This Week in San Diego Tech News - Sept 9, 2023

Hello. Hello. Good to have you all here. This is this week in San Diego Tech News with Neil Bloom and Fred Greer. I am Neil Bloom, both the co host of the Tacos and Tech podcast and Fresh Brewed Tech, a tech media platform about San Diego and the manage a co managing partner of intellock Capital, an investment group of experienced entrepreneurs and operators investing in other tech companies. And I'm joined here by Fred. Hey Fred. Hey Neil.

Fred Greer here, author of sd founder substack and technology journalist here in San Diego. Largely been covering the startup scene, tech scene, life science, consumer companies. Happy to be back.

Yeah. Good to have another one together here. We were talking a little offline how the summer felt a little quiet on fundings but there's been some recent ones. So let's cover some recent fundings from a variety of industries we've got here. Let's jump into OcuSpace, a hardware meets software startup that is putting radio frequency devices in physical places to detect occupancy. Now they started pre Covid in libraries at universities to be able to tell you know it and other places like here where your buildings are being occupied and largely went deep into you know the ed tech space on campuses to tell facilities, people where people currently are and how their buildings are being used over time. But they've, they've grown over time. Fred, have you followed their, their growth since those early days?

Yeah, I remember writing a story on them for your website actually Freshproof Tech. So yeah, this company was founded by UCSD alums. They got technology that was spun out of Qualcomm so they, they had purchased the equipment or the technology from a Qualcomm executive and they've had some pretty great growth in 2020. Up till now the Covid's kind of helped, you know businesses, universities, large corporations, they want to know how space is being used and so their technology allows that to, to capture that. You can see how many people are in a room at a certain time and you can think this could be valuable for other things outside of libraries, coffee shops, gyms. And so they raise I think another series A funding, I think 3.6 million from investors mainly from LA but they are have been hiring pretty aggressively in San Diego. So it's great to see that they raise funding.

Yeah, that's great to see. I love to hear the, the Qualcomm spin out that that still is relevant and out there. You know I think going forward use of space is going to be even more important in this post Covid world. Right of do you Know you hear all the time. For me, I'm talking to CEOs all the time who have space, love their space, want their space, know it's underutilized. And I got to imagine that's the same at every company. So you know, just from that part of knowing your own team's utilization is interesting. And then the same with digital to physical retail and other areas. Just really having data to know how is physical space being used these days. So excited to continue watching their growth. Congrats to Nick and the team there. Let's jump over to shipcom, a tech enabled 3PL, which is kind of the center point of E commerce these days. Also physical, very physical. All E Commerce is obviously the actual goods that we're purchasing and to do that means getting it from the manufacturer to your house. And there is a lot of logistical steps in between. A3PL is in a sense a staging point or warehouse for brands to stage their their packages. Amazon is notoriously one of these. If you buy something on Amazon, they have already got pretty much everything under the sun in a warehouse somewhere. And you can imagine many other warehouses full of this stuff too. So Shipcom is doing this for hundreds of brands storing packaged goods in a few different warehouses around the country. And when you buy something like say a Dr. Squatch soap bar, well depending upon if you're in the west coast, Midwest or east coast, it'll come from the specific closest warehouse order comes in. They package it up and put it on a truck over to you so that the brand itself isn't having to do that physically. So Shipcom took in some new capital here with CEO Greg Moser taken the helm over the last year, that's been a leadership change. And seeing them them grow both from physical presence around the country and the number they're now in, I believe hundreds of brands that they represent from through their platform. Have you covered Shipcom before?

I actually got to meet the CEO Greg at a startup event. I think he was the Interlock Summit. So Greg is actually a very seasoned founder and not to get confused with the company called Shipware which is a similar company, they do E commerce for I think cost and shipping. And so Shipcom is just another player in the space. They focus on, I think fulfillment and logistics in the E commerce space. And it's really, really cool to see that they continue to grow. And whether it's growth funding or debt funding, we have not only E commerce brands here, like the Vuoris of the world, but we also have kind of the technology behind that Help e commerce companies. So it's a cool company to look at and know that they're here. I think they're in North County San Diego.

Yeah Carlsbad based. I'm actually full disclosure about to jump on a sailboat with Greg Moser right now and a few other CEO founders where we're going to do some networking at Etsy. And you're right to speak to the logistic tech stack of San Diego. You mentioned shipware Trevor Altman's company that they recently got acquired where there's just so much different tech actually involved in the full process from. From all the way from actually designing the products all the way to it getting in your house. Man the stack is crazy. And we have so many different companies at different stages like like a. Like a flock freight which is helping the trucks themselves better route plan what boxes to send at what time on on what size trucks or the Lytics which is measuring how our trucks drivers doing through cameras inside in and outside the dash of it. Or let's name another later stage logistics tech company like Platform Science which is actually building the the digital layer for trucks themselves. So imagine if instead of the picture the app marketplace of the iPhone imagine the app marketplace of the truck. All the different tech that now is happening on the platform of a semi truck. Platform Science is now that digital layer too. So kind of interesting to see all of that all in one county. I believe it is a sub clustering worth continuing to talk about the logistics tech world of San Diego. So we will continue to highlight that worth mentioning I guess just some events that happened this week that were related to these companies. I happen to have hosted Carlsbad Happy hour with the city of Carlsbad for local companies building sports and active lifestyle brand companies. So these are you know like your Voris which is Carlsbad based or your Lights Helmets which we'll talk about here in a second and your Shipcoms as well too. So building either sports companies themselves sports brands or technology related to that. So another company that was represented there was Betfully which has a suite of apps to help the online sports better around you know making better bets. So Eric Crossett was was in the house there and kind of a first time we've gathered this group here but I believe city was happy with it and we'll be doing more of that as well too. Let's talk about Lights helmets real quick. Since we just mentioned them, you've known them for a bit. Take us through what's going on. Lights.

So lights Helmets is a Carlsbad based company. They have a big partnership with the NFL to kind of release their, their helmets across different teams. I kind of know the founding story that I can speak to, but I allow you to speak to more of the NFL stuff. So their company, they create, you know, safety helmets for football teams. They started actually with flag football and they've since expanded to more professional football. The guy who runs that, his name is Nicholas Ayan and he actually acquired the company in 2018 from a company called SG Helmets. I believe it was Indiana based and he acquired it and he invested I think $5 million in R& D. The technology or the equipment materials is actually originated from the military. So really cool story. They started with flag football, they got investment from Drew B, Drew Brees or I think he's an ambassador of the brand. And now they've entered the NFL which is a company. Just really shows them that, you know, they're working with, you know, really high, like the best of the best. And so, you know, we'll see them continue to grow and hopefully this partnership is a long term partnership.

Yeah, there's just been so much talk around head injuries in sports over the years and Lights really wanted to, you know, focus on that, of changing and really building better products to, to affect all the way from kids through adults on the head and physical injuries. One of the, one of the players in Lights is a longtime sports equipment technology founder named John Sarkeesian. John was the CEO of Skills, a sports equipment company, also was north county based that built a variety of sports tech from, you know, your practice soccer goals to your padding to everything you can think of related to sports training. So John's involved at Lights as well too. So you've got kind of an experienced team here obviously in the sports equipment space. And you're right, it is a huge deal that they finally got the NFL's nod. You can imagine NFL doesn't just say yes to any equipment and having their blessing to have the equipment on the field with their players is a really big deal. So yeah, excited to see Lights continue progressing their, their products forward. Here, some other events that we've done just in the last week and then we can talk about. Oh, we have one more financing to talk about. Yeah, biotech financing you want to mention.

Yeah. So report therapeutics. They raised 150 million in funding. They're more of like a mid, mid mid or mid mid stage company. Still early stage, but yeah, we have a, you know a pretty big round is 150 million as we mentioned, funding has slowed. However, you know we're still seeing some of these biotech companies raising 100 million rounds. So I just wanted to call that out. Congrats to the report team. They're here in San Diego so it's great to see them raise some funding.

Yeah, there's still capital out there, people are still writing checks. It's, you know, just, it's not necessarily as crazy as it was two years ago, but maybe more what it was like four years ago. But you know, our memories are, it's hard to remember times pre Covid that's for sure. So it feels slow. But I believe their funding levels are pretty much in line with where we were pre Covid at this point, which is great, great to see because that means we're still up from where we were five to 10 years ago in San Diego. So you know we got one month left on the, on the quarter. We expect another Q3 report on funding so we can continue tracking our progress here. Some events that were going on over the last week I held a AI meets Bio CEO event with co organizers Arjun Bonsal and Nick Edwards. Nick, deep in the biotech world, Arjun, deep in the AI world and really we're trying to understand from a thought leadership perspective just where is, where are the lines blurring here? Where is the deep bio experience leaning into utilizing AI for molecular research, protein folding modeling all the way on up. So we had a great, we do a, each month we have someone do a demo of their product and we had a really deep talk on protein engineering and kind of the full stack of LLMs or large language models that are available for people who are working in the protein engineering space. So it was a kind of a deep dive on tools for the bio leaders who are looking and leaning into AI for bio. So it was a great talk and we do it monthly, kind of an invite only thing. We want to make sure we're kind of having always having relevant builders in the room. So that was a good one. And then a group within Interlock Capital is a bunch of exited founders, people who have built software companies and now looking at post exit what's next for them. And I had enough of them reach out to me and say, you know, here's what I'm looking at. I'm looking at buying a what they say, quote unquote is a boring business or a bunch of them or maybe a software business mightbe just get right back into where I was but they're kind of in this test try and experiment world of understanding what's the business buying world as opposed to starting it from scratch. So I said let's, I'm hearing enough of these conversations. Let's convene a group of us to talk through it. And so we did the first what I call the business buyer breakfast of a group of people who are somewhere in their journey of buying businesses. There is a few like a Matt Stoica who is super far along. He's got a, a a roll up business called New Rocket where he was tapped by private equity to go buy a whole bunch of service businesses that are servicing the, the ServiceNow ecosystem. So you know developers, marketing agencies that specifically focused on ServiceNow software utilizers and he actually got ServiceNow to actually invest in the company itself too. So they're in on it. He did this prior to he did the same roll up in the world for the Salesforce environment. So he had a service roll up called Relation Edge where he built a large company and it got acquired and he said I'm gonna go do it again. So he was, it was great to hear from around how you know from an experienced business buyer. What should people be thinking about when they're just getting into it now. We had people in the room who were thinking of buying you know a FedEx route or a Laundromat or a portfolio of pool cleaning businesses or an existing marketing agency. So really, really interesting conversation. Oh we had another one who kind of a startup that's been funded actually by new fund recently called Talitha. Okay so a bunch of events coming up the most the one that's on everyone's mind over the next few weeks is Innovation Day during Innovation Week. So the week of September 11th is the is by connect has termed it Innovation Week because they're putting on an innovation day on September 14th which is a pet go park takeover. The schedule is now online so you can see what's going on throughout the day. From some thought leadership to some pitch competitions happening to hundreds of tabling of cars that cars companies, startups who that can go and meet from early stage to late stage. I believe there'll be some, a lot of late stage companies there with like full teams out to meet other people. So be kind of a great celebration today. All ending in I believe a concert with Ozo Motley which should be fun. We are going to do an interlock meetup probably around put the official timeout but it's probably around three or four o'clock in the afternoon at the Aptera car which is an EV Three wheel car. We're gonna all meet up as a group of interlockers, which there's hundred of us now and just cheers each other and see each other in person because this was all started during COVID We actually haven't all officially met in person, which should be fun. You're gonna be out there, I'm sure. Yeah, Fred.

Yeah, unfortunately I won't be there. I was talking to Mike Crane who's helping organize it. It's gonna be a great event. They're, you know, I think they're giving some, some free, not free tickets, but half off tickets for students and veterans. It's gonna be over 3,000 people there. But yeah, there's gonna be VCs, founders, C suite, startup community members. I really am excited about. I'm gonna be writing about and covering as I can. I will be out of town at a conference unfortunately during the same week. So I'm really bummed. But I, I'm looking forward to this event. I think it's going to be the banner event for Startup San Diego and I think we have a lot of momentum building here, which is great to see.

Yeah, yeah, gonna be a lot, a lot of people in town from out of town too. It's kind of replaced September is when Connect used to do Venture Summit and then I think it's kind of becoming that event now. We'll see in future years. But it's a convening event for VCs to meet a bunch of series A ready companies which are the cool companies, so should be great in that regard too. That same week is Top Tech Awards which is the night before celebrating kind of our technical leaders in San Diego at the Del Mar Race track. And that is also the first week of the brand new techstars San Diego accelerator cohort powered by sdsu. So it was great to meet a whole bunch of the other mentors at a dinner recently. There's close to 60, maybe if not 80 of us experience founders and a variety of skill sets as mentors throughout the program, which will go from September 11th all the way till demo day on December 6th or 7th at Snapdragon Stadium. So I'm super pumped for the 12 companies to names to be released so we can jump in and start helping them. Only half are local to San Diego, which means the other half are moving here to be in the program, which is a huge opportunity for us to show them what's going on here in town. So they will all be at Innovation Day as well too. So look for a special podcast in the next week or so with Fred and I will probably record it in the next week or so and Release it on September 11th or 12th to highlight all the new companies that are coming together.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this, this, this inaugural class of tech stars. I think Ryan Cooter and his team has done a great job to make sure that there's high quality companies going through this and this is going to be a program that's going to really hold a lot of weight here and really inspire the next generation of builders and founders.

Yeah, it's, it's time to, you know, accelerate some more of our local companies. Some, some people need that, some people need that huge support structure around that techstars Give it. And I'm, I'm stoked that's gonna be in person because there's just so much to be gained from, from the trans. The knowledge being transferred that full time for three months. So we will for sure see many of you out there. We didn't highlight Silicon Sands Mixer. You want to talk through real quick how that came to be and what we can look forward to going forward from that group?

Yeah. So Silas Con Sands was the inaugural event that they had in Del Mar last week. I was kind of led by a former Dropbox executive, Kaylin, and he has kind of, he's definitely community building. He's trying to bring that Silicon Valley mindset, those high quality, fast growth companies, founders, executives together. And he moved here to San Diego I think, you know, three years ago, two years ago, and is building a new company called Neotax. And I had the honor to attend and I met so many different founders from, you know, former employees at Google to a few companies that are currently based here, which is at ClickUp. And there are a lot of new early stage founders who I actually didn't know were even here. One was a former Airbnb and Coinbase alumni linear app co founder or founder and CEO. And so I just, I just think they're going to be bringing more people like this together. So stay tuned for Silicon Sands mixers that are happening I think on a quarterly basis. Neil, you were there, you can speak more to it. But honestly that was a great event that happened last last week.

Yeah, I, I popped through real quick just because I wanted to thank Kaylin and for convening that as well as Dylan from Slack Fund and, and Rob from Salesforce Ventures. Just all north county guys, all semi new to San Diego and it's just awesome to see them stepping forward and saying we're new here and we want to convene and, you know, bring our networks together. So. Loved it. Looking forward to more of it. We need. We need a lot of all of this, which is great. So with that, let's get out there and go meet more people and connect them into the community. Fred, always a pleasure to do this with you. Have a great Labor Day weekend to you and everyone, and we'll talk to you all again soon.

Pleasure, Neil. See you next time. Thank you.

Cheers. Bye.