This Week on 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, today.

Well, welcome back, everybody. Neil and Fred, back at you. Happy to be here. Fred, good to see you.

Good to see you in the, in the flesh. Neil, where you working from today?

STSU today, where I've actually been three times this week because there's been a series of events that have been fun to go to. I was at a talk by the one, the Only Eric Topol, Mr. Scripps Research Institute scientist and leader there who just came out with a new book on AI and healthcare and AI and bio. And he gave a really cool talk on here's already what we're doing with AI and here's just the tip of the iceberg of where it's headed. So very cool to have that together. And then I was back on Wednesday because Jenna Ryan, the founder, co founder of Ukora, which was a women's health powder mix for UTIs that had an awesome exit, she was giving a talk to the SDSU Entrepreneurship Society and it was just cool to see her since I had her back on the podcast right when she was launching it. So it was cool to see her on the other side now and then. Here we are. Friday had great Founders Hike and my Fridays with the Zip Launchpad, which has been fun to see kids making, students making progress. But how about you? How's your week been?

It was pretty good, man. I actually tuned in earlier this week of cool conversation. I think it was a live stream with you, Hussein, Jonah Peak. I think you guys did a phenomenal job talking about how to network and build relationships and also start your own communities and. Yeah, it's cool to see you guys do that.

Yeah, thanks. It came from a LinkedIn post that, you know, I, I constantly. You and I constantly get tagged as like, oh, who you gotta meet in San Diego. And to be honest, like, I get, I get a little frustrated. Like, I, I don't need another 500 people picking me. Why aren't 500 people helping connect to 500 people simultaneously? And I'm like, you know what? Maybe we haven't taught people the skills of being a connector. Right? You and I have had to learn it because of necessity, because it's good for us to connect to other people. But if we're all gonna, we all need to get better. We need the growth mentality that is a startup way. And if we all could one start trying to connect people to people as opposed to just saying, oh, you gotta meet Neil, gotta meet Fred, I think we all would unlock things in parallel. So we kind of did. We did it, talk about it, how it's a parallel sport, not an in series sport. So cool to see people get some takeaways from it. And I think it'll be an ongoing conversation that we'll pull and we'll pull you in on a future one too. But it was, it was actually a cool format to do LinkedIn live and have so many people live with us. And we had like at one point like 90 or 100 people live with us, which was cool to have kind of a live community conversation. You and I have talked about doing more of this podcast live. Easier said than done, but at least we're trying. So thanks for tuning into that. Let's dive into some news. We've got news in a smattering of areas around San Diego, mostly big tech I would say, or like, you know, larger areas. General Atomics had some big defense news. Launching a brand new drone, uh, all the rage obviously these days is in the drone world. And GA is one of the OG drone makers. They made one of the big ones. The Predator is a 300 or 500 or billion dollar drone that you know, to a certain regard drones have gotten a thousand x cheaper and are used way more prevalently. And they came out with this whole new drone that assists in a few ways, specifically around being a kind of co pilot wingman as well as assisting like ground to air and air to ground kind stuff. Did you pick up anything else from this story here too?

Yeah, I think the headline was General atomic launches Gambit 6 drone wingman for air to ground operations. International customers will be able to acquire this Gambit 6 as early as 2027 ahead of European missionized versions which delivery in 2029. I think. You know, one data point that I've been following is the defense spending has increased significantly. I talked to some of our research team and they said that last year I think the defense budget was around 900 billion. It's over 1 trillion this year. And so this is obviously some big news about General Atomics, a large employer here in San Diego. And yeah, they're, they're full, full, full blown, you know, in the drone space and we're seeing some startups and working drones too. And it's been a hot space for sure.

It's super hot. So much so that within our defense tech community we've been really doing sub clusters within drones. We've got just surface on water set of drones, there's probably like three or four, if not five local. And now Saronic building autonomous boats just opened here as well too. And they opened a big ribbon cutting this week that you can speak to here in a second. This is an Austin based late stage startup doing I would say mid size ship autonomous drones as opposed to some of the ones sitting or some are more smaller size like a sea sats. Then you've got the subsurface, these are like, like submersible autonomous. Then you got just air and then you got land based drones as well too. These are just four of the subcluster areas that we see people building in. And then you got all the anti drone, which is actually a whole other subcluster of San Diego tech, which is the anti drone. Actually, actually where I saw the first drones in San Diego on the startup movement. Right. It's Skysafe and Citadel nearly 10 years ago, funded by Andreessen Horowitz. So yes, a huge cluster and not just, I would say new to San Diego. This is actually a deep bench here. It makes sense the customers here as well too. You want to highlight the Saronic ribbon cutting real quick since I know something new.

Yeah. So Saranic made headlines earlier around the summertime that they were in negotiations or just signed a I think three to five year lease near downtown actually in the Midway district. And so they had a ribbon cutting. They brought in the mayor of Todd, Gloria, to celebrate this, you know, next chapter for them to set up a shop in San Diego. I was curious how many jobs they're going to be hiring in San Diego. They already started advertising for director of growth, security analyst, mission operations specialist. So yeah, check it out, check out their jobs. They're gonna be growing their presence in San Diego. They actually took a former Amazon building and yeah, it's exciting times for the defense tech scene in San Diego and congrats to them on the, on the celebration.

Yeah. And speaking of which, Veterans Day come up. Thank you to all of our veterans who put in the time, effort and sacrifice to keep us safe here. Man, one in four jobs in San Diego are military related. That's a lot of people who have put their lives on the line for us. Thank you. That and we're doing a Veterans Day event, kind of a salute if you will, bringing a bunch of veterans and defense tech founders together for a CSAT demo on the 14th here or the 11th as well. So great to be just working alongside everyone to keep America safe is what it comes down to. We got some biotech news. Why don't you take us through some of these recent deals that we just picked up on the biotech side.

So yeah, great headline story from the Senegal Union Tribune. Headline was Scripps and UCSD researchers win $4 million grant for STEM cell study. This work will focus on organoids to model genetic conditionings that can cause epilepsy. UCSD has been very involved in this space to not surprise to see, you know, some pretty sizable grant funding around this, you know, specific area. And it's great to see some momentum. It seems like there was not as many headlines like this as far as grant funding from the university. Scripps also involved. They had a biotech innovation Summit, you know I think early October and it's great to see that collaboration as well. And you know I'm hearing from other folks talking to the things seem to be picking up as far as government funding as well as venture capital funding.

Yeah and we had another story that actually came to us from a subscriber here to share some news and he's actually a member of my Interlock and Rising Tide investment community that a local company, Impero, doing work on drug making development, they got they penned a major deal with one of the big drug makers out there, GSK paying them an upfront $85 million license with the potential of meeting certain milestones will be worth up to $750 million deal massive. We love to see that. That's usually also a precursor to an acquisition as well too if the data is working and if it's a sellable trug down the road, love to see that. These are all good, good signs to see on our path towards building companies that are saving lives and protecting lives here. So shout out to Brian for sharing that and thanks for tuning in every week and sharing news. We love for all of you. You got a win. We want to share it. So reply to any of our newsletters, Fred's and mine and share your news and we would love to help tell the story. Qualcomm Ventures, which is obviously the venture capital corporate venture capital arm of Qualcomm, celebrated 25 year anniversary up in the Bay Area last week which was pretty cool. They invited a whole bunch of local VCs. Unfortunately I couldn't make the trip, but I was honored to get the invite. And a bunch of their portfolio founders and alum Qualcomm Ventures, previous founders, some of them include Zoom and Fitbit and some Epic products and wins that they got to showcase over the history of Qualcomm Ventures. Do you have a little bit deeper dive on the story here of qv?

Yeah. So Quinn Lynn, who is kind of the senior VP and global head of Qualcomm Ventures, did a nice recap post that last Tuesday we celebrated the 25th anniversary. You know, it was meaningful because over 250 founders, investors and partners and Qualcomm colleagues joined them. And as you alluded to Neil, you know, they've had some pretty big wins with Ring being acquired by over a billion. Fitbit having IPO and later getting acquired. I think Waze, which is like a Maps, you know, app used by Google. They've been involved in a lot of different stuff and they continue to be active in the private investing space. I see a lot of AI deals from the, from them these days. And then I believe in 2021 they had raised like 100 million Metaverse fund. And so they've done a lot of different stuff. They've done AI, they've done, you know, just Forefront Technologies. And they've also been a big employer in San Diego for Qualcomm. So I think it's a great way to diversify, you know, their, their bets as well.

Yeah, it's been really, I would say one of the big, I would say they're one of the early, you know, tech companies to have a corporate venture arm so dedicated kind of goes back to the original founder himself, Irwin, who really placed a lot of bet back to the linkabit days. I mean, that's where Qualcomm actually came from, was kind of this offshoot of Linkabit of taking what they originally developed was algorithms for the military and being like, well, what if this could be, you know, a commercial product here? And boom, got Qualcomm from that. And from Qualcomm came many other seeds as well too. So kudos to the entire, to Quinn and the entire team there have celebrated that. And here's to another 25 more. And here's to us sharing more deal flow with you to make sure you see as much of the San Diego deals as possible. For sure. Speaking of deals, one of our, I would say under the radar, but making moves private equity funds here in town has been, has reached a pretty big milestone. Tide Rock, which I know you've been reporting on a bit. What do you got on the latest of Tide Rock holdings here?

Yeah, so it was a great story by the Senegal Business Journal. The headline was Tide Rock reaches 1 billion in acquisition capital. Ryan, who's the CEO, and they're based right in Solana beach, right above this cool restaurant that everyone goes to nowadays called Rustic Root. They've been growing. They've actually expanded from their initial office space to now taking the first floor. I think they have over 100 employees now. And Ryan talked about how, yeah, they have now over 1 billion in acquisition capital, over 3,000 employees. And he said in his opinion, he believes they are one of the most exciting and stimulating places to work in San Diego. Yeah, it's great to see some private investment funds here in San Diego continue to thrive. There's a few that spun up in different, different time periods and they've kind of shut down because they weren't able to enough returns for their LPs and their investors. But Tyrock has kind of bucked a trend and they've only. They seem like they only do. They're only getting started with what they. They're. What they're doing.

Totally. And it's getting notoriety. I actually had a call this week. I got intro to some PE investor in LA who wants to move to San Diego no matter what and is like, well, you know, here are some funds I'm trying to get intros to. Can you help me? And he specifically wants to focus on private equity, which is awesome, right? I don't think of us as a private equity town, but once we started actually talking about names like Stepstone and HCAP and even JMI and Blueprint Equity, you know, they're starting to be like, oh, yeah, you know, we can actually see a number of, I would say non VC kind of more traditional private equity capital funds that are actually based here. I think Tide Rock's unique in that they're a holding company. Right. So they're like buying. They're like investing to buy and, and build nargar. That's unique, but is a big PE kind of thing to do. You see Vista Equity doing it and has bought 10 San Diego companies in the past, specifically 10 software companies. So love to see it, love to see more capital. We put out the San Diego investors.com list recently, me and Chris Barber. I know, Fred, you gave us a little hand there. And actually we also created the San Diego investors WhatsApp group, which we've got lit up as of this week. So just the Investors are chatting with each other behind the scenes, sharing notes, building community. That's what we need more of and we are happy to do it. That's going to do it for this week. As always, send us your news read Fred Substack. Share everything that is going that we're sharing on LinkedIn. It's pretty much the platform to be on to make sure that you're amplifying and we'll see you out at events in the community that you will see hosted on event ship and shared on the social Coyote. We're coming here, back here. We're coming down to like a few weeks till Thanksgiving, which is kind of like the official like end of the year piece. Can't believe the year is already coming to an end. Maybe we'll do like a year wrap up in the next few weeks or so. Just be like what do we think 2025 was going to be about and what did it end up being about? I think that'd be a good, good old future topic here. But thanks everyone for tuning in. Fred, thanks as always.

Neil is always a pleasure.

Likewise. Cheers everyone.

Tacos and tech is on smash for the green guacamole keeper. Counting, 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 stand in pesto 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 popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana estimate 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. Hashtag ST Tacos with your host Neil Bloom.

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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 start. Startups get the party started.

You want tech in 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 Sam.