This Week in San Diego Tech News - May 2026

Ah! Startups get da party— startups git tha pahdy started start ups gitta pahty staarted you want tech n tacos?

Tacos en tec?! You know we got it hey!!

Startupz geht dah partii startupzz gehd ahh parti staaarredt...

Staruuuupps geet thuh bohdee starrrrtpss geeeth thee pawddy staarrded yoooou wanna teck inn taakkoos? Taakkoozs een tehccch?? Y'know wee goot it hey!!!

Ahhhhhh!

Oh my God this guy's crazy man!

What do I see here!?

Whoaaa what happened to your hair???? This looks like an alien or something dude!

Heheha ha wow that was cool haha lol heeeyyy oh no way yo look at his face bro ergh Yeah yeah ya'll saw him right there guys eugh ewwww uggg hahaha Stop talking about me please stop looking so gross on camera okay thank you very much—

ummm whoaaaa wait uh why am i still filming myself???

Uhggaagaaayyyy Ooh oof fuck off doggie come back later for some more videos bye-bye alright thanks again everyone enjoy yourself have fun tonight everybody peace out ciao! Heyo how're things going over by Vancouver today people? It seems pretty good actually not bad but if anything kind of slow day yesterday because all these fucking companies were trying their best just getting up before they had stuff ready last minute which sucks cuz then when everything gets delayed shit happens anyway don't worry though cause next week starts fresh new month mayonnaise time baby let's make money now yes sir!

Haha yayyyyyteeeehiiiieeeeeeeeheeheyhihyeahbwoooooowwww What's up everybody? Welcome back to This Week in San Diego Tech News. I'm your host Neal Bloom, and this week I'm flying solo, missing my buddy Fred, but it felt like the perfect time to just jump in and do a show because this week has felt like a month and this month has felt like a year. Wait, San Diego's become a much bigger deal than people realize. That's what, that's what's been on my mind lately. On this show, we're going to cover a San Diego consumer brand that just IPO'd, another massive acquisition in the craft brewing space of San Diego, one of our local defense tech companies absolutely ripping, a brand new list of the HardTech 50 and the follow-on Next Wave 30. UCSD is pushing deeper into supercomputing and fusion. And even the zoo partnering with Scripps Oceanography to work on conservation tech. This is one of those episodes where the connective tissue matters because these aren't random stories. They're signals. So let's jump in. First story, Suja Juice IPOs and the San Diego consumer brand pipeline. Let's start with Suja here. Suja is just IPO'd yesterday if you're listening to this on Friday. And this is a huge moment, not just for the company, but the San Diego consumer brands overall. What's fascinating is the journey because Suja started as this scrappy, organic cold-pressed juice company. In fact, they were live bringing juice to San Diego Startup Week back when I was helping run in 2015, 2016 timeframe, which is kind of this perfect moment now, we think, where everything's about health-conscious consumer products, but they were doing it 10 years ago when it still was, you know, early, early movement there. And so the founding story is very San Diego: health, wellness, premium lifestyle, better-for-you products, clean ingredients. It's like the entire Southern California consumer DNA. But then Coca-Cola invested in them. That matters because Coca-Cola does not casually place bets on emerging beverage brand brands unless they see a category shift coming. And this was back pre-COVID, by the way, when they invested. Um, and then private equity got involved and then the company evolved completely operationally. Years later, just IPO'd, went public on the NASDAQ. So look at that trajectory. Startup, strategic validation, operational scale, and now in the public markets. And in fact, here's something more— even more interesting. This is the second consumer brand founded in San Diego to go public this year alone. The other one, Once Upon a Farm, just went public just a few more months ago. We got one, maybe we think that might happen before the end of this year, Vioree. So something's really happened here. And I don't think people are traditionally thinking of San Diego as a consumer product powerhouse the way they think of L.A. or New York. But they should. And that's because San Diego has this unusual combination of wellness culture and outdoor lifestyle, biotech and nutrition expertise, design-forward branding, and affluent early adopters. So there's a really strong recipe here for premium consumer products, and I think San Diego has become one of the best test markets in America for health and lifestyle brands. But this brings us to our second story. And this is where the story gets even more interesting, because at the exact moment of this IPO, Stone Brewing back in the headlines for getting acquired again, or some might say sold off.

Hmm.

Sapporo acquired them 2 years ago, and this week they sold— Sapporo sold the Stone brand to Firestone Walker, a Central Valley, Central, Central Coast, California brewing company, and they sold the brand, the beer, but not all the manufacturing. And so in fact, Sapporo is holding on to Stone's manufacturing lines, and I hear unfortunately, um, gonna be looking for a new buyer and selling off the Escondido Disneyland plant. So bummer for the local market, but man, have we seen the local beer scene, uh, take a hit, that's for sure. But that's a global macro trend happening that is affecting, you know, at one point our 150 craft breweries in San Diego. But let me tell you an interesting, fascinating story between Suja, Stone, and another tech company in San Diego. In fact, the CEO involved in all of these, Maria Stipp— I might call her the M&A exit mastermind of San Diego because she has been involved in 4 exits, 3 San Diego, 1 non, but a big brand as well. Uh, you might've heard of, uh, a little company in San Diego that used to take in— actually, it still does this— takes in your iPhone, your old iPhones, and pays you for it. This is a company that was born in San Diego, born in Evo Nexus, actually acquired multiple times by Redbox, then spun back out and been acquired again. Have you guessed it yet? This is EcoATM. Well, Maria Stipp took over as— was very involved once EcoATM was already under the Outerwall brand, which is actually owned which owns Redbox and a few other kiosks, if you will. After she got EcoATM acquired and into the right spot, she went on to be the CEO of Lagunitas Brewing, which she helped get acquired as well, too. Took that brand and helped them find an exit and then was tapped to be the CEO of Stone Brewing. Stone was one of the most storied San Diego brewing companies, honestly. I think started in '96 by two, uh, two guys, man, I'm forgetting the names all of a sudden. They're gonna come to me probably by the end of this podcast, but legends in microbrewing, really led the movement, uh, of craft local and IPAs, honestly, or just, you know, a new way to try beers that just aren't typical. So she got Stone acquired after, you know, 25, maybe 30 years in business, uh, and then went on to help Suja. Suja was already private equity backed when she came in as CEO and then just took them public. What a track record. Uh, incredible. By the way, along the way, she's been on the board of Siete Foods, which also had a big acquisition I think since she joined that board, I think the acquisition was by, you know, a big consumer packaged foods company. So shout out to Maria Step, finding exits for consumer brands. Incredible. Now what this means for us locally, look, Suja has a big manufacturing plant in Oceanside. We hope that maintains jobs because we need manufacturing. And local manufacturing in that regard. So we'll keep you posted in that regard here. But it definitely shows talent density, shows kind of this interesting poetic, you know, San Diego story from craft beer dominance to functional beverage wellness. Interesting that are all tied together. Same leadership at the helm there. Feels very San Diego to me. All right. Let's shift. Complete gears into defense tech. Firestone Labs, it's on an absolute heater. They are one of the biggest names in defense tech these days. They just in the last few weeks announced an $82 million Series B funding round and a new $30 million contract. So this company is becoming one of the breakout hard tech stories in the country, let alone in San Diego. What's wild is they represent this entirely new category of defense tech and defense startups. It's not your old-school defense contracting. This is rapid manufacturing, deployable drone systems, edge logistics, software-defined hardware, and distributed production. Modern warfare increasingly becomes who can adapt the fastest, which is not something we've ever talked about in the old-school prime contractor world. But with Firestorm, building infrastructure around them is that reality. It's worth mentioning Firestorm actually was also the host of last week's first annual HardTech 50 Awards release party. So shout out and thank you, Firestorm, for that. And it felt really symbolic in that we were in this warehouse factory of factories. In fact, it's a warehouse where they are building factories and shipping containers that can be shipped to the front lines, into battlefields, and into every military base on the planet that now can produce parts in minutes as opposed to months to, you know, fix that hatch or fix that antenna. Funny story, and we'll probably have Dan on, CEO Dan, on the pod soon, is where they started. They really started as a 3D-printed drone company, and now they are an everything-printed drone company at the edge. And so this is a density that's really kind of interesting in San Diego, one that we saw in the room at the HardTech50, where suddenly it's not just aerospace, defense, robotics. They're all colliding together. They all have a piece in each other, just as much ocean tech and energy, manufacturing, autonomy. And San Diego has always had pieces of this because of the military presence and the engineering talent. But now the startup ecosystem and venture ecosystem are finally syncing up around it. So that's new, this kind of blurring of lines. And nationally, I think we're entering an era where the hard tech founders are becoming as culturally as important as the SaaS founders were a decade ago, which is why we released this Hard Tech 50 and Next Wave 30. The Hard Tech 50 2026 list is officially out. And honestly, it was impossible to start at 50 companies. Like, once I made that list and realized who is doing amazing things, solving hard problems and doing it at scale already, Like, I got to 80 companies. And so we made the HardTech 50 and the Next Wave 30 because there's just too many companies emerging right now. What I love about this list is it's not a ranking at all. It's really a snapshot of momentum. What— and what this reveals is something I've been talking about for years. San Diego may quietly be becoming one of the most important hard tech ecosystems in America, not just software. Actual physical world technology, things that move atoms. We're talking drones, robotics, semiconductors, infrastructure, ocean systems, energy systems, manufacturing, so many more. And one thing I noticed when I put this all together is that these founders of these, of these companies, they're increasingly interdisciplinary. The new generation isn't, I'm only software or I'm only aerospace. It's that blend of disciplines naturally. AI plus hardware, biology plus robotics, defense and autonomy, ocean science and data infrastructure. That convergence is where really interesting companies are forming. So check out that list. We've got it linked in the show notes here. And let's talk about where some of this, this technology is, is starting in labs is at UCSD, which continues to quietly build one of the most important engineering ecosystems in the country. And UCSD's own newspaper, The Guardian, had a great article about university's new engineering initiatives spanning supercomputing, fusion, advanced scientific research, and high-performance computing infrastructure. And honestly, this matters way more than people think because the future of AI isn't just models, it's infrastructure, compute, energy, cooling, simulation, scientific tooling. The universities that understand this early are going to matter enormously.. And UCSD has this unique combination of world-class engineering proximity to defense and biotech and oceanography and increasingly AI infrastructure research because of the San Diego Computer Center, Supercomputer Center, because of 40 years in deep plasma energy research. And when you kind of stack all that together on top of the institutions that have spun out from this, by the way, Qualcomm, GA, General Atomics, the Navy, other defense tech startups, and the broader kind of aerospace ecosystem. This is important to watch on deep tech starting in labs at schools, turning into technology that's literally being begged for at the edges of AI and energy infrastructure. So we'll keep an eye on that. The last story here, another great blurring, really a classic San Diego story. Of blurring of institutions is one about the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. They announced a new conservation partnership, but it's deeper than conservation. Uh, this one's kind of a reminder that our unique institutional landscape really actually lends to this blurring density of talent. What do you get when you have world-class oceanography, elite conservation biology, biotech, defense, AI and climate research all within a few miles, well, you get this cross-interdisciplinary innovation that's happening. And when you formalize partnerships, you realize that the proximity matters a lot. And so now you've got researchers run into founders who turn into founders. See that all the time at Scripps now. Engineering— engineers collaborating with biologists. Defense tech who are becoming climate technologists in terms of shoring up the shores and airports and defense bases, and ocean science starting to become data science. And that future increasingly belongs to ecosystems that blend domains together, and San Diego is unusually good at that. So take an eye— keep an eye on that. Our institutions blurring, science becoming practical and blending into urgent needs. And so what's that theme? I think San Diego is entering this next chapter. For years, people talked about San Diego as a biotech hub or a military town or a beach city with some startups. But I think that story is becoming bigger than that. We're seeing consumer IPOs, defense unicorn trajectories, AI infrastructure with hard tech acceleration. Advanced research institutions, densifying within the ecosystem, all compounding at once. And that's how real innovation hubs form. Not from one big company, not from interconnected momentum, but from the connective tissue that connects everyone and everyone compounding at the same time. That's the update this week for San Diego Tech. If you enjoyed this one, let me know. Fred will be back soon. In the meantime, thanks everyone for tuning in. I'll see you next week. Have a good one.

Makoto and Yoga Posse, fold the body origami. We be surfing Coronado, eating tacos el gordo. The tacos standing puesto, lucha libre en sombrero. Gotta shout out Tecos, Dangos by the ocean, watch the sunset. La Jolla shows entrepreneurs trying to get funded when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer. Oceanside to Tijuana, SD be full of hustlers. From couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach. Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach. We interviewin' founders who be shootin' for the moon. #SDTacos with your host Neal Bloom.

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, eh!

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!