North Carolina's coverage elsewhere on this site is built around three real, dense metro economies -- Charlotte's banking core, the Research Triangle's university-and-biotech corridor, and the Piedmont Triad's furniture-and-tobacco legacy. This edition is everything real outside those three, which is most of the state by geography if not by company count. Asheville anchors the mountains, built on tourism and the Biltmore Estate but increasingly a real craft-manufacturing and brewing hub in its own right. Wilmington anchors the coast, home to a working deepwater port and one of the country's more established film-production economies outside Los Angeles and Georgia. Fayetteville sits next to Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg), the largest military installation by population in the United States. None of these are Charlotte, the Triangle, or the Triad, and none of them should be read as smaller versions of those places.
Region Stats
Total firms
90
VC / investors
17
Companies
43
Schools
30
Known For
The Mountains
The Coast
Fort Liberty
