San Diego Tech News Weekly – June 9th, 2023

Foreign welcome, this is Neil Bloom, Fred Greer coming at you live this week in San Diego Tech news. Hey, Fred, how you doing?

Hello. Hello. Welcome back. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, it's great to have you here too. I'm Neil Bloom with both Fresh Brew Tech and Interlock Capital. We invest in early stage startups as a group of experienced entrepreneurs and we also put out San Diego tech news. And this is my co host, Fred.

Hello. Yes, this is Fred Greer, startup reporter, author of SD Founders Substack. I cover startups, tech and the ins and outs of the business world in San Diego and happy to be here and talk about what's going on in San Diego as it relates to business.

Awesome. Well, we, I love that we're getting in a rhythm here, Fred. We're doing this more often, getting the news out, talking also a little bit of some events that have happened or coming up, which, you know, I think, I think we can take some credit for that. More events are happening, more people are showing up to the events as we'll talk about Startup San Diego's event this week. But you had a great, a great lead this week on a fintech company, Mosaic, working in the financial planning software space, doing a big series C. Tuck, take us through the story here with Mosaic.

Yeah, so a scoop that we had this week. I actually got an email on Monday from the CEO and co founder of Mosaic Tech, which is a financial software company that was started in, I believe it was 2019. These co founders, three co founders actually. I think you, you had them on your podcast, Neil and I listened to that and they had said that they were actually lit. They were born and raised in San Diego, but then they had worked in Bay Area for a startup that turned into a publicly traded company, Plantier Technologies. They helped grow that company From I think 200, 205, 2500 employee company. They're doing over 700 million revenue. And they took that experience at that company and discovered an opportunity to create a software platform for finance teams. They just raised a series C, this is their third round of financing. They raised over 70 million in funding. They raised money from Amzer's venture firm. They're a Bay Area venture firm and they're really doing some really cool stuff. I don't know, Neil, are you familiar with them?

Yeah, no, it was great to meet, meet them. I met Joe and Bijon right when they moved to San Diego. Man, it's maybe been five years now. And all three founders, I believe were at Palantir and all in the finance department in various areas and they just growing Palantir which by the way, Palantir is a legendary company. You know Peter Thiel, one of the co founders of it to you know, grew this, this defense tech company is really what they were. And our, and so you had three finance guys who grew up with this fast growing startup and said look like it was really hard for us to manage our dashboards as we were super fast growing company. Things were changing, department spend was changing all the time, employee count changing all the time. So they dove deep into building their own platform and that's, they moved to San Diego and you know, they've been on a big kick ever since. So it's been really cool to, to watch them grow along the way. So yeah, it was a great scoop that you put out on your substack and congrats to the guys on their continued growth.

Yeah, congrats to them. I think they have, I think over 80 employees now. Some of them are in San Diego and they're trying to hit a home run in the venture capital world. You know, I think he, the CEO put out a blog post talking about, you know, when you're raising, raising money from VCs, you know, the early stage money, friends and family, you know, they're looking for more than just grand slams, looking for home runs. And now that they have raised series C funding, they're really looking to go, you know, to make this a home run for their investors, but also building a huge massive company in San Diego. So definitely a company to watch.

Yeah, definitely. It's a great one. You know, a few other things going on. Just this week Startup San Diego did their first Mondays. It was an AI focused event that they, they had to shut down tickets like day of or even the day before because they hit 300 people and I know at the door they still took in more tickets. 320, maybe 330 tickets total for this AI event. So people really want to get out, people want to talk AI. Obviously it's, it's on everyone's mind on both the good and the bad. The, you know, is AI taking our jobs? Is AI going to, you know, run the human race and then what are all the opportunities to it? Is it just a buzzword? Like it was a great conversation that was happening and you know, all every angle was talked about from jobs to opportunities. And it was held at the Torrey Pines office of Lab Fellows, which is this cool startup that originally kind of took the mentality of co working to the biotech World offering lab space as a service and then adding a whole software layer component of how to run your lab remotely and add in like software packages to, to monitor sensors for your experimentation. So pretty cool to see a startup that's homegrown in San Diego to be able to now host events. I just love seeing those collaborations. That is also where HERA Hub moved their coworking female focused coworking space to during the pandemic as well. So you had a lot of worlds coming together this past Monday at Startup San Diego's first first Mondays. Yeah. Did you get to hear a little bit about that event too, Fred?

Yeah, I saw some pictures on Twitter. I wasn't able to be there in person, but I did see the event was sold out and it was a packed house for the topic of AI. And it just shows that there's an appetite not only from a startup perspective, but I know there were some people like Dexcom and some of the large companies, you know, their employees were interested in learning about that topic. So cool to see. And you know summer is back. You know LA Tech Week's going on right now, wrapping up and then also saw that behind Genius Ventures, which is an early stage venture firm, they were invited for the Angel Summit in the Bay Area hosted by the Launch launch and Jason who's an early investor in Uber. And so they invited Paige Finn and she was on a panel for a first time from fund manager, which is great to see and represent San Diego. So shout out to Paige for that event.

Yeah, shout out to Paige indeed. That's awesome to see. She's. She also has her own podcast which is great. And yeah, it's awesome to see her representing as an emerging fund manager here. You know, speaking of Startup San Diego in that regard, Startup Week is coming up end of October. I think they may have put the dates out there. It's the last week of October which is great, great. And I know Paige spoke last year on a panel as well when we did SDSU day. So I expect her to participate again this year too. But there's some other things coming up as well. Just Summer Social by Connect is happening on June 13th which also will be a sold out event. Hundreds I think could approach a thousand people actually just hearing so many people talking about it. So it will be a big event to come out to in Encinitas and then Evo Nexus is bringing back its demo days. It'll be at Qualcomm on June 26th and they have at least three, if not five companies showcasing what they've been working on. Evo Nexus tends to have a lot of hardware plus software related companies. So leads well for demo be able to show the physical things that these companies are building. So I'll be there. I just bought my ticket. Looking forward to seeing some of the companies being incubated at Evo Nexus. What's on your radar, Fred?

I'll be there as well then. Basically covering it on the ground. I think Good Face Project is one of the companies which is a beauty focused company. But yeah, they have a good mix of tech companies and consumer focused companies and I think it's going to be hundreds of folks from all walks of life. Early stage, late stage, great, great networking event to meet founders and other tech folks.

Hey, you mentioned it's a good transition to talk about another raise that just happened. Debut Biotech, a beauty tech focused biotech. So they're making chemicals used in clean beauty and they just raised a $34 million Series B from L' Oreal's venture arm along with a number of other kind of biotech focused investment firms. So seeing Good Face plus Debut plus Verity, a sustainable package for the beauty space. Kind of interesting to see a little subcluster of beauty tech, if you will. You know, you also got Manscape on the consumer side and a whole bunch of other actually cosmetic beauty lines here in San Diego too that are a little under the radar. So kind of cool to see those come into fruition. I wonder if there's some trend here or is it kind of randomness that these companies are having seen growth right now locally.

Yeah, I mean I covered this topic before. There's another company here in San Diego named Genomatica when they've partnered and they use Biotech to develop products in the consumer and beauty industry. And so it's cool to see that Debut Biotech has raised a Series B funding from these legit firms like l' Oreal is the number one consumer company in beauty and so it's cool to see that they're placing money into a company in San Diego. So I think we're going to continue to see convergence of biotech Beauty consumer. And they're not the first and they won't be the last. So congrats to them. Yeah, Joshua is the CEO, Joshua Britain. So it's cool to see him and team race.

Yeah, totally agree. Well, yeah, I love seeing those convergences. The other area we will I think continue to see the convergence of AI and everything. AI and bio and AI everywhere else too. So we'll keep cover them here on this Week in San Diego Tech News. Make sure you follow fred substack@sdfounders.substack.com Follow FreshBrewedTech.com to keep up to date with the latest raises and events that are going on. And it's good to have you all here. And we will see you at an event and we'll, we'll talk to you next week.

Awesome.

Thanks for practicing. Thank you. Cheers.

Cheers.