This Week in San Diego Tech – Aug 8, 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.

Welcome back, everyone, to this week in San Diego tech news. Fred and I are live in person. What's up, Fred? Good to see you.

Good to see you, man. Thanks for having me here.

We are live in a actual podcast studio. We're legit this week at least. We are here in Kiln Ranch Bernardo. Big shout out to Austin and the team for having us this week. And we actually been here a few days this week. We're here Monday for Startup San Diego's big first Monday's event and we're back here today to do the podcast and a VC lunch. So it's good to have you all here. Good to have you here.

Yeah. This space is great. Ranch Bernardo, this is like their latest location. Super cool. They have a podcast room and it's a mixed bag. There's like big tech companies in here, some startups, some creative agencies, and they just had startups. Startups first Monday event on earlier this week. You know, look like it was a great turnout. I think over a hundred people maybe showed up for that.

There was hundreds, honestly. Like we had overflow rooms and overflow rooms because the main room of 100 couldn't fit all the attendees. Wow. And what was really cool about the event that Ryan Cooter and I emceed, it was really a get to know the startup ecosystem. So we actually had every as many organizations come intro themselves and then they all were at tables in the center courtyard so you can go talk to them after. So it's a great way to kind of way find where you're at in the community.

I love it. Startup San Diego is coming back full steam and, you know, they're doing it with the right partners. I think it's great that they're doing it here in Retro Bernardo. This seems like North County. There's so much activity. A lot of companies and founders are living in this area. So it's just a great spot.

It is, yeah. And it's perfect timing coming into Startup Week, which is coming up in October, and this is the first year that Startup Week is actually taking it back to its original roots, where they're putting on programming and then also inviting the community to apply programming to it as well, which I think has been popularized lately from the SD or the LA Tech Week, SF Tech Week by Andreessen Horowitz, where they put on a core set of events and people can apply. I did some of those last year for LA Tech Week and Startup San Diego is doing it and they actually live on the fly. Had Hussein submit his first event live and him and I are going to do a Carlsbad north county mixer meets the city of Carlsbad events to kick off the whole week. So that's October 6th through 10th, which should be a really fun week itself. So good event. Thank you, Kiln, for having us. And let's dive into it. A lot of news. There's news from organizations, tech companies, fundings all over the place. So the first news that I would say hit our desk is Connect selected their next CEO, which is someone from out of town. His name is James Zanowitz and he's coming through from New Orleans and bringing his talents here in San Diego to lead Connect. You got some details here, Fred, this is huge news.

Yeah. The former CEO Mike Crin put out a post three days ago about, you know, San Diego. Get excited. James is awesome. High energy, great vision, tireless executor, and best of all, high quality good guy. I did some research, look like James from Louisiana. So New Orleans, hopefully, you know, I'm excited about, you know, maybe Innovation Day might be returning. I don't know if it's happening this year, but Connect is known for a few different programs. They curate a lot of the fundings that are happening in San Diego. They host events. Cool Companies is their flagship program and they just do a lot in the Senate community. And it's great to see that they finally filled the role of CEO. Mike Crane is now running a $50 million VC fund to back tech and life science companies. And yes, keep, keep close to Connect. I'm curious on. Yeah. What their next chapter will be in the next five years. It's going to be a lot of exciting new faces and, you know, a lot of people are moving to town and it's just great to continue to build community locally.

Yeah, exactly. So, James, welcome. Can't wait to meet you. And you know, keep, keep our community moving forward here. Speaking of community, we've been touching on every few episodes we've been talking about different tech companies who have been, you know, who we have known as SaaS, companies that are now AI companies, talking about their AI products and seismic has a big product that they've released and launched in the AI front. Seismic is a sales enablement SaaS platform, an AI platform that is one of the few unicorns in town. You know, been around I would think. I think it's been 15 years now, maybe possibly with the same original founders and CEO Doug at the helm, which is pretty cool to see. What do you know about their, their new product launch here on the AI side?

Yeah, it seems like all these companies are leaning into AI these days. We talked previously on the podcast. We've seen companies like Trust and will use AI and and others like ClickUp also released AI product. Seismic is the latest to do the same. They also are doing a big conference in San Diego in September where they highlight some of their latest product releases. I'm actually talking to Doug Winter, the CEO, so hoping to have some more details on how the business is doing. Last time I chatted with them, they were doing well over 200 million revenues and growing. They have hundreds of employees based in San Diego, based in Carmel Valley, and it's great to see them continue to innovate and be a leader in their space.

Yeah, we recently did a Dev and Data night event at their space within the last year where we had their VP of AI union, Lou, present on what they're building on and so it's cool to see that the product's out. They got an award, I believe for their aura AI for sales and marketing, specifically for the Sami Awards, which is by the Business Intelligence Group. So we'll link to that in the show notes so you can check it out further. But great to see our big startup tech companies continue to grow and lean into the space here as well too. Another interesting post that hit my feed was by a group, Ascend, which is a fund to fund and venture fund. Nate Burke put out a cool data dive into comparing cities for their return on investment. So this is called, you know, ROI or MOIC, which is kind of a core metric that VCs are judged by, you know, like how much money are you actually returning for every dollar you put in? And what they did was they looked at cities and said, how are the cities returning money? And San Diego stacked up pretty good. I think we were in the top four in terms of multiples return. So what that means is that for every dollar invested, $7 is returned back based on exits. So they took it. They took a look at all the capital that's been invested and all the exits and stacked them. And so Bay Area Boston Seattle, then San Diego above New York City, above D.C. chicago, Louisiana, Austin, Miami. You know, I'm sure this got the, the, the people on LinkedIn's commenting, which it did. I'm sure Jason Scharf was in the comments talking about Austin. Shout out to Jason keeping it down for Austin who you know is coming up for sure but love a good city to buy city comparison. We, we typically see just the VC dollars invested in. This is a good way to see and exited back out. I would comment the next thing to look at is and where did that money go. Right. So San Diego gets probably 95% of its VC dollars from outside of town. Which means when the exits happen, the money flow back out of town. Which means the reason Fred and I are working every day to, you know, help boost a domestic capital community. But all good, trending in good ways.

Yeah, our friend Terry from CCOM actually commented on that post, said Silicon Valley still leads in raw output, but Boston, Seattle and San Diego deliver striking efficiency on a far smaller capital basis. Yeah, just one thing to add to that is you know we, we do raise local capital when it comes to pre seed and seed rounds, friends and friend friends and family rounds. But when you go to series A and beyond, typically 90% above comes from outside of San Diego. So when there's exits or IPOs and M and A, that money tends to go goes back to other ecosystems. But yeah, I would say in biotech specifically, you know, we're number three behind Boston and San Francisco in terms of venture dollars invested. But you look at M and A activity and IPO activity, we're actually off to number one. Last year we had the most M and A activity in biotech and drives a ton of returns for investors, which is that flywheel effect. You know, once that return gets recycled back to investors, they want to make more investments. And so yeah, I think we have a strong healthy ecosystem. We're not just a surfing military town. We also have, you know, strong healthy startup ecosystem from tech to life science and consumer.

Yeah, and what we love seeing and we're talking about here is that our, our leading industries, even like defense and others are leaning and bleeding into the tech world as well too, which we'll get to. Let's get into some of the fundings which kind of reflect this. There, there's some big funding news out of some of our like series B plus kind of companies. Equip Health, which is a platform for helping people with eating disorder treatment, raised a significant new round here. You want to comment on that? Fred? Yeah.

So Equip Health actually been around for a few years now. They are the leader in this technology space for eating disorders. They help kind of connect. I think it's like service providers, people who serve people who have the issues of eating disorders and they're like leading in the space of kind of helping provide a solution for those folks. They, they've really made headwinds. I think they started. One of the co founders actually was affiliated with ucsd specifically in eating disorders. And they started this company and raised a lot of capital from General Catalyst who's also an investor in Thatch, which is local company. It's great to see them, you know continue to raise funding. 47 million. I believe they're remote first and yeah they're, they're just continue to find success. What'd you say about this news?

Yeah, I love seeing Christina and Aaron, the founders do well. Christina's been on the pod or Aaron has been on the pod before. North county resident. Their total funding round that they've raised to not round total that they raised 156 million to date which is really strong, you know and I think we've got between the two, two founders super like domain expertise. We're working within the clinic and tech background as well too which is awesome to see and I think they really hit it just they started just before COVID and Covid obviously did amazingly well specifically for telehealth which is really what they're kind of focused on is connecting but hyper focus. Right. A lot of telehealth did everything to everyone and they went deep into a very specific area. Even within behavioral health they focus super specifically and obviously it's paying off and they're doing really well. So congrats to the team there. Let's move on to another funding round.

I actually wanted to add on too because she's a woman, a woman leader running a venture back startup. It was another financing round. Cooler Heads actually raised a series A as well. I believe it was 11 million. So I mean this month has been great for women. Women founders leading venture back company.

Yeah.

Great to see two, two woman founders continue to find success. Equip Health and Cooler Heads which is in the medical device space and they were actual cool companies through Connect. So some local success stories.

Two health tech companies, you know, one hardware, one software. New fund is an investor in Cooler Heads which is also great to see, you know them doing well so that it will power back into the investment community here as well.

Rich, I believe they're also investor too that sounds right.

Yeah, yeah. Let's move on to a fintech funding round here by Trovada, which a series B plus company did a B extension round here I think. Solana beach based fintech company. What do you got here on the scoop, Fred?

Yeah, so Travata is a fintech platform for banks. They've been around for the last like five plus years. They've raised, I think we were talking about this before the podcast. They had raised a pretty large Series B round. I think it's 40 million. There's, this is a follow on financing for the series b round. It's 9 million backed by some pretty big banks, you know, based in Solana Beach. And yeah, it's great to see them continue to find success as well.

Yeah, so they're like a treasury management system and I think they actually acquired a company with this funding round. So good to see that, you know, in terms of being able to acquihire or build or buy the talent and team that you need to continue to serve your customer. So congrats to Brett Turner and team there. And we just had our fintech founder lunch a few weeks ago. So good to see more fintech doing well here in town for sure. We got some, some real estate news to share here specifically around defense tech. There's defense tech is hot right now, but you know, it's always been a thing in San Diego. In fact, defense is 25% of our GDP as a region and outside of DC, I think it's the largest naval presence in the United States in terms of the customer. Right. And so seeing a big late stage company like Saronic make moves to actually move into a physical space in San Diego is a big deal and kind of makes sense. What do you got on this, Fred?

Yeah, I feel like we've been talking about hard tech and defense tech, you know, pretty loudly. This year you put out hard tech 50 and highlighted all our abundance of companies that are building in hardware and defense tech. Saranic is the latest company to expand in San Diego. They announced that they've just signed a 800, I think 80,000 square foot lease near downtown San Diego for their operation facility. This is a unicorn defense tech startup are valued at 4 billion and this expansion will support their US and Allied Marine time partners. This is fresh off the news. I posted this I think last week and 800 people reacted. We had some local founders chime in. Dan, Maggie from Firestorm was like, hey, what building they take? I got some scoop for you. They actually took a building it was formerly Owned by Amazon. It's near downtown, so not exactly in there. But great to see that they're, you know, platinum flag in San Diego. I'm going to be hiring maybe a couple hundred folks in that facility. And also Jay from Aero X Ventures also commented. When's the launch party? So Neil, what do you think there? I think we're going to be having some, some events soon in defense tech for sure.

Yeah, we got a lot we're going to.

Yeah.

Talk about our local defense tech events here in a second. And this is a welcome sign to see the co founder mentioned in. This is from your article that I'm quoting from you. San Diego is, is a critical node in the US Maritime defense landscape and we're excited to join and contribute to this lively community. So welcome guys. The CEO actually commented on some tweets we had also about being excited. I think they're Austin based. I do think they have an Alabama presence for I think they bought like a boatyard out in Alabama. And so now seeing them take on some really large space in San Diego is great. And we're excited about that, I would say for a variety of reasons. One, because the Navy is here and the customer is here, that gives them, you know, they, they get to work with a local company in a sense they don't have to go travel to go meet the technology, which is what we're trying to do in terms of building curated, densifying community around that. And so we can just jump to some of the defense events we got and then I'll jump back to the AG stuff here in a second. We've got. So first of all, Navy Gold is happening in two weeks and that's a perfect time for us to. When people are in town nationally, we're doing some events around that. The week after we're doing Defense build day. So you've been seeing. I've been doing a ton of build days where we just get founders working alongside each other. We're going to do a defense tech focused one in mission Valley on August 28th. It's linked in the show notes there. It's really, it's while I say it out loud like this, we really want curation. Right. So if you're really building a defense tech, then you should be there. If you're just kind of defense curious, wait for a big public community event around that though that one will start with like a coffee gathering. So if you want to come know and meet the defense tech community, come for coffee. And then the builders are going to Stay and build for the day. And then a few weeks later is SoCal Deep Tech, which is SoCal Deep Tech Week, which is kind of think of it like a startup week, but very specific to deep Tech. It's happening up in LA, but because it's SoCal, we reached out and gotten to know Jay Velasco really well, who's been coming down to San Diego, by the way, and he asked like, hey, how about a San Diego presence up in El Segundo? And so we're putting on an event on September 16th to get the San Diego community together up in El Segundo to kind of represent and share networks with each other on that. So, yep, a lot going on there.

Yeah, it's great. I think San Diego, you know, when you think of defense tech, you think of like the androids, which is based in Orange county, but then there's also shield AI, there's CSATs, give harpoon ventures, we have Firestorm, there's just, you know, we have the right ecosystem to really thrive here. And this along with AI is really two sectors I think are going to continue to boom in San Diego and beyond. Super exciting stuff. Yeah. You know, if you're interested, you're a founder in that space. Reach out what get you plugged into the right community events. But yeah, we'd love to, you know, collaborate with you, Neil, on these, on these. Just curate the right, the right groups of builders and also the investors too.

Yep, exactly. And the end user customers as well. Like putting them all in the room together is what's super important. You're seeing the universities make moves also to support this. They're finding both technology on their campuses that makes sense to commercialize research that also makes sense. Like I would give an example. San Diego State has made moves into Lithium Valley energy side, which has big applications into both AI, climate tech and defense, which really are all kind of one and the same at this point. So yeah, it's interesting to see the whole ecosystem come together around that for sure. And related to that, just kind of touch on our last real estate news is the ag tech community that we've been working on for a few years here. This is something I partnered with the city of Escondido three years ago, I think it was actually four years ago that economic development manager Jennifer Schoenick reached. Like we met up at Startup Week and she proposed this idea like, hey, we have great AG in North county, eastern north county area. We have great tech throughout San Diego and obviously great science and life sciences. How do we Bring them all together to see if there's something there. And man, we have seen it. We've done two startup hackathons specifically with AgFocus, done a bunch of quarterly gatherings and then the city went to work and found a building in their own inventory and said all right, the community, we have heard the community and they need these things. They just finished a feasibility study that was completed by the University of California office of the President and said it was a 60 page report that said here are all the things that are kind of missing that a physical space could deliver on. From all the way from raw goods and raw science to the food producers all the way through finished good producers. Someone who's making guacamole or mango jerky. Well, now you've got a full place to go, all the way from the raw soil science to finished good and then a farmer's market actually to sell your goods. So the lease was just approved at the recent city council meeting for the city of Escondido. Actually even link the video to it because they give a really good overview of what that space is planning to be. I'm going to be helping building community around that, which could mean like physical space, incubator, accelerator, all the above of what could help founders of all these kinds of companies. So yeah, so keep an eye out for the Ag X food hub which is really starting to actually physically take foot here now.

Yeah, I would say kudos to you Neil and other partners involved. You know we're really a startup city. You know, we're building things that we want to see in in town and it starts by experimentation, getting the right people in the room and making things happen. So yeah, we encourage you to check out Event Event Ship which is ran by Hussein. He does a great job of curating what events are happening in town. Also Jonah Peak Social Coyote. It's a great newsletter to follow if you're looking for cool events to attend in town as well. And we'll continue to talk about what events we're tending to in San Diego also.

Yeah, thanks Fred. Make sure also following Fred's substack which puts out the latest news, hot exclusive news for sure that is happening and follow mine as well. We'll link them here in the show Notes in terms of I've got the new Bloom bites every week which is here's who I'm meeting with and I'm really trying to do this to just show the cross connections in the community, people who should be knowing each other. I can't write each one of you. An intro to each one of you, so I might as well just show. Hey, here are people you should know. I appreciate everyone's comments and feedback on both of our substacks and how we can connect all of you to each other so we can 10x our community because our founders are doing it. They're 10x companies. Our job is to 10x the community to make sure those founders are even more successful.

So I love it.

Thank you all, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Fred, good to see you.

It's a pleasure, Neil.

We'll see you next week.

See you next week.

Cheers.

Cheers.

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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.

Ra.