This Week in San Diego Tech News - April 1, 2024

Hello, Hello. Happy Monday. April Fool's Day. But. Or seriously, it's Fred Neal, back at you. Hey Fred, how you doing?

Hey Neil. Doing pretty good. How about yourself?

Doing well. Had a nice refreshing weekend with the rain back in the sun. You hit San Diego Wave game?

Yeah, yeah. You know, it was a little rainy over the weekend, but on Friday it was, you know, pretty sunny out, so I got a chance to go to the SD Wave game. Actually a local VC extended the tickets. His name is Him Surrey who runs Spark Growth Ventures. And thank you for the, for the tickets. Him. It was great to see the SD Wave game. I posted a picture on my Twitter and Cody Barbo from Trust and Will commented and said can you see the Trust and Will banner? And of course they had the biggest sponsorship in the arena. It seems like these days you can't, can't go somewhere at a sporting event without seeing Dress and Will logo somewhere.

I know, I love that. I got a. When you were saying Cody messed that for some reason, I got an image of Tupac saying move to right a little bit. Can you see me right there? Because that's what Trust and Will is on right now. Like they are riding high out in the consumer space. I think they're on the ice for the Kings in la. I think they're maybe the Dallas Stars too. Rams quarterback. It's, it's awesome to see, but even cooler to see you being at the game with the Wave to win it in overtime. Right?

Yeah, yeah. Alex Morgan is, is the heavy hitter there and they have a great, great team, I think, you know, hopefully they can, you know, win it again this year. It's just San Diego is a sports town. You know, soccer is, is booming here, but then also other sports. So it's just great to see. Also opening day was, was happening the Padres this weekend. So just a big sports weekend in general in San Diego.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that. Last week I hosted a small little gathering of the sports and active lifestyle community and we had both the Front Wave arena leaders come who are going to be hosting the San Diego Soccers, which is like the winningest indoor soccer team professionally in the country. And the new D League Clippers, the San Diego Clippers. So it's cool to see and they just invited us out for a tour. So I might invite you, link you up if you want to come check it out in the new arena out in Oceanside. And at that match was also the DK from head of community for San Diego Football Club talking about what they're up to lately and how they just I think did the ribbon cutting for the new academy out in East County. So yeah, sports we're back. So yeah, it's pretty cool to see. Plus all the sports tech that's here in town as well too. So I think we're doing, we're going to be doing every four months or so some sort of Carlsbad based sports gathering. Kind of a happy hour for the sports and active lifestyle like builders of tech, the actual product side and teams. So that'll be interesting to to check out, but we got plenty to talk about here. Why don't we dive into our show.

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 and tech is on smash border green guacamole keep accountants counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles founders 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 poppin 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 Mo sdtacles 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. I'm Neal Bloom from Fresh Brewed Tech and the Tacos in Tech Podcast all about bringing the community together and amplifying awareness both locally and abroad and, you know, capital. We are a community of builders, executives, not just funding companies, but really helping companies before, during and after we actually write the check. We have a really fun announcement, fun investment coming out this week. I'm so, so excited to share, but I'll tease it right there. This is Fred Greer with me, my partner.

Yeah, I'm Fred Greer, independent business journalist, also the author of Business of San Diego Substack, which is a publication highlighting unicorn companies and VC firms in San Diego. And excited to be back today talking about the biggest news in San Diego. Tech.

Love it. Well, as if you've been listening to us consistently, man, every week we've got new biotech news to share, whether it's a new IPO or a new multi hundred million dollar raise or a billion dollar exit. And I think we've got a little bit of everything for you today. Take us through the latest from Continuum Therapeutics.

Yeah, so the headline was Continuum says It will seek 136 million in IPO likely later this week. It's a mid stage neural drug company. And if you recall from my last previous podcast, in January alone There was over 6 billion in acquisitions. We've had multiple IPOs. As we're closing off Q1, going into Q2, it seems like more biotech companies are looking to go public. You might have recalled two years ago there's a lot of SPAC craze and a lot of biotech companies went public via a SPAC vehicle. It'd be interesting to see this year what the theme will be. I think it's IPOs and so M&A bankers and IPO lawyers I'm sure are very busy right now trying to serve life science companies in San Diego. It's huge news, I would say, and a great sign of a healthy pipeline of companies that are growing and getting acquired or going public to raise more capital, which is bodes well for the region.

Totally. And you kind of nailed it. Like the IPOs and the M and A, which both are exits in their own regard. And I would. And they're actually being played up against each other. There's got to be some companies who are about to file that may actually get an acquisition offer before the news can get out because maybe the big, you know, the big enterprise company doesn't want to get that S1 out with existing information out there. So I'm hoping to that we get to continue sharing some of the stories behind the scenes as well. And we hosted our AI Meets Bio SD event last week and there was some talk of that. So I'm hoping we can share some news of some of our existing companies there. Group that actually have been attending our AI Meets Bio event are some of the former Prometheus founders and they made some big news last week. Prometheus executives spun out and started a whole new startup out of stealth if you will. Less than a year after being acquired for $10 billion they came out with a 400 million dollar plus raise to they literally their quote, get the band back together and finish the job. This is everything we love about the recycle nature of building in an industry that is growing and the flywheel spins faster. What's your take here from this new Prometheus spin out?

I mean it's eye watering numbers, 400 million out the gate. I think they're probably going to raise more capital in the next year or two so definitely going to be following them very closely. You know, Merck acquired their previous company for $10.8 billion and so the founders, you know, obviously had a massive exit. They can retire, they hang it up. But it sounds like they still have more in the tank and they're reuniting with their initial team. And this is a common theme in the biotech scene in San Diego. Create a company, it gets acquired and then they have that same knowledge and they apply to a different drug or opportunity and they pitch similar VCs and they're able to raise a lot of capital based off of the previous success of the last company. So that's what we're seeing here today and definitely be keeping all eyes on this company.

Yeah, Mirador Therapeutics keep an eye on them for sure. It's everything. We as an investor love seeing the team getting back together to go pretty much keep working on the thing they're working on before. And if you look at who funded this, like Arch and a few others, their names on every big round lately from a VC scene. And you actually put out a great new report kind of updating your work from a year ago of San Diego's active VCs one year later after you initially wrote it. What's the VCC take from your angle, Fred?

Yeah, you know I get a lot of, a lot of, you know, comments or people reaching out and saying hey, is there any VCs in San Diego? And so I really tried to just highlight who are the key players in the space. And so this, this piece that we, we published looked at that Most active technology VCs and so the people who made that list was Correlation Ventures, which is one of the oldest VC firms in San Diego. They also have offices in San Francisco and New York. A few other VC firms were Akana Capital, which we had at our collaboration event with Deloitte a few weeks ago. Brian Mesic is a managing partner who lives in San Diego and they've had about I think five companies invested in the tech scene here in San Diego and they're based in Orange County. Also Harpoon Ventures, which is really popping off right now with their defense tech meetups led by Larson, Larson Jessen. He's a founder and general partner at Harpoon, former A16Z, former Lightspeed, you know, really great, really great firm. And then obviously Interlock Capital, which is kind of the newest venture capital firm on the block. And you know there's a list that we created the San Diego VC Directory. And so if you're a paid subscriber to the newsletter, you can get the list of who are the key contacts, what are their fund sizes and it's a great way to just kind of know who's moving to San Diego and investing in writing checks.

Yeah, I appreciate you including us on that. Not only are we local San Diego Interlock Capital, but we've also made investments in I think close to 15 companies now in about three and a half years. I think, I think we've written, I think our stats are 32 checks total between our syndicate and our fund and 15 companies of that are San Diego and even more so Southern California based. So we're pretty proud to be one be able to live in San Diego but also funding San Diego companies too. And I think that's a common thread that you just mentioned with a lot of the companies that are on this list. More, more and more are writing checks locally which only makes sense. You know, this is a, you might as well meet the companies in your backyard and invest in the ones you like. As I've continued to hinted, we've got one coming out this week that is a San Diego aerospace company moved recently from San Francisco and both commercial aviation and defense aviation hardware company that it'll be our newest investment. So I'm going to keep teasing that out just for a little bit. But thanks Fred for highlighting the, the local venture capital scene. For sure we're proud to do it and we all work together here locally. Let's talk about another venture backed company here, daasity. They're a consumer, they're a retail tech company. So they build a B2B SaaS product that helps retailers and consumer brands really understand their analytics about flow of consumer traffic. Through there they made an acquisition of Red Fox analytics so really kind of doubling up the analytics stack that they can provide to consumer brands, CPGs as we call them, packaged goods. Dassey actually has a bunch of local investors on their cap table I believe Mooring Ventures Ventures which is Shane and Scott, our investors in them as well as Sarah Ventures I believe as well too which has got both the Midwest and a San Diego presence. Have you covered Audacity before? I think you did, yeah.

I think the Business Journal did a recent piece on them but yeah, we followed them in the early days when they raised the initial funding and this acquisition is just kind of a follow on is it showing that they're growing the firm? The founder named Dan LeBlanc he's actually a former Pro Flowers employee and I think he was maybe a co founder or an employee there and Proflowers is actually one of the OG tech companies that had one of the major acquisitions in the region. He then went on to start daasity which is kind of a fast growing e commerce data analytics company and yeah, it's great to see them continue to grow with this acquisition.

Yeah, Santa got deep roots in analytics, that's for sure. From Google Analytics being started here which started as Urchin analytics to on the FinTech side. The HNC created the what is now known as the FICO Score and FICO acquired them in the late 90s and other analytics companies that Adobe acquired here as well. The names all of a sudden escape me but they are the current founders of Telium so we have deep roots in analytics, especially on the consumer side which is pretty cool to see. So kudos to the daasity team for for continuing to build products around that. We had a bunch of events recently and we got a bunch coming up and you know, before everyone takes off for the summer now is kind of the rush over the next few months for a bunch of events happening. March Mingle was last week which is on year 20. It's what I heard and Falon Reason and June Clark have been running it for like 15 of those years I believe. Pretty cool to to see them. They're one of the Falon, one of the original founders of Startup San Diego but this is solely like their event they put on. They move it to a new cool event every year. They've had it in museums, they've had it in paintball parks and this year was at the Bali High over in Shelter island area of Point Loma, I think five, six, seven hundred people out there. It was, it was a, it was a busy night. I, as usual I made it about 2ft an hour which is great to see people who, there's some people who only come to this event, so you kind of only catch them, you know, yearly at this event and others that you get to see that you only see online all the time. But like, like Jonah Peak was so fun to see in person. He made me a custom coyote shirt that I wore and represented. But man, so many tech people and there was a good catch all for a lot of new people who've moved to town here recently. So good event. I know you were at an event simultaneously. Can you give us, drop us a little bit about the event you were at?

Yeah, I was a little bummed not to make the March mingle because I know that's like one of the biggest, you know, startup events and I saw a lot of familiar faces promote on LinkedIn. Glad it was super successful. I was actually at a, a new tech company that I've written about called Sidebar. They held a private dinner for about 25 folks who are members of Sidebar and Sidebar is a tech company. They raised about 11 million seed funding from the Bay Area. The founder, Lexi Franklin moved to San Diego in the last year and it's really kind of building this really cool mentoring platform for executives and startup folks who want to build and establish their own personal board of directors. And so it's pretty cool. We got to go meet at a founder's house and we had conversations about challenges and opportunities people are experiencing in their career and it was great.

Oh, that's awesome. Love, love hearing more and more dinners happening. It just means that people are leaning into getting to know each other and share our networks, which we really need more and more in San Diego and there's some times to do that this week. So Harpoon Ventures is doing their second Defense meetup. I'm so glad to see the consistency out of them. Seems like monthly is what they're going to do, which is awesome. So check it out this week, April 4th. We've linked it here in the show notes which we've powered by the Social Coyote you can link to is a newsletter that talks about this in next week's events. This Friday is the April Founders Hike, first Friday of each month. And if you want to take the founders plunge after jump in the water with us, I'll be doing that as well too. 6:30 Friday a.m. torrey Pines beach south lot. Santa Angel Conference tickets are live for that. It's May 9th but I believe the finalists have been announced. Right Fred, you paying attention to this?

Yeah, yeah, I'll be covering that. Hitting the ground running on May 9th. But yeah, they have not a finalist think they have, I think about five to 10 folks that they've narrowed down from a larger list. So yeah, this is one of the bigger conferences where startups can raise funding from angel investors which is one of the best events to attend.

What's cool about it is it's really not only a great for fund, it's actual equity funding for founders, but it really is training a whole new class of angel investors. So for about a six month period they actually use the diligence process to train a whole new class of people who are interested in angel investing but may not know how to do it on their own. And this is their chance to learn and actually deploy the capital during. So I, I'm stoked to see this happening so many years in a row. I think this might be year five now which is so cool to see that they write you know, multi hundred thousand dollar checks into at least the top three if not five finalists. It's kind of dependent on the group and all the interest and they'll write checks directly into these companies here. So definitely check out Santa Angel Conference. And lastly Clean tech is doing a happy hour next week. You want to give us a rundown here?

Yeah. So there's a happy hour for clean tech. As you know San Diego has, you know, kind of a hotbed for energy companies and clean tech mainly in north county that from what I've found. And yeah there's happy hour hosted by Outfit which is a marketing agency called Happy Hour Networking. It's going to be in north park at Pure Projects Tap Room. I've been there before. It's pretty good venue space happening on April 10th and we'll link that in the show notes.

Cool. Yeah, the clean tech scene is is great to see from on the solar and alternative energies to battery storage to kind of all over the place. So good to see more events to for people grouping that together. I was at the Equilious Sustainability Symposium last week actually judging a pitch competition with Zach from Clean Tech. We were both on the judging panel. It was cool to see the wide diversity of clean tech companies. There was a spin out from the Salk Instit Institute that is doing something more at the seed level of having a more sustainable seed which is pretty cool. There is battery tech all over the place. It's cool to see all of those come together, so keep an eye out for that. And as always, subscribe to fresh BrewTech.com for events that are coming up. Tacos and Tech podcast that you're listening to here for the latest news that Fred and I dived into. And of course, Fred's business of San Diego Substack, where he does deep dives into the tech scene and the business community of San Diego. As always, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for subscribing and sharing this with others. And Fred, always a pleasure.

Always a pleasure, Neil. Until next time.

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 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 standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to Costa 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, the Tijuana est? 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 in 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 and tacos, Tacos in tech, you know we got it.

Hey, Ra.