This Week in San Diego Tech News - March 18, 2024

Hey everyone.

Good to be back.

Neil Bloom here and Fred Greer in the house. Hey, Fred. Hey Neil.

Glad to be back.

Yeah, it's good to, Good to be back here with you. You just are back in town from a fresh off a trip to New York, huh? How was it?

Yeah, it was a weekend trip. Got to try some good food and see some artwork. But back, back to the grind, attending events and you know, it's been busy. It's been a packed week.

Yeah, I hear you. Sorry we missed paths last week. I actually spoke at USD last week to Jay Kunin's engineer entrepreneur class, which I always do each semester. But it's nice to be on campus USD. It's such a nice campus. I think we ate at the faculty club or something like that, which is nice. So I'm jealous to get to spend so much time on campus there.

Yeah, it's a beautiful campus. I think it's the number one, you know, best looking campus in the us or at least that was the ranking of the last two years. But yeah, it's awesome that you give back to, you know, the universities at ucsd, USD and sdsu.

True. Yeah, I like to, I like to talk, I like to talk to specific audiences, but we're gonna, we're gonna dive in here in a second. But speaking of USD, something that's coming up is the San Diego angel conference, which will be on campus coming up I think in the next month.

So.

So, well, a little tiny preview for that, but I hear that they've weeded down to 12, 12 finalists and they're weeding down further. So that reminded me of USD. But.

Startups get the party, Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos. Tacos in tech, you know we got tacos in tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us Queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping Fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times A craft beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing Coronado eating tacos El gordo the taco stand in pesto Lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost Angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Jolla shows entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in summer Oceanside, the Tijuana St. Be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach tech leaders who believe stars are within reach. We interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon. Hashtag SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom.

Come on Startups get the party Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast where we interview tech leaders in the San Diego tech ecosystem. We also read the latest tech news on this Week in San Diego Tech News. Follow us and subscribe online to your favorite podcast network. Thanks to our partners, Cox Business is a leading provider of technology solutions and we're looking for people like you to grow our local sales business. We reward your hard work with a competitive compensation package plus commission, healthcare awards and recognition for top performers and opportunities for career advancement. We're on a quest to find someone whose savvy sales skills will help keep our customers smiling. Visit CoxBusinessJobs.com to learn more and be a part of our customer focused team. Let's dive into the episode here. I'm Neil Bloom with Fresh Brewed Tech and the Tacos and Tech Podcast, which is a tech newsletter and awareness engine to promote San Diego tech ecosystem as well as an investor with Interlock Capital. And this is Fred.

And I'm Fred Greer, San Diego startup journalist covering tech companies and the VC space in San Diego. I also run my own newsletter writing about the key characters and fundraising rounds and M and A activity in the ecosystem. And glad to be back to talk about the biggest news in tech.

Yeah, and we've finally broken open the IPO market here. I'm going to dive right into that one. It's the hottest news I would say around financial news if you will. Boundless Bio priced their IPO and went public in the last week. Having our first IPO of the year in San Diego in March, which is good. Hopefully this is breaking open more. I mean bio market, Bio World is having its own moment right now with big billion dollar M&As, but also love seeing companies go public because people are skittish these days. What do you know about the buying about the IPO here, Fred?

Yeah, so the Boundless Bio is an early stage biotech company. They had a pretty big like a sizable I think public offering and I don't know too much about the deal but I actually want to do some digging and understanding if there was any local investors involved. But yes, like you said, it was the first IPL that we've seen this year. There's been multiple acquisitions of smaller biotech companies. In January alone I think there was about 6 billion in acquisitions. And so I think people are optimistic with the markets opening up and companies wanting, wanting to go public. I know in LA there's another company, Liquid Death is trying to go public and a few others in San Diego. So I just think that the story here is we might see more companies go public as investors on the public markets are starting to invest.

Yeah, and Boundless is a cancer therapeutic, which we have a lot of in San Diego. We've seen some acquisitions there and as well, new company starting up. I'm looking at the crunch base here and it looks like we do have some San Diego connections here, whether it's Alexandria Venture Investments, which while headquartered in Pasadena has, has a venture team here in San Diego as well as Raw Capital, which has done a lot of San Diego deals. Vertex Ventures also and Arch Venture Partners. I see them on all those names on a lot of Bio deals as well. So that's a good thing. Hopefully that there's freeing up some liquidity though Bio runs a little different. Bio doesn't necessarily like, like Bio, when you go public, it's just another, you know, funding round and oftentimes actually you, you pop and you quickly recede and your stock price drops very quickly. But, but at least you're public now and you have access to more capital. So typically Bio and I've done on a number of interviews, I know with one like with Todd from Tyro Biosciences, we dove deep into like, what does it really mean to go public as a Bio? Like, it's not a. Like, yes, you ring the bell, but it is get back to work and you got to keep, you know, working forward and pushing ahead. So yes, it's a good sign that companies are willing to go that route now. But their path is still being written for sure. But good to hear and we'll keep track of that. Let's do a quick debrief. Let me just give you an overview of what I'm just kind of still recovering from the Escondido Ag X startup hackathon, which just happened last weekend. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. This is our second year that we did this in partnership with the city of Escondido, who houses a very large agriculture community and food processing community as well. And together with our tech community, we brought everyone together to come up with new ideas in the food farm and food and ag farm ecosystem space. So we had three grand challenges. We also put up 10,000 in cash prize money and 10,000 towards companies going through the Aquilius incubator, which is called the Catalyst program. So almost 20k in cash and prizes on the line. We had over 70 people come with ideas, and 14 ideas initially were pitched all over the place. Like on food waste app that tracks and helps people educate on how to pro, you know, do the right thing, cleaning their food waste to, you know, artificial suns for indoor growing, to how do you fill in farms with more exotic plants that may reach higher price points than, say, like, existing? So it was all over the place. It was pretty cool. And the teams met with a ton of farmers on Friday. So they went out on day two and had to go interview the customer, come back, and all their ideas changed or pivoted a little bit after hearing the real problems that their customers were having. And by Saturday, 24 hours later, they had full pitches, five minute pitches to judges who were farmers, growers, technologists, scientists. And we awarded the top three teams. So one, the winning team, called the local basket, is Eric Westreach, who's a serial entrepreneur here in San Diego and longtime volunteer at startup San Diego. He teamed up with three, three software developers from Tijuana, from the Arcus Nexus crew who came up. They had like 15 people come and spend the whole weekend up in Escondido, and three of those were on this team. And the local basket is a basket that is sourced between a number of farms for themed baskets. So imagine, you know, Cinco de Mayo or Easter is coming up. You want a basket with fresh food and kind of the whole meal plan and the whole thing planned in a basket. So they would kind of do the whole experience in a basket where each farm would contribute what they know. So, like the avocado farm, all right, we're in for 5,000 avocados for 5,000 baskets. The tomato farm would do the same for maybe the salsa. So you kind of already know what you're using your products for, as opposed to maybe just going to a farmer's market and like, picking, like, okay, beans sound good? Or corn sounds good. Like, you've got like the kit of parts already given to you. So there he had a website live and for taking pre orders and put together some baskets for the pitch competition itself, which was pretty cool. So congrats to the teams there. You can read the Our Kind of Debrief article. I'll put a link in the show notes here that talks about all the teams. And we already have our next event, the Ag x gathering on April 23, which is linked in that article as well, too. So exhausting, but so fulfilling to see these companies and 50 hours go from nothing to really something. And I believe some of these will become full, full companies and keep working on it after this. So pretty fun experience. We'll get you out to one of these, Fred.

Yeah, it's pretty awesome. And people think San Diego is all biotech, but no, we have consumer, we have ag tech, we have other sectors. And so thanks for, you know, helping the community down in Escondido.

Yeah, that's great. Speaking of north county, more north county news coming, more on the sports side, but there's a tech angle that we can pull out of this. The San Diego Clippers, which is the G League to the LA Clippers, they are relocating from Inland Empire, I believe, to Oceanside at the brand new Front Wave arena, which is a brand new indoor arena up in Oceanside. It's pretty cool news, especially since the original Clippers were actually San Diego Clippers. So the NBA team has San Diego roots and now you've got the G League, which is kind of like their, their minor league team that will be housed in Oceanside. How'd you take this news, Fred?

I, I love it. I think I put out a tweet a few days ago when the, when the, when the news broke. And yeah, I'm really excited. I think they're investing about 100 million into this Oceanside Stadium. A billionaire, Steve Ballmer, who owns the, the LA Clippers, is involved in the deal. And so I think it's a huge win for America's finest city. And you know, San Diego sports scene has been taken off with the San Diego Football Club coming in, the San Diego Women's football, football, soccer club, as well as this Oceanside G League team. It's fantastic win for San Diego and North County. I think property values are going to go up once that finalizes as well.

Yeah. And there's this talk of the old sports arena down in the Midway District getting redeveloped to be a stadium that could house a hockey or basketball team. And maybe this is, you know, the precursor to seeing a minor league team how it does. Are we ready to have, you know, another pro team here? So, yeah, pretty cool all around. I just watched a special on Twitter, I think about the Intuit arena, which is the brand new arena that they're built, that Bomber is building for the LA Clippers and if they. I'll find and link to it here too. They talked about how much tech they're putting into that, like contactless shopping. So never take your wallet out, you know, so that you can get back to your seats quick or stuff like that. So if they're thinking of that kind of tech here in San Diego. I know that we've got a lot of interest there to help them out from some of our logistics tech companies too and retail tech too. So great to hear. Let's talk some techstars news. Two pieces of two different tech stars programs had some announcements this week including the Texars anywhere which is the remote only program, which is the leaders have always been kind of rooted in San Diego and they actually are doing week one right now in San Diego. So those, those companies were announced this week and start week one. And I believe we have at least one San Diego company in that 12 company batch called Namara. It's a water tech company focused on helping the consumer conserve water by putting a device in their house. And then the techstars San Diego accelerator which launches in fall just open applications and are due. I got to look when they're due. I think by May. So if you have a startup that could use three months of very specific acceleration, maybe you are just pre revenue and ready to launch post revenue or maybe you're just pre product and ready to launch. The product like an accelerator is great for that where they will help you figure out a milestone and with three months nail it. Some people use it as just like I need to get to fundraising but milestone but they actually work ahead of that. What is the thing that we want to show progress on for the business that usually then necessitates funding to go scale that thing you just did. So go look in our show notes here for the techstars San Diego application and submit an application we'd love to to see. I mean it'll be, it'll be a mix of San Diego companies and out of San Diego, but the whole program is physically in San Diego. And I think officially now one company from the fall 23 class has moved back and I hear maybe a second one is moving back to San Diego as well too. So even in that regard it's pretty great to get new companies in San Diego. Anything on your end?

Yeah, a few fun facts. Trust and Will started in techstars Crafter's box also started in techstars. Their last demo day was a huge success. I think they had over a hundred people show up out in the community and so just a great opportunity to get in front of the right folks, mentors, investors and you know, turn your idea into a fast growing company. And Ryan Cooter, the managing director at techstars San Diego, powered by San Diego State University, I interviewed him and we'll have a piece on that coming out in a few weeks, so stay tuned. And yeah, applications are live so check it, check it out.

Thanks for naming some of my, my, my top portfolio companies there with that start with Trust and Will, which was my first direct angel investment. I got to know him before the program Ryan and kud and I love to go back and forth on actually who wrote who actually the check went to first my check or his which is fun and crafter as well. Another great one. So yeah, we'd love to find more companies here to to and especially a lot of us in Interlock, our mentors and we get to sit with you and get to know the companies in IT and you know, see where we can be helpful is there as well too. So for us it's just great, great way to get to know companies over a longer period of time than just a pitch. So make sure you tap the Apply now button. So applications are due May 22 is what it looks like. So keep an eye on for that. All right, let's talk some defense tech. So coming off the a few weeks ago we talked about the Harpoon Ventures defense tech meetup, which was a phenomenal success. Overwhelmed. They had a wait list that even in the new venue they, they were bursting at the seams and already announced their next event, which we'll put in the show notes there as well. But on that panel for that night one was Dan Magi, who is a serial defense tech founder who has recently co founded Firestorm, which is a modular missile startup. So they intend to, you know, kind of be able to create your own missile from parts that you may things you want to add. So if you want to add, you know, a different kind of engine, boom, slap that on. Different kind of warhead, slap that on. So super modularity. And they kind of are like in this post Ukraine war where modularity is king, where you have very unique situations and circumstances. And so Firestorm kind of came out in the public I would say and with this, not necessarily out of stealth, but raised a large seed round of 12 and a half million here. What's your take here from the the defense tech world and things that are growing here?

I love to see it. I mean 12 million is a solid round. And you know, San Diego is home to a few defense tech startups like SHIELD AI, which is a unicorn company. And so I'll be closely following them. I think they raised money from Lockheed Martin, who also has a presence in San Diego. And San Diego is a defense town and so you know, it's great for companies to raise funding here and work, work locally and grow and hire SHIELD AI, you know, hires majority of its employees in the area. And so if you're looking for a job in defense tech, check out Firestorm or SHIELD AI because they are hiring.

Awesome. Yeah, great call out and hopefully we'll meet more of them at the next defense tech event that Harpoon is putting on shortly. Let's talk some biotech raises as well. Rakuten Medical just raised a, a large series E, 119 million dollar series E Medical on the medical device side. And Argonaut Biomanufacturing, which is a kind of a contract biomanufacturing company out of Carlsbad, raised 45 million. So more and more bio because you know, we're seeing the market is doing well there from M and A and now public and more funding there as well too. What are you, what's your take on just like bio raises right now? Are you. I mean, yes, we're seeing more but anything specific come to mind of just like who, who is getting funded or the kinds of bio that's getting funded here?

That's, that's a good question. I honestly don't know. Can't speak to specifically, you know, what's the raises that we're seeing? I mean I've been following the funding rounds and right now I think biotech is outraising the tech companies and the consumer companies and I'm seeing you know, repeat founders go out and start new companies and able to raise funding within weeks. For example, Raise the Bio founder Ken Song, you know, he previously founded a company before starting Raise Bio, which was then acquired for you know, I think over a billion, I think $4 billion. And I think he's probably going to start his next thing. And so investors are looking at who has a proven team, proven track record and those, those are the founders that are raising these mega rounds. Series E119 million is eye watering. But you know, with these biotech companies they, they actually need a lot of capital to you know, find success. So it's great to see and you know, biotech is, is really, is really strong in San Diego.

Totally A few tailwinds I feel, I'm feeling when I'm hearing from people is that you know, a lot of the certain diagnostic and other companies who were focused during COVID on Covid, you know, now are kind of getting back to where they were pre Covid. And so there's a lot of that which is like shifting focus Shifting back to maybe core business in that regard and that that spans therapeutic, you know, MRNA and you know, diagnostic. The other piece is from these monthly AI meets bio conversations we're having more and more bio tool, more and more AI tools are coming to the biomarket. Whether it's you know, project management, running smarter trials like a pharaoh health that's here, that's done, you know, significantly well, kind of a soft software for the biotech scene or just other libraries and tools for small molecule discovery. You know, just seeing a lot of tech innovation come to the bio side world that seems to be speeding up the, the process for biotech companies to innovate and move forward maybe with less capital as well too. So those are the, maybe the individual conversations that I'm hearing that's probably helping San Diego in that regard too. Let's talk another hardware tech company that just raised Luke AI which is a UCSD spin out in the constructions tech space. They raise a 2.6 million seed. I met the team a few years ago where they have a unique vision system that they have developed as postdocs and PhDs and they have kind of spun out this technology to do digitization of infrastructure so they can take a multi camera system and walk through a construction site and it will document the work of the day. That's like one use case per se. So pretty cool technology especially with image classification. Have you met the Loop team yet Fred, or hear about them?

Yeah, the CEO did a nice post on LinkedIn. His name is Dominique Meyer and he actually is a UCSD alum. He got his PhD there and he put out a tweet and said, you know, 10,000 emails, hundreds of investor calls, hundreds of flights and demos around the world. Finally you know, we can announce our fundraise. And I was happy to see that Longley Capital, which is a local VC firm, was an investor in the company and there was a few other investors who were non San Diego Bootstrap Labs, Spatial Capital and yeah, we'll be following them closely as they're building some cool technology in the AI space.

Yeah, it's great to see that's for sure. Especially like you mentioned Longley Capital putting in some money there as well too. So we'll keep in touch there and we actually have a little bit of history of construction tech, infrastructure tech here in town. So some other good experienced tech talent, mentors and investors to tap into here for that. Let's talk about some events coming up. Powered by the social coyote we've got. I'm doing a Devin, Data Night combining forces with CTO talks, we're doing a joint event where we're highlighting a panel of experienced technical leaders. So we've got the VP of engineering from Illumina who kind of runs Illumina's like internal incubator. So they spin up like startups within Illumina and determine should we turn them into, spin them out, turn them into projects or not or kill them, which will be a cool conversation. As well as the CTO of Insulet, which is a diabetes tech company here in town, which we have a deep, deep rooted diabetes tech scene. And we've got, oh, Jamie Shield from Enable Auto, who moved from the Bay to San Diego. It's an EV software company that does more kind of the data side of ev. So it powers a lot. They get a lot of data from a variety of sources, whether it's energy and infrastructure and power back to the EV grid and around that. So should be a great conversation in Del Mar at Kenobi Martin's office and moderated by Cheryl Goodman. And it's really focused on talking about leadership, so technical leadership. So what does it really mean to be a CTO today in, you know, up and coming managers and leaders? And on the technology side, like what is. Where are the people curious? What is. What's technically curious? Or where are you technically curious? You know, what's exciting? Generative AI is kind of blown the doors open, everything. We're going to dive a little bit deeper than that. Like, what are you really using today for your company and what's exciting for you personally as a technology leader these days? So Devin Day tonight, March 19th will be a fun event. And then you just came from the SDX AI coffee meetups, which are happening every other week. Tell us about those events.

Yeah. So XDXAI is a meetup happening every Wednesday from 9am to 11am and it's put on by two, two great community builders. One is Andy White who works at Keefshift Ventures as well as Chat Laurie, who is a founder of SDX and ETH San Diego. And their whole goal is to, you know, bring together folks who are interested in AI or working in AI. There was about 20 folks there. Also Keisha Ventures team was there and everyone went around the room to share the latest news or the latest headline that they read white paper that they read in AI and they share and exchange ideas. I thought it was great. And it was at UCSD's campus and they do it weekly. And so they said that they had 35 people show up two weeks ago and so it's great to see that there's some interest and momentum building in the AI space. It's a little technical but you know, it's great for people who are, you know, geeking out on LLMs and other AI related tools and softwares.

You pull out a tool that you new to you and you're going to try.

You know, there are so many AI tools it's really hard to keep up. I I like to use my trusty chat GPT. I have a page description and I've been messing around around with that, you know, pretty weekly.

Yeah I feel like the buzz this week. I'm also very rigorously on GPT and I've been a mid journey user for a while but now GPT's Dolly is really caught up to a certain regard. But the the big news this week in the genove our world was was Claude3 last week which we've been using already at SDSU's Zip Launchpad for using for testing iteration and then Devin this week everyone's talking about, you know, software developer as a service AI where which is pretty, pretty cool. So I'm sure those are both topics.

That came up in today's meetup. So if you're interested in learning more about those things, I highly recommend checking it out.

Awesome. I love it. And speaking of, SDSU ran out this week. They've got the Chinye Hostler Social Venture H2O Impact Challenge. So it's a pitch competition on Friday, March 15th and all the pitches will be water related which will be really interesting to see technology. I'm actually I expect them to be all over the place, kind of like ag, like hard tech, consumer tech, all those other things. So we'll put a link to that in the show. Notes if you'd like to attend the H2O Impact Challenge at SDSU and that is our show. We're always grateful for you for listening Fred. It's always a pleasure doing this with you. Make sure you are subscribed to Fred's Substack the Business of San Diego and share this podcast with others so that we're making sure that everyone is as aware as possible about what's going on here in San Diego. You don't need to always come to Fred and I come to our podcast. Share it with the world.

Always. Always a pleasure Neil. Until next time. Thanks Fred.

Cheers.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got tacos in techies on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas, round jalapenos in these modern times A craft beer and coffee My coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in puesto lucha libre and sombrero gotta shout out to cost angels by the ocean, watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside to Tijuana Estee be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach we interviewing founders who be shooting for the Moon. Hashtag SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Come on.

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 in 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 in tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got it.