Since Electronic Lab Logs won the Coastal Entrepreneurship Award for health care and the NC IDEA SEED grant in 2020, the Wilmington startup has continued to build capital and grow.

A recently named participant in the CED Venture Connect conference, Electronic Lab Logs plans to close a second seed round of $1.8 million by the end of the month, said co-founder Daniel Summers. Early-stage venture capital firm VentureSouth, which has a chapter in Wilmington, has committed to lead the round, Summers said.

Electronic Lab Logs helps reference labs like Quest Diagnostics to standardize their data and documents electronically. Summers said establishments like this have different kinds of equipment to perform a host of tests, so keeping track of paper records gets “out of control.” His company helps digitize that process through an electronic database.

VentureSouth has a network of over 550 investors and multiple chapters across the Southeast and has invested more than $80 million to date. The Wilmington market director is Josh Hallingse, the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce’s small business director. The firm committed to leading the seed round but is still in the process of gathering capital commitments, Summers said, so the final contribution to the round is undecided.

The firm will also help to syndicate the remaining funds in the round until it closes, which Summers said is on track for the end of the month, around the same time the company will present to more investors at Venture Connect.

“If we've not already reached our [seed round] minimum by then, we're trying to get our round closed or meet the minimum by the end of March, and so that timing works out great,” Summers said.

“Definitely excited to meet the other investors there," he added. "And also, there's a couple of industry experts there that we're excited to talk with as well as far as partnerships are concerned."

Similarly, Summers said he enjoys working with VentureSouth because of its network of angel investors.

“The cool thing about their model is whenever you syndicate so many angel investors together, you undoubtedly have a lot of experience and so there's been so many good industry-experience players in that group,” he said.

He expects the round to include about five groups from across the Southeast, including groups from Tennessee and South Carolina.

Electronic Lab Logs’ last seed round was completed in late 2021, totaling $650,000, according to Summers. The increase in capital with this round will allow the company to hire a sales position, build on its software to improve integration with other lab platforms and develop a new module, Summers said.

The team currently consists of five full-time employees and five full-time contractors. The plan is to hire two sales roles, a compliance officer and a team of three state-side developers, Summers said. If all the planned hires are made, the company would effectively double its number of full-time employees.