San Diego Tech News - July 31, 2021

So Neil and recap the event yesterday while we wait. Let some people kind of jump in and join.

Yeah, Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara.

Yeah. Yeah. Neil's on the road guys.

I am, I'm in Lawndale. I was up in Santa Barbara meeting, getting together Santa Barbara founders and ecosystem builders and investors which was great to be back in person. We had Ian Hathaway who co wrote Startup Community Ways of. Brad Feld was there because he now has moved his family to Santa Barbara. So it was cool to have get 20 people together and partner again with our great partners Cox business on more great community events. So it was awesome. I ended up staying out with some founders that I met and they showed me around the leader scene. So.

Yeah, that's right. I remember maybe it was last week.

Or the week before.

You were talking about comic book, the Santa Barbara scene, those kind of like a smaller scene sort of city or town or kind of however you want to call it is pretty massive when it comes to a tech community. So I mean there's got to be some heavy hitters out there.

Yeah, that's really the reason why I spend spending time is to compare notes. What's working for them. They've had multi billion dollar tech iPodOS and tech acquisitions. Whether it's Sonos being headquartered there or Appfolio or now Procore just went public. Um, Linda.com was acquired for a billion by LinkedIn Deckers. Like they got a bunch of e commerce and like apparel brands. Kind of like San Diego too. But yeah, there's just something that, that you could see where they're having wins and recycling the capital and people are staying and you could see that has a lot of the same DNA as San Diego. We just need the winds to recycle all that capital from a lot of our later stage companies. So hopefully that's coming up for us. And that's why I've been spending time for the last two years just sharing and learning and compare notes.

So it's the funk zone too, right? The funk zone up there.

We were in the funk zone. Yeah, we were at this rum bar called Test Pilot. We brought in food from this barbecue and butchery called Shell Hoobs right across the street. It was good, good stuff.

Oh, that's awesome. I was just telling someone recently about my. My drink of choice was as a youngster kind of the hide from the parents was Captain Morgan. So rum, rum might be the enemy for me. Maybe I can give another try.

Yeah, it's worth giving it a shot. They had some really high End sipping rums that I wouldn't think of to use to sip on rum. But I guess if it's nice enough and on the rocks, it could be good.

Hey, let's do it.

Let's do it. Well, hey everyone. Happy Friday. Good to see you all here. See, people who I know are Android users are here, which is also incredible.

Yes, welcome.

Everyone's welcome. Always. Well, now it's not always been always. Now it is. Happy Friday. We got some news. We think we should probably just jump into it. What do you think, Jonah?

Yeah, let's do it. One thing that we'd love to announce and we should, there's a red circle here. So we're actually going to record this so we can put it out later. San Diego Tech News Weekly for those of you who have this tough time slot, you can listen to the recording. So we're going to try this for folks with various schedules or trying to crank through the week to get to the weekend early. So yeah, let's dive in with the first story.

Neil, let's do it. This one's got some juicy drama. So Global Payments is acquiring zgo, which is a platform for real estate software and payment solutions. Now ZGO has some history in San Diego, so ZGO really is what we know in San Diego as Paleys. They combined and so they're getting bought out. But here's some backstory to it. Paleys got acquired in, let's see, do we have the notes here?

2018.

2018 for 350 million. Great win. It also created some recycled capital because many, some of you know Sheldon Lewis who started Blueprint Equity, he was an exec at Paleys. So that was a great win and they kept the team here and they were acquired by Vista Equity which has acquired many of our companies. Typically Vista takes a lot of the team away and moves into Austin. But Paley, some of it got to stay, which is great. They then combined with Kansas City Zgo in 2019 so they became Zigo, powered by Pay Lease. And together they were still a Vista equity company and then Vista, a private equity company trying to increase value. And so they're selling it now for 925 million the combined companies to Global Payments. So I think it's all good that great to see the trickle down effect into San Diego through that because there are still employees here. So obviously we hope they stay employed. We never want to see shrinking of a company's footprint but hopefully it's also created some loosened up some capital for people who have been a Part of it for a while as well too. So yeah, that's all in the real estate kind of payment side. It's software to help whether it's helping landlords through payment structured through that way. So yeah, it's kind of real tech or prop tech, I would say a good prop tech company here in town that's now got its own little Tech.

Mafia and GPN bought them. They're massive publicly Global Payments Inc. But GPN, I keep reading it as Groupon. We have 24,000 employees and they're doing basically everything, payments, billions of transactions per year. And they said, hey, we want to get a little bit heavier into real estate. So the ZGO tools were kind of really that way in. Does it bother you that it's 925 and not a billion?

A little bit. I bet it bothers Vista even more. But it's all good.

That's so funny. I love that.

Nice.

Well, that's funny because that's a little bit of a juicy story, but we have another one. I don't know if you want to jump into the next one, but it looks like intel will be making chips for Qualcomm in a new US based foundry business. That was super interesting and there's a lot of drama going on there.

There is a lot of drama. It's kind of incestuous. Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, it's incestuous. And on top of that we have the big macro story where there's just not enough chips for the products that are being built. You're hearing all about cars being delayed, not enough chips for that. So I think it was a big thing for Biden to bring chip manufacturing back to the US So I got to imagine this is part of it. So yeah, so Intel's building a new foundry to create chips. I think Qualcomm and Amazon, if I'm.

Right, yeah, Amazon's really interesting one because they're doing it a little bit of a different way. Amazon's using it to assemble their tiles for aws. So not quite the same application, but both mega clients for them I would have gotta imagine.

Interesting. So what the juicy details around this, which is funny, is that obviously we all know about Apple and Qualcomm having lawsuits against each other. We also know that Apple moved to San Diego to really start building its own chipsets for its phones and in essence steal Qualcomm talent. But a few years ago, intel also got out of the game of building and designing actually more certain internal chips and modems and so they sold that division off to Apple. That division had an office in Scripps Ranch. So that was actually Apple's kind of first footprint into San Diego before they started building their UTC footprint. And so you got Apple and Qualcomm fighting over each. Other. Now you got intel saying, hey Qualcomm, we'll build you chips. So it's all kind of messy.

Sounds messy.

It is. There's like a love triangle here between the three of them.

Oh my gosh. That's that. We'll see how that develops. It's really interesting because they are at war with each other but also kind of working together. So I wonder how those NDAs look.

But having manufacturing back in the US is all good for us. So hopefully us as the consumer, we still gain because of that. We will see. Well, hopefully there's more drama to this so we can keep talking about it because we love good drama.

I love it.

Let's jump into some more acquisition news. This is a big one in the biotech space. Perkin Elmer is acquiring San Diego's bio legend for $5.25 billion. Boom. That's a big one. That's huge.

Five times bigger than the other deal.

Not to.

There is a 2.2 billion in stock too. So they didn't go all cash, but that's massive. Massive deal.

Yeah. What does biologen do?

Yeah, so they make antibodies used in gene therapy and reagents for drug discoveries. Pretty interesting. Myanmar and Sereno Val. 700 people in San Diego, but they're selling it worldwide. They have 10,000 customers in 130 countries. Super cool. Just a quick note for a little science lesson. Antibodies are super important. They're Y shaped proteins that are made the immune system and they latch onto specific molecules, think bacteria, viruses, foreign substances. And they could be pretty easily adapted for a range of experiments. And so that's what Perkin Elmer really wanted. You can actually sell antibodies to other companies doing a lot of testing. You can also use them for gene therapy. So experimental techniques to treat or prevent diseases. But if we think about COVID with COVID antibodies we talked about spike proteins a lot. What they were actually able to do is help researchers treat infected people, test vaccines effectiveness and then identify who's already recovered. And they can use these Y shaped proteins, these antibodies to do that. So that's pretty cool. So Perkinelmer is saying, hey, antibodies and the antibody business is big. We want in. It's actually a $6 billion business and they expect it to grow by about 10% it could be bigger. I mean, if we keep seeing viruses like variants like Delta and so on, we might actually see a larger business. I'm not sure how much it ties back specifically to Covid, but definitely this is a pretty impressive technology that they have. One last thing that's cool is they're going to keep the antibody HQ in SD in San Diego, which is pretty cool. With extra funding, Bio Legends actually able to expand into food safety testing and some other clinical diagnostics. So they'll get a little bit more flexibility and expansion, but under a new banner. So kind of interesting to see that.

There it is. I love the Bio 101 lesson by Jonah. Thank you.

Yeah, you got it.

Love it, love it. Break it down. Talk to me like I'm a five year old. I appreciate it.

Oh, I know. I need that sometimes too. Let me. Yeah, I just say let's just call this one out really quick. We just want to flag this. It's super interesting. I wouldn't say necessarily a full blown story, but Southwestern College is beginning three new career training courses in tech. And Neil and I have talked about this a lot. There's a need for tech jobs, there's a challenge of hiring. Workforce is moving online. We have to defend our infrastructure. We've heard about attacks recently and even talked about mitigating fires. So they basically have a couple new programs that are out there. If you're thinking about moving into tech, definitely consider this. The highlight programs are drone technology and applications, cybersecurity and fire science technology. So we need to attack these three industries. Highly technical industries should be growing and I'm glad that they're actually training a lot more people and let's keep them in San Diego. We're going to need the fire security and we've talked about drones a hell of a lot, not to mention cybersecurity as well.

Yeah, we just talked about, I think two weeks ago there was a whole study from the Cybersecurity center of Excellence that there is a big loss of, not loss of jobs. There's just so many openings that they can't fill locally. So I'm glad to see not just Southwestern College, but also workforce development spinning up programs to really focus on local talent and training them up for this. It's great.

We need more.

And obviously the next thing we're going to talk about is funding. Funding we all know like leads to jobs. Right? The more funding you have, the more usually you grow by hiring staff, which just means there's going to be more and more talent needed. So we love stories like this. If you see more tech jobs, tech training kind of stuff, send it our way. We want to blast it and make sure everyone knows that it exists so that we get people trained and then out into tech world.

So I love it. They can up a level themselves as well. So it's perfect. Yeah, I agree. Send it our way.

Yeah. Last section we want to try this week or no. Yeah. Is just like some recent fundings because man, we've been booming. Like I put out a tweet this week that just since July 1st there's 450 million in new investment funding that's come to startups. That's tech funding by the way, that I think is already old like that. I think we've already had more come since then. So it probably is closer to 500 million in just like three weeks. Three or four weeks. What's the last day of the month for a full month to do 500 million? It's pretty strong already showing for this quarter and so we thought we'd spotlight some of that including Internet of things startup Wiliot pulling in some big money. They're in Israel and San Diego based so we'll give both credit. $200 million that they raised a big chunk from SoftBank Vision Fund and only the third. I think it's only the third company in San Diego to take SoftBank money besides BrainCorp and Flock Freight. I think Fred Greer mentioned that in a LinkedIn post. You want to tell us more about what Will that's up to?

Yeah, it's so funny. So we were going to do some highlights, some quick hits on funding and started to look under the hood of this one. I'm kind of mind blown by this technology so maybe I went a little crazy on notes here.

But.

So they are making. This is really unbelievable. They're making a battery free sensor tag. Something that can sort of basically stick on and track a whole number of things. But there's no battery. It's using Bluetooth and it's using wi fi to generate its power, which is a pretty cool tech. But think of things like supply chains, grocery medicine, apparel and a whole ton of other industries. But basically what they're able to do is add intelligence to everything and we're starting to see tracking from sort of a high level, from a moderately high priced value level. Think tile. Apple's making a sensor and these are moderately expensive but they're not cheap. They're by no means throwaway and that's kind of what they're doing. So they're making this postage stamp size sticker that's again charged by Bluetooth and wifi waves. So this technology, I mean this is new will be really interesting to kind of see what we evolve it into. But beyond that you can throw these stickers onto things and get and track the temp. So if something is needing to stay cold or in the medical industry as it moves through the supply chain, fill level, location change. So if something leaves the supply chain or leaves the warehouse or maybe comes into the warehouse, humidity and proximity really looking at inventory management largely but avoid sort of running out of stock. Think kind of just in time what's running low and can we order that now as opposed to sort of ordering and shipping around a lot of different products that may or may not need to be in a particular store. So that was really, really interesting. But you know they are in, in San Diego and Israel as you mentioned but they do have roots in Qualcomm so they were. Some of the founders here were acquired by Qualcomm Willocity so I can kind of liking that name. They're looking to keep, keep a piece of that there 2014 for $300 million. So these founders know what they're doing and so they said hey, let's move back in. But one thing to keep in mind and you can kind of start to really see how big of a deal this is. Some other investors that are hitting this round aside from the vision fund From SoftBank are AWS, Samsung, Qualcomm Ventures obviously loves this and then Avery Denison, RFID tag maker. So basically big players in movement tracking and well stickers I guess for Avery. So pretty, pretty cool stuff. I can't wait to see this. I mean think about your T shirt could be tracked. It could tell you certain temperature updates or if your brother stole your shirt and now he's running around la we'll pick on him there. But pretty cool stuff and it's a simple tag.

Super cool to see. Yeah, we love it. Love the hardware software piece connection as well too. Another great story about San Diego tech too. So love to see it. Let's jump into the next one. Turquoise Health Digital Health Tech play raising 5 million and they are doing software for transparent pricing of healthcare. Man, is that needed? So needed. So they a few things really about this one. I want to call it in general like things like this when a company like Turquoise Health raises money like it sometimes gets lumped into the biotech life science world. But this is a software play that it just happens to be attacking the digital health space. Count it for tech. Absolutely. And they've got some great tech investors behind them, like Andreessen Horowitz. I think that's Andreessen's third or fourth investment in a San Diego company. And Klay Thompson from the warriors jumping in, maybe injured, sitting on the bench, but he's writing checks.

Hey, he knows a thing or two about that. I would think if he's injured, he's probably getting these bills being like, what the heck's going on?

Yeah, exactly. And so they've curated already 170 million different price records from hospitals. I wonder if that's public. I wonder how they've grabbed all that. Maybe they've already got it partnered from customers.

Well, it's really interesting is a law changed January 1st requiring hospitals to publish pricing on, they said 300 procedures. So I'm sure they do tons more than that. But it's kind of weird that it was murky before that it was kind of like, here's the procedure. You need an mri, but you're going to pay later. And so that's what's really interesting about this. If it's not published, you don't know where to go. But what if you could drive Neal, like, 10 more minutes to an adjacent hospital and save yourself $1,000? Probably would want to do a small bit of movement and maneuvering. And so this is kind of interesting. It's a murky industry. You're working with multiple parties, insurance companies, hospital. You can even lump the pharmacy into that. That batch. And so all these systems are communicating together. And why not find the best price for some of these procedures and really take care of yourself that way? So I think what they're doing. Super cool. Go, Go Turquoise help.

Totally. I wonder, my mind went to, like, car dealerships. Are we going to have, like, hospital dealer salespeople now? We're like, hey, kidney transplant. I can get it, you know, under sticker price.

I love that. Come on down. I don't know. We'll see, man. They have the data, that's for sure.

Yeah, for sure. So There are about 10 people now, but we know they're gonna be growing pretty quickly. They think over 40 by end of year. So there's 30 new jobs. Love seeing that. So, yeah, go Turquoise Health. Some other funnies that happened literally just in the week itself. Genomatica. More on the life science side, but, well, I'm gonna start challenging these, by the way, if it's genomics and it's, you know, not just wet Lab genomics. If it is either hardware or data science applied to genomics. That's tech play. I'm gonna have to come up with a cool sound effect for that. That's a tech play. I love it. They raised 113 million. So they are pretty late stage company. I think that was their series C. Aristia Therapeutics. That is a wet lab. They're doing therapeutics. 63 million in new funding. Sendlane email marketing software. Some of you in the room I think know them pretty well. 20 million of a series A and fabricate labs. They are doing. They're doing some super cool stuff. They're doing 3D printing of some of the tiniest hardware you can think of, I believe to go into sensors and other things. They just raised 19 million in a Series A as well too.

It's amazing. Have you seen the image that's going around with like the quarter next to what they're printing? It's like, it's like. I don't want to say it's a quarter the size of a quarter that's clunky as hell, but I'm looking at it here. It's wild that they're able to do this. Check the story out for the image sometime if you get a moment. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. Good story by Mike Freeman at the UT about them. What about Mike? Yeah. So those are our stories for the week. Holy would welcome any of you to jump up and tell us what you're looking at, what you're seeing. A few things while we're waiting for anyone to raise their hand. You know, we put this out every Friday or we join on Clubhouse every Friday. We we hoping to put this out relatively quickly on the Tacos and tech podcast channel. Thanks. One way we'll do it. And then next Tuesday is newsletter week. Again we do the tacos or the Fresh Brew tech newsletter every other Tuesday where we summarize some of these fundings jobs events that are happening. So if you aren't reading that, check that out and give us some feedback. Also, if you're hiring, let us know as well too. We've got a new job board on Fresh Brew Tech that we've been testing out. So happy to post jobs there. You can do it yourself on freshbrewtech.com jobs. So anyone want to jump up, tell us what they're up to or news from their neighborhood. If not, we can call it early.

Yeah, let's do it. I think that's the show San Diego Tech News Weekly. We're talking Tech every Friday.

Every Friday. Good to see you all. Have a good weekend. Jonah. Enjoy the weather.

Hey, I'll do my best. You as well. Get home safe.

Take care. Bye, everyone.