This Week in San Diego Tech - June 27, 2025

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech, you know we got it.

Hey.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos and tech, you know we got it. Hey.

Foreign.

Welcome back to this week in San Diego Tech with your boys, Fred, Neil. Hey Fred. Welcome back from your own vacation. Good to have you back in town.

Hey Neil, thanks so much. Yeah, I had a great time. I was in Hawaii for a few days and now back in paradise and you are actually on the road today. You're in LA, so welcome from LA.

Yeah, thanks. 24 hours in LA and then 24 hours in New York. So I'm, I'm hitting a few, hosting an event, a pitch competition up in LA and then I am going to a founder funder summit in New York where some San Diegans are representing. Be out there with Cody Barbo from Trust and Will and Bobby Brandigan from Mercado. So they've been trying to get me out to this annual event for probably three years and finally making it happen. So be out there and be back quick. Should be good.

I love it. I love it. No, it's great. I think there's a few founders who've been moving to New York these days and you know, Trust and Will still, you know, sending a company and they're just continuing to crush it. Mercado, another cool company in town. So yeah, great to see that OG tech founders hang out in other cities.

Anyway. Well, we got a lot to talk about. Let's jump into it actually for summer I would say when times when people are starting to check out on vacation, there's actually a good amount of news going on. So even if you are on the road as well, you know, you can count on us to dive into it and keep you up to date here. Between Fred the journalist who is everywhere on the street tracking all the news and me who's you know, meeting with founders, investing in some founders and just making sure everyone's connected. And so that's what we do here is connect people and share the news. From that regard we'll dive right into the longtime CPG Darling, I would say of San Diego, Dr. Squatch just got acquired again actually. And this is a really, I would say a strong acquisition. Unilever buying them for $2 billion after having a private equity acquisition a few years ago, which this is kind of a typical playbook, you know, for a bootstrapped cpg. I would say that really they got to their first, I think it's first capital invested in it really was at the. For $200 million valuation, I think about five years ago. Does that sound right, Fred? And then.

Yeah. So Dr. Dr. Squatch, I didn't even realize started in San Diego. So you probably know the bad backstory than me. But I did see the headline of the news that they got acquired by Unilever, which is a conglomerate and they own a lot of, you know, consumer brands. But yeah, what, how did they start? Do you know like the backstory of Dr. Squatch in San Diego?

Yeah, actually there's there it all actually funnels back to a very specific marketing agency in Little Italy called Raindrop. You probably have seen this agency on the north end of Little Italy right there by the crack shack. They have a beautiful mural on their side. And they got really good at creating viral video hits for CPG companies. And so if you remember there's a very specific video that Dr. Squatch ran with that featured a specific comedian who was in, kind of became the face of that brand. He actually did a bunch of brands all because he got, he did really good viral, viral work with Dr. Squatch. We'll put a link to one of those videos because it's definitely, it was kind of like 2.0 version of the razor blade company, you know Dollar Shave Club. They kind of went off of that and that was really what helped them take off with this natural soaps product and then into a natural deodorant product. I'm a Dr. Swatch Soap and deodorant user myself. And so San Diego company bootstrapped all the way to $200 million exit to a private equity firm and then got a 2 billion dollar exit by Unilever. So you know, it's a twofer here and very excited to see it. Congrats to the team, to Mike and team here. I don't actually know if the original team's still involved with the company. So great story from that because you know we see cpg, we have really strong CPG roots here. We always talk about the lack of capital for cpg and now we've can show kind of another success story. And so hopefully this breeds more success. It's great for Raindrop to Jackson team to be able to say that they, they started them there and took them off there as well. So congrats to Dr. Squatch team and I hope you continue to deliver a great deodorant because I enjoy it. Let's talk about global markets a little bit. You know we're actually in a bit of a good IPO run right now. There's been a bunch of solid IPOs over the last two, three months that you can actually now string along and show really good market support there. Why this is important. Well all capital at the big public markets stage flows, finds its way flowing down to the, to the startup phase. And so if we see exits, especially public markets having really strong appetite for venture C venture backed startups going public, that's all good for the industry. And so I would say there's two buckets where people are watching. There's the fintech bucket. So you've had Etoro which is kind of like Robin Hood but for the global market, had a great IPO and you actually have some local investors in that. Howard Linden I believe from the social leverage is a part of that. And you have Circle, another fintech doing had a great IPO as well too. So good for the fintech world, you know, in that regard. And then even Wealthfront, a multi stage venture backed company just filed for IPO for like a 3 or 400 billion dollar ARR company which will be a solid multi billion dollar IPO. And then on the SAS side or AI however you want to call it now, SaaS AI. We've had a few strong ones there too with Chime, which is kind of like a, I would say legacy unicorn SaaS company that has had strong showing in the markets as well as Core Weave which is really kind of more of a behind the scenes software in the AI space kind of supporting this new leg of AI. All strong, like really, really strong. Which means that venture capitalists are getting good exits which means they're going to deploy more capital and hopefully raise more funds. So that's good for all of us. What's your take here from seeing it at the global stage?

There was a great tweet this guy named Shy, he works at Brex. I think he's like one of the leadership team. He said it's Fintech Summer Circle IPO, eToro Chime and then all these other ones that have been filed. Klarna well front Navan yeah he's a good, good follow on Twitter. S A I G. We'll link to the tweet in the show notes. But yeah, it's great to see it. You know we did a fintech mixer event last Summer, I believe in Mission Valley we had 40 fintech entrepreneurs come together. Maybe we should bring that back, people, you know, I think it's overlooked. There's always different sectors that kind of pump up the numbers in San Diego and I think fintech doesn't get enough love. But we also have, you know, great group of companies in fintech in San Diego that are continuing to move along and raise capital, which is great to see. Maybe we'll get some IPOs in the future, who knows?

Yeah, great point. No, I, I hope we do get some exits here as well. I'm gonna see if Shy will be at this event tomorrow because we, we connected around doing Brex dinners together. Shy kind of leads the local startup community strategy at the, at the national level for Brex. Hey, Brex, how about uipo? That'd be awesome too, right? I think Brex is on deck there too. You got ramp doing well and Brex should be right behind. Anyway, anyway, fintech summer is upon us and I'm, I'm all for it. Let's talk about some other acquisitions within the San Diego area. Quidel, which is a longtime diagnostics company, made an acquisition. 100 million dollar acquisition of Lex Quidel has been an interesting story that, you know, one of the darlings, I would say of San Diego from a life sciences world but just like all the other diagnostics got caught up a bit in the COVID you know, pre post Covid world of, you know, everyone going all in on Covid diagnostics and then all of a sudden Covid diagnostics is not a market anymore. And so Quidella, you've been seeing them bounce back and buying into other areas to make sure that they're well diversified for where you know, the market is in the post covet area. I know you're spending some time life sciences. You have anything here from Quadel?

Yeah, as you were mentioning that, I was just curious, you know, how much the stock has dropped since 2000s. I remember at their peak they were trading at $282. As of today it's at 28. So their stock prices definitely suffered since then. They still have approximately 6,000 employees. One is still one of the top employers in San Diego. You might have seen their logo quite el orto at some of the Petco park games. But yeah, it's great to see them make some acquisitions. Just trying to stay innovative and stay on top of the industry. They were the leader in COVID testing and full of other diagnostic products and yeah, we'll continue to follow that company closely if there's any other news.

Awesome. Yeah, great to see you. Right. I do see their logos. They've been really good at sponsoring our, the local sports teams in that regard. Which is, which is you always appreciate local supporting local in that regard. Let's talk about some also in, also in the life sciences world, we have some news in the diabetes tech space, which is that out of a local research lab, Lilly's research laboratories, known as Scripps Whittier Diabetes Institute in La Hoya, they had a big break specifically on long lasting insulin. So dive into this a little bit, you know, and give a little backstory. Let's, let's do diabetes 101 real quick. First of all, just because there's so much actually rich history within San Diego related to diabetes care and diabetes management, I'll give some personal story here in a second as well. But you know, the whole point of diabetes is not being able to regulate processing blood sugar. Right. And so with that comes a huge host of health issues for bodies. Now some are preconditions, some are just from health, health and wellness lifestyle, you know, as well. So we talk about diabetes type 1 and type 2. Type 1 is more of like a, you know, genetic disorder and type 2 is more of lifestyle that leads to health disorder. And so both are treated eventually through insulin delivery, which enables the body to process and get the sugar out of the bloodstream. And they've had at this lab a big breakthrough in terms of getting insulin delivered that just stays in the body longer so that therefore you don't have to take it so often and even take it, you know, through a pill as opposed to injecting it. So these are all like really cool breakthroughs that are happening both at the academic research and then commercial level here. You want, you have anything more to share on this?

Yeah. On the front of Eli Lilly, I would say there's been a big announcement earlier this year that they've officially opened their Eli Lilly Gateway labs. There's a few companies I'm familiar that are now moving in. I think they're selecting 10 companies. They're very similar like JLabs where they're supporting local innovation and startups. Robodyne is a local company that's in there, a company called Haya Therapeutics, which raised pretty massive Series A funding earlier this year, just moved into that office and it's right across from Torrey Pines Golf course. You have Scripps and uc, ucsd. Eli Lilly really is at the forefront, as you mentioned, of just a lot of different important issues in healthcare, and diabetes is definitely one of those. And, but they also help support local innovation startup companies by investing in them and providing them opportunities to collaborate with Big Pharma.

Yeah. And, and actually, San Diego has a deep history of, of being at the forefront of diabetes research. In fact, my dad was diagnosed with diabetes at 21 years old back in the 70s. And at the time he was living in LA as a 21 year old, and the only place he could go and get his blood sugar checked was at this research lab at Scripps. And so he would drive down three days a week from LA to San Diego.