This Week In San Diego Tech News

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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 in tech, you know we got it. Hey.

Hello. Hello everyone. Fred and Neil back at it with you all. Hey Fred, how you doing?

Hey Neil. I lost my voice, but other than that I'm pretty good.

You must been out at it like everyone has been either at the conferences or getting this sickness that's going around. I hope not the latter.

Yeah. Nonetheless we're here bringing the San Diego tech news to everybody and glad to be back.

Yeah, likewise. Fred and I do this, try to do it on a weekly cadence here. Both of us have our own substacks where maybe many of you follow this from. Fred's got the business of San Diego substack where he writes about the latest news that's happening here in the tech ecosystem. Biotech, real estate and tech and capital. And I've got rising type partner substack where I'm writing about signals through the noise that I'm seeing what's worth checking out, what tech is coming up, how it's affecting others and what companies are making a dent in this world. So thanks again for tuning in. We love to put a hyper focus on our own community since we are out there every day spending time with the community on an hourly by hourly basis, whether at events, putting on our own or just you know, moving from coffee to coffee. So we continue to share what we're seeing and we'd love if you share all what you're seeing right back to us, respond to our emails and tell us hey, I'm seeing this hot news or I'm seeing this trend. We want to, we want to know and want to share and amplify your guys news as well too. Fred, should we dive right in?

Let's do it.

Well, we got some, some big funding news from a local fund which is rare and we love to share it. A local fund, Blueprint Equity has raised a new Fund 3 and it's hot off the press. I think it was a exclusive they did with Wall Street Journal this week but I know Fred's got the scoop here as well. Fred, you want to share more on this new fund?

Yes. So blueprint equities, Loyola based growth equity firm they just announced a new fund, 333 million which is massive oversubscribed and the Wall Street Journal reporter mentioned that she was a little skeptical when investors say hey we were oversubscribed. But she said multiple LP she spoke with, you know said that they blueprint had to turn away some capital. And I talked to Sheldon actually today just before this podcast and he said he was in the top 5% their fund across the US and so they've been able to have a of investing in I believe small medium businesses across the US and yeah, it's great. Bobby El Campo and Sheldon Lewis who run that local, local office and off to the races. This is our second big fund announced in two weeks. We had social leverage last week where they raised 85 million fund 5. Now we have Blueprint with another massive fundraise. So a hot start to 2026 in terms of dry capital and private investing.

It is awesome to see just in January alone. And we are going to highlight this at our event next week on the state of venture at the 2026 VC Outlook, our annual, you know, come together and learn what's happening from the venture capital community in San Diego. So if you're a venture backed founder, let us know. Love to have you there. And we will have, we won't have the Blueprint team. I know we'll have the social leverage team which is awesome. So great to be highlighting that. Congrats to Sheldon and Bobby. There's some history here actually I'd love to share a little bit of background here. Bobby and Sheldon worked together in their first jobs out of college I believe, I believe that's how they met and then they went their own pathways. I think Bobby went into venture capital right away from there or private equity, then venture capital most recently before this at Revolution Ventures which is the most people have heard of this because it's the, it's the Anything but the Coasts Venture fund by Steve Case of aol. And Bobby had. Sorry. Sheldon has his own pathway of getting into sas but along the way he started his own little angel syndicate. So he was working at a high flying, fast growing SaaS company while also investing in local SaaS. I know a number of people who got some investments from Sheldon and then he was one of the first that we called when we started up Interlock Capital just to be like hey, what are some of the tips and tricks that you recommend in launching a syndicate? And that was right around time that he was launching Blueprint. Fun one like 2020 I think what's Cool about Bobby and Sheldon teaming up together on this is that they're kind of an atypical fund. They call themselves Growth Equity but they're really been looking for under the radar SaaS, companies that haven't taken a ton of money but have somehow found their own bootstrap growth pattern. And that was hard to find in 2019 through 2023 but now it's actually pretty hot to go bootstrap your way to single digit million. Which means they were ahead of that trend. Right. Like they saw that this may. I don't know if they saw that this is what generated AI was going to do was branch off the AI, native AI software companies. But I believe there's a much bigger pool now of SaaS, bootstrap SaaS for them to invest in so you know, win in their sales and awesome to see that. Obviously their LPs have find conviction to, you know, amp up what they're doing. So congrats to the group. I can't wait to read Fred's article about it. To get the deeper dive here, why don't we get jump over to an award that was issued this week to CSATs, a hard tech company here doing autonomous boats and ships. San Diego based believe they've got pretty much every like research institute like Scripps Oceanography to the military like Navy and Coast Guard all as customers and they were recently awarded by the Department of War. Fred, you got more on this one?

Yeah, there's an article published on the 16th and it was announced that an autonomous service vessel maker, CSATS has won a 24 million grant from the DOD and this is the second grant funding that CSATS has gotten in the last six months. We talked on the podcast how CSATS has also received, I believe it was 85 million from the US Navy. This has definitely been something we've been paying attention to locally is defense tech companies are thriving because big military are now tapping startups to move faster and develop autonomous drones and submarines. And CSATS is obviously the leader, one of the emerging leaders in autonomous drones, service C service vehicles and it seems like we've been talking about them a lot. It's great to see them continue to get some more funding. And if you're looking to get the defense tech space, I'd say either csats or Firestorm, Nautilus and others are also, you know, finding success right now or on a tear. Friendly.

Yeah. And what we've been talking about is that you know, autonomous in air had a 10 year head start in San Diego right? And Maybe even a 20 year head start from General Atomics with the Predator and Northrop Grumman with their giant drones. Then SHIELD AI ushered in a whole new era of kind of the software for drones. And then we even had the anti drone companies here between skysafe and forgotten the other name of the company, Dan Magie's company. Sorry, I know he's a listener. Sorry, Dan. And now you're seeing obviously like drone for everything. And so it's in every domain, every dimension. Now water, underwater, land and space are kind of the missing areas. And it really feels, Fred and I, maybe it's time to talk about Drone City usa because this San Diego is it. We've got some merch actually we've been playing around with that. We'll launch soon for Drone City usa And csats is one of the water leaders building autonomous systems here. And you can see one, the customer base is massive here in terms of water based autonomy. Right. So much so that another big drone chip maker, Saronic out of Austin, opened a large center here for their customer success. Place pretty much where they're rolling out their products and training the Navy on you know, medium sized ships. All that is just shows the proof point and the density of talent and customer base here. So yeah, it's great to see CSAT doing that. They're also one. Fred, go ahead. I think you got a comment here.

No, I think you covered it. You covered it well.

I was just going to mention the award size. I think there's a lot to be said. We talk about grants, if you will, sbirs and you're starting to see our companies in San Diego who have customers get these much larger grants that are not, you know, technology transfer, SBIR level one kind of awards. They're skipping straight to SBIR 3, which is this fast pass to pretty much customer adoption saying, you know, we need a fleet, not just hey, go prove out the technology. That's a really good sign, right? Because for hard tech it is hard to get funding. It takes such a long cycle to get a customer to. So finding this SBIR level 3 fast pass to actually fund, you know, building full on full manufacturing lines. It's a really good sign to be seeing that. You saw the same Firestorm got one of those too. $100 million I think grant directly from the Air Force in that same vein as well too. So like Fred said, we're gonna keep our eye on these, we'll keep sharing what's winning and what trends we're seeing here.

Another thing I'll Add to that is I think you know it allows companies to not give out equity. You know this is non diluted funding and yeah, it's great, it's great to see that this is you know a good business model for early stage starter.

Totally but and it's a business model in a way that's actually like getting them to customer whereas there's a lot of sbirs that are just kind of like distractions down the road. So all good signs here. Let's talk about another product launch we that came upon our radar here. Friend of the POD company. We talk about a lot here. Trust and Will just launched a brand new product for attorneys. It's kind of, it's, it's big news in a certain regard because Trust and Will has built an estate planning platform in a sense that seemingly like kind of went around attorneys for the last five years or used internal attorneys to help you so that you didn't need to just go the traditional like paper estate plan route. And so you know it's been so them launching a full on product suite that helps estate attorneys use their platform to streamline people have a full estate plan is a full circle moment and also kind of shows that they're at that enterprise level where you're, you know, the person you're trying to disrupt ends up being your customer. Pretty typical pathway here. What do you got on this, Fred?

Yeah, I think at some point we need to look at the center companies who have been, you know, really leaning into AI and introducing new products. I love that Trust and Will is staying innovative on technology side as well as the marketing side. I did see that they talked about how they sponsored the their Holiday bowl in San Diego a few months ago last month. And then I see Cody promoting something for a Super bowl this year and you know it's great to see them innovating in AI but let's do a wrap up at some point Neil and look at what standard companies have been paving the way. I remember cloud Beds introduced something like that. I believe maybe Flock Freight or one of the other unicorn tech companies have also been very, you know, advocating that, you know we're introducing new products in AI and the B2B SaaS space is definitely leaning into that space. More, more, more.

Yeah, I actually talked about it on a podcast. When did I talk about. In the. Within the last week I talked about. Oh no, maybe it was with you on the last one this week in San Diego how we, we didn't see as many like native AI San Diego fundings And a lot of our legacy companies, you know, are trying to catch up into the a native AI space, right? They're like hey, we were SaaS, now we're AI. Yeah, let's do more of those wrap ups and roundups of that. Like click up definitely has got a full native AI product who is trying to catch up but who is also building brand new products for brand new customers there. It's a really good sign. One more shout out on trust and will. Their big brand ambassador, Matt Stafford, who him and his wife together are brand ambassadors of trust and will are going to super bowl which is probably why Cody's there throwing a Super bowl party because they got team Stafford who I wonder if he'll sneak in a trust and will shout out at the Super Bowl. We'll see. But pretty cool to see them on the big stage there for sure. Last but not least, we got some great fun news for a company in North County, Empower, hiring a whole new slew of staff that really coincides with them launching literally into space in a and catching quite a wave of what is power based space systems. Fred, I think you have a little more of a scoop here. You want to tell us about it?

Yeah. So Empower and if you look them up they say they're Albuquerque, Mexico based but they're actually basing right here in Carlsbad. They're working on satellites and they're in the aerospace industry. And the guy I spoke to and just joined as a coo, his name is James Hel and he's from Rapify, which is another local startup, I think advertising company. And then they hired a new CFO who came from another local company, Totem Labs. And he said hey, watch out for us in Power technologies is going to be a unicorn company in this aerospace. And so it's great news to see that a local company is making hires from top talent to help build out manufacturing operations. And this is, this is a company to watch 100%.

Yeah. Kevin Hell, the CEO is actually a bit of a local legend on the entrepreneurial community here in San Diego, has been around for a bit. He helped heavily at Evo Nexus for a while, which is where we crossed paths first. But he came into the CEO role at Empowerment maybe three years ago. Does that sound right? And Mpower really was a play on new solar cells within the space based systems. So they're designing new ways to obtain energy which obviously benefits satellites as a obvious choice. But what's really interesting in the last six months and I'm sure what that if we knew that in six months it's been going for about a year plus is that all the hyperscalers, the Mag 7, anyone who's doing data centers are moving data centers to space literally because that's the best way to cool it from an energy standpoint and power it because you have direct solar energy pretty much always on and don't have to worry about it at night. And so here you've got this AI wave that I don't think anyone's expecting to hit space. You literally have Starlink 9000 satellites in the in space. And Elon has announced all future starlinks are going to be data centers in space because we're already set up to beam it, empower it and then you had the same with Google and I believe Nvidia. So if they're doing space based data centers, you know more thinking about that as well too. So pretty cool to see. They happen to be in Carlsbad down the street from another big satellite maker, ViaSat so there's some space density there as well up in north county. So pretty cool to see. Congrats to the Empower team. I think we're gonna do an event there within the next three to six months. I was talking to James about that. Oh and of course shout out to our friend James Heller, longtime friend of the pod. I know he listens. Uh, he also comes out and hikes on the founders hike. Founder of Rapify founded a good home and said I want to go keep building. Uh and so it's great to see him leading and he actually has data center experience. Before Rapify he was in the data center space. So cool to see him come back a full circle around there. Uh, we've kind of already mentioned a few events coming up but as always there's lots to do. Always look at the social coyote for Jonah's curated list of events that are coming up. Event Ship has pretty much all events that are happening in San Diego. Man. I keep looking and the list keeps getting longer of like new series coming to eventship. Love to see that some that's coming up that we've got on our radar. We mentioned the 2026 VC Outlook third annual next week VCs and kind of series A and earlier venture backed already Founders is kind of who we're curing that around. We have some VCs coming in from Santa Barbara, Ian Hathaway, who's a good buddy and is writing leading pre seed deals. We've also got a family office on the panel who does Direct deals and invest in funds who's kind of give their state of the state of funding funds. Right. Which is super important for founders to understand that side of the table. And that same day is actually the Farmers Open, which is in its last year in San Diego. A legend of a. An event. Fred, thanks for bringing me out there. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Yeah.

And then. And it's. And there'll be a lot of local tech events happening. It looks like a bunch of people in the tech community will be at different events happening throughout the weekend, which will be fun to kind of see us all around the golf course. One of the biggest Navy and military conferences is coming up AFCA West. It's a chance where pretty much the whole military tech scene descends on San Diego. I know that Harpoon and Saab and others are throwing events on the side throughout the week. Which is great. We've been talking about that. Right. Like bring. Bring the national community in to our local community and vice versa. So if you are in the defense tech world, look for February 10th through 12th FCOS events that are going on. And then later that week a bunch of us are picking up and going to Austin for techcon Austin, which will be the VC and founder community descending on Austin. It's their first time in Austin, which is pretty cool and I'm looking forward to doing it. I'm going to do a little happy hour with local founders that we've got in our portfolio and LPs and GPs in the local community too. That's what's on our radar. If there's more on yours, like we said, shoot us a note. Reply to the newsletters that come out of our substacks. DM us on LinkedIn. You can't DM me on Twitter. I still don't have access to my Twitter account. I don't feel like I'm missing much, but you know where to find us. And Fred, thanks as always.

Always a pleasure, Neil.

Likewise. Thanks everyone. We'll see you soon.

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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 text, you know we got it.

Hey, Sam.