the product would look like when they started fundraising. “Stealth mode gave us that time to really build the product,” he said. Opine will start private beta testing this month; potential users can get on a waiting list at Opine’s site . “It’s the perfect time for us to come out of stealth because we actually know for sure that this is what we’re taking to market.”