San Diego Tech News Weekly – September 17, 2021

Well, welcome, everyone. Happy Friday. It is a busy Friday. A lot going on right now. We got Women's Venture Summit, which I hope most of you are at and listening to this recording later. But we are here to tell the news. That's what we do. And we will. Hey, Jonah, how you doing? What's up?

Doing well, actually. Got kind of a. Well, we just got back from Maui, so we did a little bit of an adventure there. But you might have heard on a previous podcast that I wear a Dexcom sensor. Sensor. So we got crazy sunburned out there last day, right. So we did it responsibly, got home, I swapped the sensor. You change it every, you know, handful days, week and a half. I have basically the size of maybe a half dollar, if you know what that it looks like of a completely white patch. And everything else is like seven shades darker or sunburned. It's absolutely hilarious. But I have to show you, sometimes it's kind of funny. But yeah, like right on my chest. It's just like a circle that's just bright white and golden. And then the rest is amazing.

It's almost too bad there isn't, like, a cutout for the letters of Dexcom, so that Dexcom's branded into you a great post on social to tag them.

That's amazing. Yeah, it's so funny. But that kind of does, like, lead us in. We do have a whole ton of biotech updates, but from a slightly different angle this time, which will be kind of. Kind of cool. Less about the companies and kind of more about where they're living. But not to dig too deep into there. Do you want to kick things off, Neil?

Yeah. Yeah. Welcome, everyone. Neil Bloom here, entrepreneur, community builder, investor with Freshproof Tech with Interlock Capital at Startup San Diego. All the things. And here with my pal Jonah Peake as well, too.

What's up, everybody? Happy to. Happy to be here. I love doing the news on Friday in tech for a number of years. Tons of operations. And we're going to be doing some investing soon. We'll tell you more when that's live, but just loving San Diego. Love this weather, love the speed, and, you know, excited about what we got going on here. And that actually, interestingly enough, kind of leads into the first story. I don't know if you want to kick off the headline and then I can take this away. Got a little background here.

Yeah. This has got your name all over it. Bird. Bird. As many of you know, the scooter business, we love the scoot scoot. News, they're back this time bringing E bikes to San Diego. It's their first market that they are testing their new E bike in that they're actually selling as well, which I think was also similar. They did the same with their scooters. They could, you could buy a bird scooter too. But Joni, you got some scoop. Business background. Take us away.

This is so, this is super, super interesting and we'll kind of get into why everybody loves San Diego in a second. But when I joined Lime a number of years ago, we were operating a fleet of like 300 to 500, ramping up the scooters. There was, you know, sub 1000 or just, you know, high hundreds E bikes and then thousands of bikes. And so, you know, initially a lot of companies started with, with the sort of multimodal, let's sort of give everybody an option. And then really through ride data, you see that sort of scooters really were the most, you know, customer selected choice. They're fun, you can stand on them. But at the same time, you know, you start to see other products coming up like wheels or veo, which have kind of more of a sit down option. Some people are a little nervous standing on scooters and so, you know, it makes a lot of sense to have multiple options. E bikes are a little tricky because, you know, you need to obviously charge them. They're bigger and heavier. You can't fit as many into a van. And so the industry was shifting a little bit more towards a swappable battery. So you could just drive up to it, swap the battery in, out, and leave the bike kind of where it was. You wouldn't need to move it as much. But still, that's pretty manpower, heavy operations, heavy. And so I think we're getting to that place. But Birds was notoriously the first scooter company that came in, showed everybody the popularity of the scooter and really everybody kind of tagged along after. But what's interesting, and this happened quite frequently during my time at Lime was San Diego was like the market in the beginning. We were the market to watch for a number of reasons. And for better or worse, they said the investors kept an eye on San Diego. And you know, we're a great test market because we have solid weather. Tourism is really, you know, really heavy. You can ride pretty much year round and, you know, you can imagine scooter wheels in the rain. So we have low moisture too. So, you know, we have a really good place to test a lot of vehicles, a lot of operations and you know, that that's really cool because it brings a ton of innovation here. But at the same time, you know, we, as we saw that sort of overnight snow, I'll put air quotes around that of scooters, where we all woke up one morning and we're like, whoa, where did these all come from? Yeah, maybe we get a little overrun on the other side, but there's some funny news out there. They said, you know, Bird comes out with more than a thousand scooters. I'll tell you right now that feels incredibly low based on the data that I have. But, you know, everyone's very coy about what they're doing, but they are bringing E Bikes into the market. They're partnering with SDSU so that you can kind of help bring some green transportation options to campus. And, you know, we've many of us in college and many of the students I've talked to, parking on campus is definitely not easy. I don't know if this is giving away too much, but one of our most popular spots was the glider port for line years ago. I'm sure it's changed, but because on campus, so having options like this are really awesome for that crowd. It's obviously the demographic that is looking to ride these bikes and scooters, and so, you know, hopefully they're able to have a little bit of success. I'd love to see some more E bikes. I'd love to have more options for folks that maybe don't feel as comfortable on a scooter or you don't want to have or maybe can't stand on a scooter. Maybe you prefer to sit down. But last thing you know, I'll be. I'll be the. The lame parent soon and wear a helmet. There's. Cars are big, potholes are everywhere. Just be safe while you're out there, but definitely have some fun and enjoy the city. Really opens up some range. So welcome. Welcome with E Bikes. With. With Bert.

Yeah, welcome back. Uh, E Bikes do seem safer, I would think. But then like you said, speed might be a difference in factor there too. Definitely know plenty of people that got hurt on scooters, most of their knees. But either way, hopefully time has helped make them a little safer. And people are smarter too, so we shall see. But we love a good scoot news, that's for sure. Uh, you know what I also love in San Diego and hard to not talk about his Biotech, that's for sure. Our bread and butter. And biotech's booming, as we all know. I Think in future episodes we're going to talk about how much it's booming in terms of jobs, in terms of funding over other industries. But for now we're going to talk kind of more real estate in a little bit. So new biotech expanding to San Diego. Ibio. Welcome, welcome. The publicly traded company from Bryan, Texas. Love by the way, seeing a Texas company expand into California bucking whatever trend. We love telling where people are going from California to Texas. What up, giddy up. Come on over and comes where the real tacos are at. Not breakfast tacos in Austin, but love seeing them expand here. They're moving into 12,000 square feet of new lab space in Sorrento Valley. Another very popular biotech hub that we're going to talk about. Ibio is doing plant based antibodies. So both for therapeutics and vaccines.

Remember this before?

No. It's super cool. Take us away. Science by Jonah.

Yes, science update. Super cool. So I didn't at first I was like I don't even understand what this is. And so basically you can genetically engineer a plant with animal DNA to produce antibodies which is wild. So it's like super, super modified. But what they're doing on another level is and actually this is kind of, it's kind of bummed me out. I was like plant a body. That's so sick. Can't use that. Trademark by Biolex, a completely different company. They grabbed that term kind of lame, but it's just so perfect. Flows right off the tongue. But what's cool is so cool. You could, these can be, these antibodies can be purified really cheaply and, and produce at a large number. So you can get a ton of these and just to kind of share some scale. In their Texas facility they have 130,000 square feet. That's pretty good size. Half a million hydroponic plants and it's a fully automated vertical farm. So really taking over a number of really interesting technologies from antibodies to vertical farming to autonomous operations. Can of neat future. The future in one company here.

Love seeing that. We love convergences of things. You know, farming, biotech, vertical farming now which is, you know, urban farming to the clustering of all this. So love seeing that, the bleeding edge kind of stuff. You know they're coming from pretty big facility in Texas and got to imagine they're coming to San Diego for work life balance for their employees plus also be able to raise families here too. So you know, not, not surprising to see that you want talent in this beautiful biotech burgeoning ecosystem. So yeah, hope that they, they grow from here. There are 20 people here and grow on out from there.

But one last point, you know, before we charge on. No, it's really awesome to see kind of vertical farming and aquaponics sort of outside the marijuana industry. You know, obviously that's booming too. But it's cool because I think it really brings a attention to the potential of vertical farming. And like you said, in a close, close by warehouse space, if we can grow food that gets shipped five miles over into the downtown area versus across the country, I mean that's, that's huge for a number of reasons. So just wanted to call that out.

Yeah, no, great point. As well as other areas of biotech that are booming. You know, when booming happens, real estate becomes scarce and the Torrey Pines Mesa easily has, has been topped out. You know, there's only so much room there though. I still see construction from the five, but man, gotta imagine it's pretty topped out there. And so because of that, we're seeing new biotech campuses spring up all over San Diego County. So a new one popping up in Sorrento Valley. A Group just bought five buildings for 576 million for 1.4 million square feet of new biotech campus over. If you know, if you know Sorrento, it's Harrison street and Sterling Bay or. No, those are the companies that are buying it. Sorry, but they're buying buildings that right now are leased by Qualcomm, Tanvax and Wacker and they're going to have another access to 13 acres to build another 1.1 million square feet of office and lab space. So massive, massive, massive campus. This falls in the footsteps of the IQ HQ building downtown. Another million square feet that has been announced to be all biotech lab space on the water. Pretty massive and pretty awesome there. There's also thoughts of, you know, Horton Plaza going to be biotech focused. Another million square feet. So you know, these million square feet to seeing them pop up, especially during the pandemic where it's so uncertain if tech will really ever come back. But biotech obviously is and is in such demand. So great to see that an already is great, great industry is getting even greater because of this need for space, you know, and it's. Sorrento is super close to lots of things, right? So ucsd, Scripps, Salk, Sanford Burnham. So you know, not surprising why Sorrento would be the next adjacent spot that's growing for, for real estate.

Well, it's crazy. It's hard to believe that there's even 13 acres available, you know, to build in that area. I thought it was packed to the, to the gills. Which, which kind of leads us into final piece of our super biotech real estate update. But the last thing before diving into that is, you know, I was thinking about this recently. I mean we have so much biotech in San Diego. It's such a massive industry, but we might want to dive a little deeper into sort of what are the jobs that are sort of the non scientist based or what, you know, what can you do to support that industry that doesn't, you know, feel like you have to get a PhD because you know, maybe, maybe I want to go back to school. Maybe there's some opportunities there with some operations work or you know, some other sort of details. I mean you obviously have to manage campuses, you have to, you know, maintain them. And so I think there's a lot more going on around that area. And so you don't necessarily want people to think that they're boxed out completely. If you know, we're such a biotech focused city. It is true. And maybe that's leading the charge. But you know, that's not really the, that's not really the only thing that's going on.

No, it's a great point. You know, like just because you're a biotech doesn't mean you're not one. Have other tech related jobs like data science, software engineering, but also everything else marketing and sales. Man, I can't tell you how many people I get pitches from right now who started their career as a med device salesperson or pharma salesperson, learn sales like hard sales, learn their chops there and are moving it into SAS or something else. So yeah, it's great that it's a mature market that can train up talent in a diverse range of skill sets. Totally agree. You're right. We should be exposing like all the openness to different jobs. But speaking of just like how busting out the seams it is, you know, Torrey Pines, like we said, is too hot. And you mentioned where is the, where is the land? Well, the 56 along the 56 highway. That's where more biotech is going to. And another huge campus is also being developed there. Half a million square feet is being developed by Seabreeze Properties in Torrey Highlands. I always get confused when we talk about Torrey Highlands, Torrey Blank. It's. But I think I finally figured out it's kind of on those hills right at 56 and the 5 and then everything moving into the 56. It's kind of like South Carmel Valley almost in a sense, if you drive that lot of space into. It's been there for years. And now here comes biotech moving in right alongside them as well too.

You know, it's crazy. Yes. I was looking at some maps. If you just look a bit east of literally where Tori is now, you start to see this area. But this kind of goes back to what we're talking about again a couple weeks ago with sort of this high demand. This project has been in the works for a number of years, but they're actually reworking the office portion of the campus into life sciences and actually applied to amend their permit to allow for labs. So they kind of were like, you know, they're building something already and they said, oh wait, we're missing an opportunity here. And so they actually are adjusting the plans for this facility to accommodate a little bit more lab space. Kind of, kind of cool to see.

Yeah, exactly what we'll like we said we'll probably see in Horton Plaza as well, you know, so keep an eye out for that.

It's like the Pac sun right now. The PacSun turns into a bio lab.

Yeah, exactly. Anything available, you know. And speaking of another expansion company, really this is actually started out with an IPO Alert Health which has been booming over the last year, but it is a ten year overnight success. I'd call it. Like this is one of the companies that's riding the pandemic wave. They failed to go public and they started in and I think they're still in Sorrento or utc. They have made a big expansion into Vista, which is where their facility, their manufacturing facility is. But they're doing like devices, smart devices, so connected devices that have been helpful in building out devices for Covid. So they've kind of rode this wave. They got a $450 million grant or contract kind of one in the same from the US government a year ago, which really helped them. You know, it's a big client obviously. And then right after that took like 275 million in new funding just three to six months ago and now filing to go public. So obviously they've hit a nerve and doing amazingly well. A company that a local biotech investment firm, Section32 invested in them I think three to four years ago. So way before the pandemic and way before they really had product market fit, it sounds like. And so kudos to them, you know, for getting lucky on this one. But yeah, this is not only a unicorn, but now going public too, which I think is our 15th or 16th IPO on the year. Look for an article from Natalie Rocca at the Business Journal, I think within early next week where she's going to document all those. But I'm pretty sure we've gotten, we've named Most of them 15 IPOs on the year, which is like 2 or 3x what our normal year is easily. But connected devices here. This is a great sign of showing both manufacturing, biotech and tech coming together. So not just a lab science company only, but a whole bunch of diverse jobs to get Q Health to where it's at.

Awesome. Yeah, there's sites amazing. I was just like poking around here. There's a lot of rabbit holes to go down but it looks beautiful. I love in home testing and you know, we don't want to go to labs if we don't have to. And this looks like it's actually doing some, some really awesome stuff and working that is not Theranos. So just calling that one out.

Yes, for sure. Let's talk through another. Another actually Sorrento Valley company Aptera Motors, you may have seen this one. They're doing a three wheeled solar powered electric vehicle. They've been working on this for a while too. And now it's hot again. Solar and electric vehicles are hot again. Solar powered electric vehicles that we don't see a lot of. So that's kind of cool and smart. They are pushing ahead with manufacturing. So this is kind of cool. The three wheel, one wheel in the front, two in the back and solar on kind of the whole roof panel. I believe or no, it's on like the hood and the trunk.

Yeah, it's a kind of every available space. This is a really, really interesting problem. I think it's one of those ones that everyone sort of naturally says, oh duh, like put solar panels on the car. If you really want to go down a rabbit hole and do this a coup weeks ago with a different electric car company, look up like Teslas and solar panels and they'll show you people are trying to retrofit the tops of their cars with solar panels. But if you think about it, and this is just kind of from what I found at a high level look is solar needs to have is typically panels are flat because they want that really direct hit of sun to get the optimum charge. But I don't think we want a square car because that's not good for aerodynamics. And so you have this problem of shape, optimum sun absorption and then enough Surface area to actually absorb enough electricity to make it matter that your car is sitting in the sun versus, you know, like a tiny little backpack charger that really isn't going to get you very far. So a little more complex. It seems like a natural solution. It's not that easy.

Interesting. Yeah, but they're getting, they're nailing it and it's, it's hidden with. Obviously range anxiety is a big thing for people. Right. You don't want to pull over and charge if you don't have to. So charge while you drive. And it's proven that it's working there. You got 11,000 pre orders for this, which is pretty awesome. And so they're looking for some new manufacturing space. If only they were a biotech man, that'd be a lot for them. But I got to imagine they're. Well, knowing what I know about north county right now, which is booming on the industrial space side, I bet they're looking there and maybe in south county too, which is coming online with a ton of manufacturing industrial space too. So hopefully they find a spot in San Diego to do this. Yeah, but it's pretty exciting. Majority of the parts are. Oh, go ahead. Yeah.

Oh, no, I was going to get into that same thing. I mean, for them to actually make the car successful the way that they want and try to get 40 miles of range from just sitting in the sun, which is incredible. It needs to be super lightweight and aerodynamic. But that kind of adds to their, that kind of adds a little bit to their advantage. Right. Because now all their parts and then their pieces are lightweight. And so they can actually do some of the manufacturing on site in their own facilities. So they can make their own parts. But let's not forget they can ship their own parts around. And so that makes the facility that they're looking at, looking to acquire a little bit unique to maybe your standard or the car company manufacturing facilities you might have seen on YouTube or on videos of like, you know, Tesla kind of sending their cars through an assembly line. Those are much heavier and have to be much more machined and built. So an advantage on the one hand. On the other hand, you know, we've, we've all seen the big trucks and cars running around the city currently. So, you know, a lightweight vehicle has to be safe too. So kind of a bit of both sides. But yeah, they want to try to get, have your car sit in the parking lot, get 40 miles worth of range and then they envision, if you, if you're able to charge it up Maybe you can go up and over 250 miles. So maybe an excellent option for commuting and cruising around the city, but we'll see where they go. This is pretty cool.

Yeah. I mean, I hope that just finding new applications for solar advances. Solar, right. Yeah. Just the way that, you know, Tesla found ways to put it into roof tiles. You know, that's what we hope that becomes when you actually work on it and apply it and find money a business case for it. It becomes build a denser and find new places to put it on the car. So just glad to see this moving forward. And the company's name is Aptera again, if you want to check them out. And those are our stories for the week. But we got some events and some funding news to share through that we'd love to dive into happening right now, Women's Venture Summit last night, today and tomorrow. So hopefully you're listening to this later because you've been listening to Venture Summit. But everyone here, I hope you got one ear of us. One year of Women's Venture Summit like Kelly's doing. Great event that we love being a part of. My partner Al at Interlock Capital is giving a workshop tomorrow. So check in on that. Shout out to him. Next week is the green summit by green.org so go to that website and it's the 23rd and 24th. I'll be giving a talk on investments in CleanTech on the 24th at actually right around now. Next week, 1pm Next week. So I'll be doing our 12:30 clubhouse and then I'll jump in right over to the summit to give a talk.

I'll join you. I'll jump into the audience.

It sounds awesome. Jump on in. Yeah. And then lastly, October is startup month. So October 1st through 29th. The whole month is startup month. Go to san diegostartupweek.com the first week is heavy content and then after that is a lot of pitch practice or talent incubation. If you're looking to work at a startup. We've got a whole bunch of tech entrepreneurs and recruiters that'll give you some guidance on how to work at a startup. And then there's the full month incubator that's going on. So you can apply for the incubator, get a full month's handheld work with mentors from techstars, one of the top incubators in the in the world. And then we've got our first ever San Diego Startup Awards gala night. So I think it's the end of the month. Don't quote me on the dates, but you can submit nominations right now for like best technology, best startup, best investor, best and other things there too. So san diegostartupweek.com check that out. And then fundings, man, it's been a busy week for fundings. We probably saw just in tech alone over 2,300 million in funding raised in one week. So the big one is measurable ESG platform helping real estate properties and tech companies alike who want to be measuring their environmental, sustainable and growth impact. I think the G was wrong there, but esg, they've been built out an amazing dashboard to really, truly measure your ESG KPI 50 million from them. Congrats to Matt Ellis and the team. There go forms. This company's been in the news a lot because the founder got in some legal trouble. But they have continued charging ahead, raising 13 million, I believe for creating interesting, unique forms for companies to use at the enterprise level. Tiled company also raised somewhere in the $13 to $15 million Series A. They are doing interesting things with content creation and actually they have a big partnership and now a fund, sorry, a investor in Seismic Software, one of San Diego's unicorn invested in them, which you love to see, that's for sure. Yeah, Giga IO raised 20 million plus in this in the semiconductor space. Doing some interesting things on density there. And there's one more that I'm missing that I feel really bad about that I have to recall.

So you know what? Tweet us if you think of it.

I will for sure. It's in the space of detecting fake images and fake content, so they can actually determine if there's been deepfakes on video and pictures. And they've got some tremendous backing from newspapers and journalisms like ap. Hearst Media have all backed this company and all of a sudden the names escape me. So sorry about that.

Hey, Google to the rescue. True pick. 26 million.

True epic. There we go. Truepick. Yes. 26 million in funding to root out deepfakes.

It's going to be a big thing coming up. I think this is important tech.

Absolutely. So big one, big week. A lot of fundings, a lot of like, you know, 10 million plus kind of fundings. So love to see it, that's for sure. Anything else on your radar, Jonah?

That's it. I mean, we're up on one o' clock and we just, we just cruised through. There was so much going on this week, but no, it was excellent having everyone. Thanks for joining us live. What's up John, Brooke, Santosh, Rose, how you guys all doing? Seisha, thanks for joining. And, Neal, take us out.

Yeah. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining live. If you're listening to this recorded, hope you listen to it a few times. Do it in slow motion, in fast motion. Tell us how we sound at what speed, and we will catch you next week, 12:30 after a glorious San Diego weekend. So thanks all. Cheers.

All right, we'll see you later.