This Week in San Diego Tech News

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 in tech, you know we got it.

Hey.

Hello everyone. Welcome back. This week in San Diego Tech with Neil Fred. Hey, Fred.

Hey Neil. How's it going? It's good.

Good to see you.

Good to see you as well today. I'm currently in the office, brand new office in utc. Got a nice little conference room here. So yeah, super excited to be back recording this week. Tech Week news. Love it.

Yeah. I'm here at the Leucadia Club, this secret unidentified building in Leucadia. I can see some surfboards over there. So different office vibes for a different day. But coming off a week of CES last week and JPMorgan this week and so feels like half the community was out of town last week and half the and like the whole community is gone this week. So it feels a little quiet in San Diego right now if you are in San Diego, otherwise if you're not, you're probably non stop going, going, going. And so shout out to everyone who is doing the first of the year conference circuits. I was out at CES last week just for honestly such a quick time as a founder funder dinner with a bunch of local companies and people who flew in. Actually Mercado, a San Diego company CEO Bobby Branigan helped co organize a dinner and it was really nice to be there. Cheryl Goodman came to the dinner and we ended up driving home together right after the dinner because we were like, let's just, let's go home, let's get back to work. And so we spent four or five hours just chatting about the week and the buzz and AI and the whole CES was honestly abuzz with physical AI, like robotics of everything or automation of everything. I think you had Nvidia and others bringing their, you know, AI chips and AI stuff to bring things to life. And so that's what everyone usually is already excited about, CES seeing the gadgets. But now it feels like people are like, oh, this is coming to the mainstream, the automation. Right. Like Waymo had a huge showcase of how they've drastically reduced their kit apart to put on any car down I think under 20k now. So you can turn any car into Self driving for under that. That was big as well as everything else. Automation for everything. So it was a fun week in that regard. And now JP Morgan is kicking off the attention on bio and we've already had the pre JP Morgan announcements that came out. I feel like the ones that kind of got everyone pumped and juiced and excited. And I think while it's only Tuesday or Wednesday of this week of JP Morgan, I think we're going to continue to see a bunch of big bio headlines come out as the week goes on. So why don't we jump into some bio headlines? Right? I think you pulled a big one. Another big multi billion dollar acquisition for a San Diego company here.

Yeah. So I think last podcast we talked about just like the biggest VC deals as well as M and A deals in San Diego. We had some of the bigger ones like Avidity, Biosciences, Cedara, Capstan, all had multi billion dollar acquisitions. Well, just last week there was another one here in San Diego. Vintx was acquired by Lily for 1.2 billion. And someone commented on my LinkedIn post and said, hey, we're hitting our stride here in San Diego in 2026. Lily's plan acquisition of NTX State. Classy. San Diego. This is pretty huge. And you know, I remember talking this to the CEO about three years ago when they had just raised, you know, some capital. I believe it's like 100 million round and they had some immun immunology targets. So it's great to see big pharma, you know, continue to see success from biotech startups. I think this is, this is great news. I reached out to the CEO to get the scoop, but unfortunately right now it's quiet, quiet period. So we have to wait till the deal closes and so we have more information. We'll have to kind of bring that story to life.

Well, it's more of the trend that we talked about last week, which was big bio buying startups. Right. Which is awesome. We love to see that because they're doing it in a way that is bringing liquidity to both the investors and the founders. They're keeping the teams local in most of the cases. And now you have a big company like Lily, who's already super invested in San Diego, has an even bigger talent base here too. This is awesome. So hopefully we see more of that trend. We also talked about, we want to see more of that trend spill over in the tech side, see big tech by our startup tech. So we'll keep an eye on that. Good one. Fred, what Else what do you got next that hit your radar?

So we had another big financing round. Life science related. Mirador Therapeutics. This is started by a former Prometheus bio executives. They just raised a series B pretty massive 250 million series B. And it was an interesting article by Endpoints saying that you know, they are kind of a secretive life science company and they're looking to build a powerhouse to build out, you know, their platform even wider. So this is some huge news. It seems like biotech funding is starting to come back and investors are starting to have more of an appetite for. I wouldn't say this is, it is all risky but you know, this guy and his team have proven successful in other areas. Prometheus had one of the largest acquisitions on record in San Diego and so they're looking to do that again with Mirador. And so this is definitely a company to watch. I assume with this new funding round they're going to be hiring. They have a brand new office in Sorrento Valley. It's super stunning and super congrats to them for their funding round.

Amazing. Yeah, we, we watched this team right after their acquisition. It was under a year. Right. They spun up a new Mirador, I think just from stealth. Raised 400 million in their first round just less than a year ago maybe. I think it was, I think it was like. Yep. So to see them continuing to, to raise strong capital and continue to grow is awesome. So amazing news for the local bioseed. Keep going here.

So the last one biorelated, there was some other additional funding from more of a middle stage midsize company called Ibio. They publicly traded, they had a 26 million private placement. They are doing something interesting in you know, GLP1s obesity related drugs. So Ibio is a company to watch. Also my radar, they just raised some new capital and it's great to see them succeeding as well in the space.

Amazing. Love to see it. Multi, multi million dollar fundings keep them coming for sure. We have a bunch of hardware fundings that will probably be coming out this quarter. That's as much as I can tease but I know that they have happened already. First closes are happening this week. But related to the hardware, especially one that bridges the hardware, life science and consumer, which is three great pillars of San Diego. Blue Nalu, a food tech and food innovation company announced their funding which I believe closed just like literally December 31st, end of the year announced a 11 million dollar round to continue for them to scale from their R D lab to their manufacturing lab. And so we actually participated in this at Interlock Capital also new fund which or Tech Coast Angels participated in their way back there, I think their seed round and so Rising Tide Partners helped through an investment with new fund there and then so yeah, we participated in this new round for Blue Nolan. So congrats to Luke Cooper House and the Blue Nalu team. This company is really going from like I said, R D to scale. So they have their first orders in and they pretty much have to deliver on these orders by end of 2026, which is awesome. A bunch of these orders are big food vendors and big food distributors. The round encompassed all insiders so it was a great sign to see all existing investors return to the table and participate in this round to help them now scale up their manufacturing. So they have their manufacturing facility in place, they've got first orders and now it's just a race for the next 12 months to get FDA approval to then deliver on these multimillion dollar orders here. So, so great to see. Any comments Fred, on Blue Nalu?

Yeah, I love seeing Blue Nalu get, get the local. Love. Luke Per House is a veteran CEO. He posted on his LinkedIn that this is insider led round participation with more than 40 existing investors. And I enjoyed following them when they first started and had that viral article on Union Tribune about how they're using technology to kind of create, yeah, sell cultured seafood and they're starting with some pretty high end fish and it's great to see them, you know, you know, thrive and do well years after. I think it's about four years ago when I first heard about them. So it's great. Congrats to them on the recent funding.

Ground and, and it really does rely a lot on the local life science scene. The cto, Lauren comes from Organovo where they did very similar things with human organs in terms of cell, you know, in terms of creating a. They pretty much grew organs from scratch in a way that the same thing that they're doing with Bluefin Tuno of taking the best of the best cell lines and enabling them to, to build just the healthy protein. Not have to build, not have to build the whole fish, just the edible protein. So it's really cool to see the crossover here locally from, from and, and they're going to be a consumer brand. They're going to have to. Right? They're going to have to. People are going to look on menus and decide am I, you know, what am I eating here in Bluefin Tuno? They aren't going to have to disclose that. So all of it's really great. We're super stoked to be continue to be along for the ride. Love you know, backing deep tech founders like this. Why don't we move over to some other news. There was a announcement of Cubic on their defense side partnering with Palantir to bring Palantir's crazy strong AI to the defense supply chain and communications world that Cubic delivers in. Love seeing this news one Palantir is one of the hottest and honestly biggest names in AI right now. They're doing it at the largest scale. They're considered one of the new primes if you will, public company bringing top tech to the government. And you're starting to see them actually when what they used to do is really hyper focused on the intelligence world and now they're taking their giant data ingestion artificial intelligence technology and bring it to other verticals. I've seen them do it in manufacturing and they partner with Anduril on that as well as Natilus, a local company and now they're just saying where can we take this huge unstructured data ingestion engine and bring sense and order to another world that that doesn't have it? And so in this announcement with Cubic, which Cubic's helping specifically on the communications software side for and hardware for the defense industry, Palantir is pretty much taking their AI ingestion and helping both the whole supply chain of building hardware and software to get it out to a delivered product for the U.S. army and managing the whole funnel of the data from start to finish. So great to see these two partnering. You have anything here on this one?

Yeah, I would just say I think 2026 will still have a lot of defense related news and I, I've been reading some newspapers, you know, every single week and I think this past week I saw a ton of news around, you know, the US going into war and things are just, tensions are accelerating. So I think this is going to continue to be a trend where we're going to see local companies partner up together to move faster and create better solutions. Now the article that was published, it was pretty interesting to read that they said they're excited to partner with Palantir, is excited to partner with Cubic with the dual purpose DNA and you know, basically Cuba was like, hey, we're, we're proud to collaborate with Palantir to deliver next generation tactical edge solutions using AI. So yeah, it's going to see, we're going to see more of these partnerships with local companies and global Companies especially as geopolitical tensions rise. So I can see it being a continued trend.

Agreed. Yeah, I think many parts of America are waking up to how far we are behind and not moving fast enough. And partnership is the way to do it. Right. When someone's already figured out one piece, how do you catch up quick in that regard to, especially in the defense world, which is looking to a local only supply chain is what they're trying to get to. And a budget that's significantly increasing. Right. The Department of War's budget continues to increase. Meanwhile the Department, the NIH budget continues to get slashed at times. And so you're seeing people find dual use or new purpose of technology finding its way to military applications as opposed to maybe health. So all that's kind of interesting and it kind of leads to our next story. ResMed, another local company, public company, the leader in sleep innovation, sleep technology, just got FDA clearance on taking their CPAP machine, which is this machine that helps people sleep and breathe during sleep and taking personalized human, individualized data, empowering the CPAP with your own data. So personalize the settings. They're calling it an AI improvement. So what it says is it's just tracking a bunch of different markers from you and enabling your own CPAP machine to tailor all the pieces related to that. Flow rates, oxygen rates, oxygen, nitrogen mixture ratios, all based on sensors and settings that they're getting from your own human data, which I think is going to be a huge trend. Continue to be a trend that San Diego continues to gain on because of our deep pool of I would say personalized medicine and medicine or, or hardware, healthcare hardware that touches the individual person. But any new, anything to fill in here on ResMed from you?

I was just looking at ResMed stock right now. It's currently trading at $254. You know, this might be a company to watch. They're innovating in the sleep space. Congrats to them. They're one of the largest employers in San Diego. I love to see them innovating, staying competitive.

Yeah, nearly a $40 billion company, which I think's up for them. Definitely up year over year. They're up even over the five year. So yeah, continue to grow here. And you've seen some spin outs from them too. It's been pretty fun to see sleep score labs come out of them and a few other people who've taken this data and data science and now into AI approach and spin up new startups because of the things that they're learning. Purely just about One piece of technology, CPAP for while you're sleeping. But man, there's so many things you that happens and it's a third of your day sleeping. Right. So it's actually, you know, pretty big area to focus on. But just like that, we see Dexcom, another sensor wearable that you wear and they're getting a ton of data and building that right back into a set of personalized healthcare. I think we're going to see more and more of that as well too. And I. Oh, we got one last news story here related to some grant funding. You want to give us the news there, Fred?

Yeah. So Tim Schwartz, who leads entrepreneurship innovation at UCSD shared the news that Air Surgical landed a $2.6 million grant. And they said this was found by a team from the Rady School of Business as well as Jake School of Engineering. Aerosurgical is helping improve patient outcomes. Specifically in medtech, they actually participated in Radius Jacobs School Medtech Accelerator program. So huge congrats to them on landing their funding. The post also mentioned that they provided some investor connections and incubation space. I think it's awesome to see local startups continue to find success and get funding. A lot of them start from a lab or research lab at ucsd. So congrats to them on that milestone.

Yeah, love to see it. And actually I'm going to throw in one last news story here. At the end of the year, the Forbes 30 under 30 was announced and we actually had two companies in San Diego that were on that list at least including Crater, the team that was a spin out out of UCSD as well. So super cool to see 3D printing at the edge for the military. Eric Snell and team, it's super cool to see that they land the 30 under 30 list. And then there was another team on that list that formerly was part of techstars San Diego. They're in year one. Call the names escaped me all of a sudden. I don't know if they're 100% in San Diego anymore, but they were a San Diego based company that that got named to that. You'll probably get to the name before I get to it. But what they did was in a sense building, taking the model of solar cells on your roof, but actually doing plants and algae on your roof to generate new oxygen. So it was kind of like an offset. It's like a carbon offset. So instead of, you know, while you're also generating energy from your solar cell, why not also generate new oxygen and release into the world? Super cool company. I think they've got their first prototype up either in Utah or Arizona. So congrats to the new Forbes 30 under 30 list is there as well too. Some events coming up. Well like we mentioned, everyone's at JP Morgan this week coming up soon. Also TechCon is coming to Austin in about a month. I'll be out there for that. I'm looking forward to a bunch of San Diegos being in Austin, seeing a bunch of our Austin friends, which will be really fun. At the end of the month Fred and I have our VC Outlook event for kind of the top local Series A ready founders and the funders who are doing Series A's. So we've got a great group coming together kind of show like the state of funding. Got some people on the family office side, LP side, VC side speaking on a panel and just like, you know, what are they seeing for the year ahead? And hopefully not just AI. AI dominated conversation which happens a lot. What else you got on the reader? Oh, Hussein's event's coming up soon within the week. Hussein's Mixer, first one of the year will be awesome to go to. What else you got on your radar friend?

I would just say I enjoyed driving down Carlsbad last week and attending the Crowd Industry Mixer hosted by yourself and Matthew Stafford. It was just awesome to see folks from Tech Life Science Consumer come and show out network that was on powered on event ships. So I recommend tapping into that resource as well as Social Coyote ran by Jonah Peak who shares weekly events happening in San Diego. And yeah, you know, this is a time to get out. It seems like we'd be a renewed interest for people to, you know, network. Whether it's a hike or happy hour, there's something for everyone.

Yes, yes. Big shout out to both Eventship and Social Coyote. You can find a link to the Social Coyote and Event Ship in the show notes here. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We definitely have gotten a lot of love from people who keep in touch through this and we're here to just kind of inform. We're learning. We might as well share it and it really helps if you amplify it so that other people know where to go and what's happening. You know another thing, around the first year people are switching jobs looking for some new opportunities and so if you are hiring, I think the Social Coyotes got their Social the Coyote job board going too. So look for local jobs. There's a bunch of people. Anytime someone raises money they're going to be hiring right after that. So let's make sure that people find some new opportunities this year as well too. And thanks all for sharing. Make sure you go to Fred's Substack, the Business of San Diego Substack linked in the show notes. And we can find mine at Rising Tide Partners Substack as well too. Fred, thanks for doing this.

Always a pleasure, Neil.

All right, everyone, see you later.

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