For this year’s Coastal Entrepreneur of the Year, the journey started, as many entrepreneurial journeys do, with an important question. “How do we make sure life-saving therapies get to the people who need them without delay, without compromise?” Frontier Scientific Solutions, the 2025 Coastal Entrepreneur of the Year, wanted to come up with an answ ...

Who would you invest $100,000 in? That’s one of the pieces of advice we give our Coastal Entrepreneur Award judges each year when they’re faced with the task of making their picks. Who shows high-growth potential? Who is making a name for themselves and cutting through the noise? Who, out of these stacks and stacks of nominations, do you see as entreprene ...

As part of the Coastal Entrepreneur Awards program, area chambers of commerce share their top picks.   Burgaw Area Chamber of Commerce: Burgaw’s Best Kids “Burgaw’s Best Kids provides a fun and safe place for kids to participate in after school and summer camp. … They have program activities that focus on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes, karate ...

Brett Caines, co-founder and CEO of Lumos Technologies Inc., got his crash course in banking at Wilmington-headquartered Live Oak Bank. He joined the Live Oak team in 2007 when the early-stage firm was organizing to become a bank. In 2011, Caines became the company’s chief financial officer – a role he held until he left to start Lumos Technologies with Step ...

Since rolling out its first cryogenic tank monitoring system in October 2023, Boreas Monitoring Solutions has installed its products in more than 40 cryogenic labs across the United States. The majority are human fertility laboratories but some work with IVF in the dairy and equine industries. There is plenty of room for growth, according to company co-founder and CEO W ...

When Abbye McGee began hosting Sunday dinners, she did it out of a need for community and togetherness. Each Sunday, the crowd grew. McGee notes that at one time she hosted upwards of 75 people. At the time, she had no chef or restaurant experience; her recipes and cooking skills were learned from her grandmother. Yet people enjoyed the dinner and the food McGee prepare ...

After living in Europe for three years and working as an accountant, Chris Capone and his wife decided to return to Wilmington to build a business. A graduate of the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Cameron School of Business with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting, Capone returned to Wilmington in 2018 and founded Capone & Asso ...

For everyone who works for or with Welcome Home Angel, renovating a house is about more than adding aesthetic appeal or indulging in the latest trends. It’s about improving functionality and creating a safe, accessible environment for friends and neighbors who could use a helping hand. “It might seem like it’s just helping one child at a time,” s ...

Cleaning the interior of a seafaring vessel “is way more complicated than other types of places,” explained Krystina Fuge, owner of Maritime Maids. Maritime Maids is an interior yacht cleaning company and concierge business. Fuge said in an email that the cleaning part of Maritime Maids “requires a completely different systematic approach on what to cl ...

Modular spaces from Wilmington-based company Infinite Structures appeared this year at the Super Bowl, Coachella and at the bottom of the half pipe at Shaun White’s inaugural The Snow League event in Aspen, Colorado. For Infinite Structures CEO David Fioravanti, the Aspen event was one of the coolest projects the company has worked on so far – a three-story ...