This Week In San Diego Tech News

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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.

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Hello. Hello everyone. Neil and Fred back at you with this week in San Diego tech. Hey Fred, what's going on? Going on?

Neil, I was curious where you're working out from today. Are you at a cool, any cool spots working out?

Where in the world is Neil? San Diego. Yeah, I'm in downtown La Jolla, a friend's office. The patient partner crew. Shout to George and Patrick for letting me hang out. This is also where the visor team works out of as well. And we actually, through the windows you can see the blueprint equity team right there. And actually what used to be another VC was right outside that door as well. Shout out to Paige who I think might still have her office there but is full time San Francisco. So good spot to be, but really good to be with you, Fred. We had the. I had the pleasure of hanging out with you a lot last week, which does not happen much. So thank you for bringing me out to the farmer is open. You and, and PNC bank for bringing us out. Thank you.

Of course, that was, it was a good time, man. We don't really get to, to meet in person too often, so it was, it was a good time to get out there on the golf course. It's been, you know, 75 and sunny here in San Diego in January, which is hard to beat, especially as the snow is all over the east coast these days. Uh, and then, you know, we also jumped right into our VC panel event with Cooley and Deloitte shortly after hanging out at the golf course. It was a packed, packed week. You also got a pack a week of news and so we'll dive into some of those today.

Well, yeah, let's just dive right. Well actually let's give a little intro for the people. Always like to start with that. I'm Neil Bloom with Rising Type Partners. We're an investment fund and an investment community. Back in the best founders that there are by being a bunch of founders, funding founders. And this is Mr. Fred Greer.

Yeah, I'm Fred Greer, I'm a journalist, work at the intersection of media, media, tech and also real estate. And here we are bringing the biggest headlines in tech and startups in San.

Diego and we do it on the daily you can follow on Fred substack, the business of San Diego substack. Look for that as well as the rising type partner substack. It's where you can get this however you heard this. Maybe subscribe to the podcast, but you can also get our blog content as well. Let's dive into it. We got like you just teased, we threw an event last week. This is our third annual San Diego VC Outlook where we like to kick off the year hearing directly from investors on what's top of mind for them. That obviously funnels its way into founders who are looking for capital. And uniquely this year we had people on the panel who could speak to not just VC but also lp, the people who are funding funds, which was really great to have and we pulled in some great data charts from Carta so we were able to take here's the national and global story. Let's hyperlocalize that with capital allocators who are allocating capital directly to startups or into funds. Give us a little bit of your takeaway what you thought of the event, Fred.

Yeah, so our third annual event, we did it right in the heart of Tory Pines and Koh's office and we had panelists featured Dylan Weenie from Tally Pot, which is a family office as well as a BC firm. We have Matt over from Social Leverage. They just recently raised 85 million for their fifth fund. And we had Natalie Poston from Motley Fool Ventures and it was a great conversation. Myself and Neil moderated the convo. We talked very high level what's happening from other startup cities like New York and Bay Area to also dialing into what's happening in San Diego. Looking at seed deals and Series A. I thought there was a lot of great questions around just you know, how do you raise capital in this new environment where both emerging fund managers are having trouble raising capital as well as early stage companies who are trying to get capital. And there was a lot of great takeaways that were shared and you know we couldn't have done it without our partners at Deloitte. So shout out to Brett Doveman and also Matt Olsen from from Deloitte as well and Cooley team. It was, it was a great event.

I thought it was. Thanks for, for doing it and thanks for letting me jump in co moderate with you. It was pretty fun to do something in person that we normally do on a weekly basis here on the pod and I think we, like you said, got a lot of great feedback from the founders and, and a lot of investors in the room too, which was also great to just have. We, we put it on their name tags, make sure that you're finding opposite colors and people did it. What we really talked about is like last year, how's that looking into this year? Right. It was January 29th when we did the event. So January was kind of already over yet you know, it still was. People still just getting back to speed. And you right away turned around a great recap of January 2026, which we have LinkedIn shows. You want to take us through a little bit of what we already saw action wise for funding and M and A news in, in January.

Yeah. So this was kind of a partnership Connect does a, you know, great report of like who's getting funded in San Diego. And it seemed like we already had over 400 million going to local companies both early and late stage. We had Mirador Therapeutics, which is a biota company started by former Prometheus Bio, who sold, you know, for I think 10 billion plus. They went out and started a new company and they've raised 250 million series B. We had Rackin Medical which is 100 million series F. We had a company called Pivotal Space which is in a deep tech. I didn't hear about this company so they're on my radar now. They raised 44 million.

We had some M and A deals.

We had obviously Venti Bioscientists acquire them by eli Lilly for 1.2 billion. And we also had some fundraises. We had Blueprint 333 million fund. We had social leverage and we had several Companies receive either DoD funding, university grant funding and also some IPLs which we'll dive into further in this pod. So yeah, definitely off to a hot start. 2026 seems like there are some silver linings already this year. There is also, you know, the other side of that. There's been some layoffs. But I would say there's been, you know, a bright spot. I don't know from folks I'm talking to, whether it's lawyers or bankers. People are optimistic of, you know, the first half of this year and how it's starting off 100%.

Yeah, I mean I think the year. So we'll talk about this. We've got a little section on macro we'll talk about here, but great to be highlighting already what's coming. I think there's always a start, a little start, slow start to the PR of funding Because a lot of it happens in December and kind of finds its way out. So I think by end of quarter we'll see a lot more that happened. I know there's two deals I've participated that haven't even done a press release yet. And there's a deal that's announced in years, Firestorm, which is raising a lot more. So, you know, I think we'll relook back at Q1 and say yeah, there was a lot of funding activity, which is great to balance the other side, which is tech layoffs and stuff, which we'll talk about in a second. But let's talk about the IPO side. We'll talk about. We'll do a little waterfall here. We got two tech IPOs on the books here. We've been talking about Once Upon a Farm for a little bit because they listed I think a week or two or not listed. They started their roadshow a week ago. And it is, you know, it's totally about the roadshow is can you fill it in real time and then you list immediately the next day. So that's actively happening right now in New York, you know, is that the bankers are filling the allocation for the listing. It's rumored to go live on February 6th, Friday. So fingers crossed they do. I'm buying some stock around that OFRM San Diego Consumer Packaged Good company from a group of serial CPG founders and it's not really known as the San Diego company anymore. I think the CEO that took over after Ari Roz moved, you know, corporate headquarters to Bay area Berkeley. So you won't see many articles about San Diego based but it is a San Diego story and you could actually. I'll link it. We interviewed them early days like 2019, 2020 and it was still in Cassandra's garage I think and Ari was working from. We work, you know, to get this off the ground. So cool story. Maybe fun to like bring them back and talk about it on the other side once they list here. But another one on my radar that you brought up to me. Solve Energy just listed raising over 500 million. Take us through this IPO.

Yeah. So this has just hit the wire. January 30th, Solve Energy is targeting a 5 billion valuation in U.S. iPO routers broke the story. It says there are solar and battery storage firm and you know they basically are pricing, they're offering share between $22 25, 25 a piece. And they also noted in the article that IPO activity in the US seems to be bouncing back after historic US Government shutdown last year would kind of hinder, you know, the SEC's operation and kind of stifled deal flow. I think this is hinting towards, yeah, more IPOs, hopefully. It's great to see a company like in the solar and battery solar space, you know, find some success. We'd love to see more biotech deals go public this year. To be, to be seen. But I'm hearing some, some folks who are gearing up for that love it.

I mean we've definitely had the big rounds on the bio side which means they have a need for lots of capital and usually you top out on. Well usually you top out on private access to capital in the biotech world and therefore need to go public to access more. So yes, 100% would love to see that. Like the M and A that we've seen over the last two years in biotech, which has been great, there is a lot of capital that has been reflowed back to these big multibillion dollar exits here. Why don't we go take us through the next one here. Yeah, keep going Fred. It's kind of like going out from the funding round. Recap.

Yeah, there was, I kind of mentioned in our recap in January there was kind of a company called Ratuku Medical. They raised a 100 million oversubscribed Series F and they're actually gearing up for submission for the FDA approval. Yeah, there's been some, some massive fundings in biotech at Mirador and then now this Series F of company. So it's great to see that there's some funding going to local biotechs as well.

Yeah, 100%. It is great to see a lot of new funds. Also by the way in for the early stage biocide. Right. Jose and team doing two phase bio which is pretty cool. They're funding both direct investment in startups but they've also founded a few companies of their own. So they're almost a little bit of a quasi studio in that they're starting stuff that where they're seeing a gap and getting a management team in place and funding them into the portfolio, which is cool as well. And I know there's a few other biotech funds out there raising that. We will see them come out this year. So great to see on both sides of that. The other side though of tech man, Tech macro is both the most heightened enthusiasm and the, the darkest days which is really hard for everyone to piece together these days. Right. We, we have this like renaissance of AI but also the, it's taking Our jobs. And I would say the only place I've really seen it's taking our jobs happening is in the big tech companies themselves. Right. So as much as everyone's scared about AI taking a job, well, it turns out it's the big tech hyperscalers so far that are the ones that are laying people off. And that's kind of interesting. And so one of the biggest news is Amazon announced a really big layoff. Amazon's one of the few where you don't hear them in the AI world so much, which is interesting because they are this massive player in AWS of obviously like the big, one of the biggest data centers out there, but not this like we have this massive model and raising billions of funds towards building out infrastructure for the AI model. It's kind of interesting. Well, unfortunately They've announced over 16,000 in layoffs and that affects some San Diego jobs. They have a big office over in UTC mall which was the former Sears building I think has been built out and is Amazon's San Diego hub. A whole bunch of different divisions there, so I don't know which ones, if anyone's affected and, and also always very sad to see that. What do you got a little bit more on the layoffs area here?

Yeah, I think this was a topic during our VC panel. Someone asked, you know, what are their thoughts on the stock market? I think Microsoft dropped stock, dropped 15, which is like, you know, the highest they've seen in years. Calci, which is like a sports betting or predictions market betting platform, they tweeted that layoffs were the highest level in 15 years plus last month. So I mean it's not just Amazon, there's a bunch of other companies who are, you know, kind of trimming the fat. It seems there's been about 27000 layoffs in the US 2026 so far, about 69 companies doing layoffs at tech companies. But on the flip side, I've also read that Google has had its best quarter in Q4 last year. It's now bringing in $400 billion and largely is driven by YouTube and AI like Gemini in their other product service lines. And so there's still big tech. I think there are still opportunities within big tech. We obviously see Nvidia is doing well and, and Elon's acquired his own company and now he's valued at I think 800 billion, which is really crazy. So there's definitely like levels to who's doing well and winning in the AI race. But then like traditional software SaaS business models. I think ServiceNow stock is actually down. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's a war right now. People are definitely trying to remain competitive. And yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. It's interesting to follow for sure. It is, yeah.

I mean, I think if you look at like the more traditional just SaaS companies and look, there's nothing, I hate to call them traditional and legacy because Salesforce, ServiceNow, a lot of these are like, you know, big tech companies that are public, but the whole slew of them are the, the public perception that is showing up in their, their stock price is showing down. But there's something bigger at hand here. I mean, if you look gold and silver is down, bitcoin's down. Like there is a, you know, a group of, of investors who are, who are looking at outlook down or assets are overpriced, certain assets, and so hard to tell the difference of what today's, you know, your stock ticker looks like versus what tomorrow looks like. Unfortunately, it's what a lot of the world does. They wake up and they open an app and they're like, is it red or green? And that kind of decides their outlook. Well, we're in the tech space. We build things that are over the horizon. We're going to change the world in places we, we don't even know yet. Right. I actually heard a great analogy today. When Netflix started, they were delivering DVDs to your door. They were a mail service DVD player. No one told them. I'm sure in their business plan there was not. We were going to be the largest movie studio and content creator in the world. And you know what did that high speed Internet that enabled you to actually watch movies live right now and that latency piece, that's what's happening right now in AI and cognition, the ability to take large amounts of data, crunch it in seconds, not have to wait and pay for weeks or months of trials to just collect it. It's data now, answers now, move forward now. And so we're on this precipice and unfortunately a lot of people see that as change. And change is hard. Change is hard for a lot of people. And so while you and I and the world we live in every day, which is 10 years out, half our bodies are actually living in the future. We're literally thinking about this is what the world's going to be like one day. And yet everyone's saying, well, the world to me is red. And so that's really hard. I would think for A lot of our listeners I'm sure to go through in that regard. And all I say is because I know our, our listeners is the audience who thinks for a better future and build it for humanity. And that's what's happening. So keep focus on that. Keep building the problems worth solving and the big problems we're solving, because I think all of us can always look at what is the biggest thing possible to go solve. Go do that. So I would just give that as like our. Let's go into 20, 26 strong. Don't worry about today, worry about 10 years from now. Did we change the world? And related to that, one of the companies that's changed the world is Illumina. Illumina here obviously brought biology into the data era. This is the opportunity where they said, you know, this is just a code base and we know how to crunch code base. Let's actually change the world by knowing, by taking human biology and treating it like computer science. Well, they partnered with the San Diego Zoo recently and their frozen zoo, which is a, is the largest repository of animal data. They've got skin and genetic and blood samples from the largest swath of animal species in the world. And they actually have duplicated into multiple sites for redundancy. And so we were fortunate enough to get a tour, me and the Rising Tide Partners crew just this past fall actually of the frozen zoo. It's pretty cool to see one. We learned we got to see the lab and see them take a sample in a slice and then prepare it for freezing. And then they lifted up these, you know, very Jurassic park, like, like pulled these, you know, straight, like metal casings up of, of you know, some of them animals that don't exist anymore, which is pretty crazy, right? They've got some of the rhinos in there where there was one left kind of thing. And so to see Illumina and the San Jose Zoo, these two pivotal assets, partner to enable of what they could do with their data that they've been sitting on. It's actually been around 50 years, this zoo. And this is kind of the first time that they are taking, you know, modern genetic tools and saying, what else could we do with these samples? Pretty cool. You got anything more on this?

Yeah, in the press release it just said this collaboration marks a new era of genomic discovery that will accelerate the capacity to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Illumina is obviously one of the largest employers in life sciences in San Diego. They've been in the news a lot lately. Their stock is, you know, has Been on the decline a little bit. They have a new CEO and so people are looking for some guidance this year. So yeah, it's great to see them partner with the local company, San Diego Zoo. They're doing some great work and super cool that you got opportunity to go check that out.

It is pretty cool. I, I love to see them doing stuff local because the local community, the biotech world is massive and, and seeing the collaboration there is real. Right? That's kind of like the opportunity to meet your customer every day as opposed to fly to them once a year and see them at a conference. And the Illumina, you know, let's call it the Lumina mafia. The Aluminum alumni are here and building other companies as well too. And so to see a, see their, their exec team also get rooted here again is I think really important related to exec teams being local. There was a big announcement of a new CEO at another med device company, Dexcom, a long time leader in glucose or blood sugar analysis and data. They announced the big CEO change, which was a big change. I think past CEO Kevin has been there a long time. You got more on this, Fred?

Yeah. So Dexcom had a great, had a great feature both in the Union Tribune and the Senate Business Journal. They did an interview with the new CEO Jacob, where they call him Jake Leach. He's been there for 20 years, started very early and worked his way up. He kind of reminds me of, you know, Qualcomm also had a very similar situation where the CEO stepped down. They hired from within Lumina. You know, they obviously had a CEO step down. They hired someone in. So this is part of the biggest leadership change in San Diego since Qualcomm and Illumina. So yeah, it's a great, great story feature Tribune Business Journal. I'm actually reaching out, trying to get an interview with them as well and love to hear more about their plans. They did a Super bowl ad loving two years ago or last year. Be curious, is there doing super AD this year? Maybe we do this on the next podcast. What companies are doing super bowl ad call.

It was with the Jonas Brothers, I think, right?

That's correct.

Which was cool. You're right, I forgot about that. Yeah. Let's do a rundown. Let's see if, if ClickUp pulls the trigger this year. That's been always. My bet is the first San Diego startup, if you will, that does one. But maybe S.H.I.E.L.D. a.I. Maybe S.H.I.ELL's ready to go. Bring this publicly. Yeah, you're right. We'll follow it this weekend. Is the super bowl, which will be fun. And I now can monitor that in real time on Twitter because I finally got back on Twitter after getting hacked last summer. I got hacked, like man, good old classic hack. They took over my account, changed password and I couldn't get back in. And X was like, sorry, we don't know even if you were real or not. So they changed the whole account name or the whole account look and just started of course. What do you think they did? Just, just spamming crypto as they do. So they spammed enough crypto. I got tons of messages saying, is this you? Have you been hacked? And then apparently X just deleted the account. Just got deleted. Which I didn't even follow. And so someone went to tag me last week actually to share the substack about our VC Outlook event. They're like, are you not on Twitter? And I don't even know. I went, I was like, oh, apparently got deleted. So I just went and re registered forward slash Neil Bloom and it was available. So I got my account back. I have none of the followers of the content but honestly, you know, it's all relationships. I got the people, people know where, where to find me if they need to. So I'm back with my 10 followers and three tweets. And honestly, you know, I'll use it as, as much as I need to so you can follow me there. I'll post stuff. It's hard not to be on Twitter for the. Just the stuff that's happening, that's for sure. But yeah, good to be back and welcome back.

Yeah, it was actually I, I tweet, you know, some San Diego stuff or try to repost San Diego things and there actually was some news related to sports. So maybe just tee it up a little bit. The Olympics announced, I think six cities that they're bringing the soccer team too. And they're actually going to be bringing the Olympics soccer team to San Diego, Snapdragon, which is pretty big news. So I went ahead and retweete, tweeted that on Twitter. It's great to see you back on that, Neil. And you know, we always try to, you know, share what we're seeing, news related stuff. So give, give Neil follow. And yeah, be sure to start posting your stuff too, man. It's great to see you back on the platform.

Thanks. Yeah, it's good to be back. Thank you, thank you. And you can come see us live in person in a number of things Coming up. We got the San Diego founders hike back at it Friday morning, first Friday of every month and we'll be there. I think I've also nailed down a DJ who wants to Church of music, wants to play some tunes at the end of the hike, which is fun. It's pretty fun. And we've got Thrive Coffee right who will be there at the end as well to give out, you know, sell some coffee as well. Local startup built it into a jeep so you can just like buy and pour your pour your coffee right from the machine there. Next week is actually Sano Angel Conference Investor Network Night. I'll be leading an overview of how to evaluate startups. Pretty poignant for everyone who's about to start Sano Angel Conference on the investor side which starts in March. So come out there at C3 bank, which would be fun. And then I'm flying to Texas to be with a bunch of other San Diego at techcon Southwest Austin. I'm actually making a pit stop in Dallas to go see our friends in Dallas, the Trust and Will guys and maybe Ryan at Shield AI as well. And then headed to Austin first to put on an Austin founder and funders happy hour of my own. And then I'll be leading a panel on kind of the state of venture I'm leading. I've got four investors, mostly local at techcon Southwest which will be fun. What else you got on your radar coming up?

Events wise Fred, there's never a dull moment of events. February seems to be stacked. There's a global investor conference by Biocom. A bunch of folks are flying in for that and yeah, I would say get plugged in Social Coyote. Jonah Peak does a great job of curating what events are happening in San Diego as well as Usain's Eventship.com there's always a lot of community events and we try to share our events that we're attending to, both open and private on LinkedIn. So give us a follow there and that's. That's pretty much it.

One more event coming into town next week. One of the biggest defense tech gatherings is AFC west. So there's events pretty much every day from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of both local. I know like the Harpoon guys have got a few events going as well as some big global events happening. So if you're in hard tech, defense tech, make sure you're going to be out there and let the San Diego scene know that you're there because the San Diego hard tech and defense tech crew has been rolling deep together, which has been really fun to see. So fcos look for it next week. Fred thanks for being on doing this together. We'll keep it going.

Always a pleasure, Neil.

Likewise. Cheers everyone. Have a good one.

Queso la vida San Diego School of rappy rapping Fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a craft beer and coffee my coating 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 cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset the Hoya shores 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 interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host Neil Bloom Cross 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 start up get the party started it you want tech and tacos tacos in tech you know we got it hey.