This Week on 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.

Hey, And welcome back, everybody. Fred, Neal, back at you for another week just before Thanksgiving. Fred, what's up? How you doing?

Hey, Neil, it's good to see you, man. Where are you working from today?

Actually caught me at home for like an hour before. Not in the car or not, you know, in another city. I was in LA for a few days at a family office summit, which was awesome and. But it's good to be back in San Diego. You were in New York, weren't you, just now?

Yeah, I was in New York. Lost my voice a little bit. But coming back, how was it? New York, that city, never sleep. People stay out till, you know, 5:00am and they still work the next day in the morning. And you know, the energy is infectious. New York's a great city. Glad to be back in San Diego. But I definitely got a good feel for the seasons there. You know, people well wear, you know, coats and there's things decorated for Christmas. New York is a fun city.

It is a really fun city. I think it's like a best city to visit and then be done after like four or five days and like rest because. Yeah, I agree. I don't know how living there, it's. It's sounds crazy. Well, we got some stories this week and this week's a busy week. It's kind of the last week I feel like, of like regular business before everyone kind of starts to shut down for the rest of the year. We got. Blue Tech week is wrapped. Wrapping up this week. I guess BlueTech has been kind of Bluetech month, really. But there's a big day today. I know at Scripps, bunch of people speaking at it. I know Mike at csats. I was talking to him this morning. He was just heading over to speak on a panel. And then this afternoon is the UCSD Space Symposium. So we got a lot of hard tech being worked on, which is super cool. We actually were having a conversation about a month ago with the UCSD Innovation team and I was like, hey, how many space tech companies are in San Diego? And they were like, I don't know. We're going to do this event and we're going to see, you know, who we can pull up. And then we went to the San Diego Defense Signal Group and I just asked like hey, how many space companies are here? And just, we just crowdsourced and like I think we got to like 10 or 15 companies that have space relations, whether it's ViaSat building big multi billion dollar satellites on down to supply chain and satellite tracking software and propulsion like suppliers here. Oh, and then got like Mpower doing big solar power build outs as well. So yeah, it was kind of interesting to learn. Obviously I have a big background in space, but I just didn't think that there was much of an ecosystem in San Diego. So I'm glad to see UCSD pulling that together to have a half day conversation about it. So what else? What's been on your radar within the community this week?

Yeah, it just seems like things are kind of heating up. There's been a lot of major financings this past month and I'm seeing just rude optimism around, you know, the new year and yeah, it's great to see, you know, there's defense tech stuff is popping off I think. Neil, Neil, you kind of teed it up earlier this year when you get your Defense Tech 50 list and you highlighted our top hardware companies in San Diego and that's going to continue. The energy's infectious and people come to me all the time say hey, I get a lot of value out of the content that you and Neil are putting out. The founders hike continues to be a big boom and a success and I'm really excited about continuing to do more community events for the, for the region.

Me too. And more people coming here from elsewhere hearing about it. So tonight, well, this is going out Friday, but so you, everyone listening. The night before we hosted Drew Yashar who used to be a biotech VC in San Diego and actually moved to Austin to join Capital Factory, which is this early stage hard tech incubator or really just an incubator. They happen to invest in hard tech, defense tech and a few others. I went and visited it in October I think and Drew's coming back out here a month later and we're hosting him for a little hard tech deep tech happy hour, which is great to see. They've, they've invested in a ton of companies, probably 10 in San Diego by the way. Like they're really big on first check, 100k to 500k kind of first check. I know they're in Natalis, they're in Chateau, they Might be in Firestorm, so it's good to have him back in town looking for more. More tech. I think he did a biotech happy hour event last night as well too. So it's good to see them showing up here in town, even though they have a physical place in Aust and they're going out to other communities to be like, hey, where can we be building bridges and nodes here?

I also want to just put a pin in this that we did do an event. You hosted a great event, actually, in downtown San Diego with csats. And it was super cool because we got the demo, the autonomous service vehicles that csats makes. They recently just landed a pretty big contract, the US Navy. It was like an $89 million SBR grant. And, you know, I think we had over 60 people show up out. And this was a partnership with John and Kimberly from Sequoia as well as Cullen. And it was great to see the community come out and support a local marine company. Also put a LinkedIn out about how San Diego defense tech is having a moment. Kind of went viral. We got some quotes from Dan, Maggie from Firestorm, Mike from csats, Ryan at SHIELD AI, and also Larson from Harpoon. And so it was. It was cool to collaborate with you on that, on that meal. See. See the community come out for that.

Thanks, man. Yeah, it was awesome. We got a lot more coming, including merch. I'm gonna. We'll sneak peek it. We got some merch that we've been designing to hype on San Diego. This all started from a LinkedIn comment, by the way. And I went and made shirts. Drone City usa. You got the next one being printed, Fred. And then Dan Magi's got the one after that already. Already there.

Take my money, man. I love the. The speed of execution. This was literally happening last week. You drummed up some graphics and now do you have the prototype in hand? I can't wait to wear that.

Hell, yeah.

Awesome.

Well, we're just getting started, but let's talk through some of this. Some of the news that happened over the last few weeks. Prebys Ventures. This was the big news earlier in the year when Mike Kren left Connect. I think it was all the way back in February or March of this year and went off to, you know, quote unquote, build a $50 million SOL LP venture fund. Well, they kind of were quiet for a long time, and then suddenly emerged with, hey, we made five investments, which was pretty cool to see. All kind of in health care and life sciences. I think it was four therapeutic companies and a digital health company. So Prebys Ventures emerges with 4 dropping the mic with like or 5 investments with arrow RX Therapeutics, Clinical Stage Biotech doing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease therapeutics. Aspen Neurosciences, Clinical Stage Biotech focused on cell therapies to address diseases with high unmet medical need, like Parkinson's. Crystallis Therapeutics Biotech in development commercialization focused for rheumatic diseases and other conditions. Protolis Therapeutics, which is targeting Chimeras, the company's associate, focused on solid tumor targets and Wellbe Health, which is a remote patient monitoring and chronic care management technology platform. What'd you take of this, Fred, seeing this come out?

Yeah, I think it's just great to see some local investors, you know, start investing in local companies. What we talk about a lot, there's a lot of institutional money that comes from the base Bay Area or Boston and would be great to see more capital being recycled and see some exits and that go back to local investors and to grow the pot. So I think, yeah, it's great to see what they're doing. You know, I noticed that they've invested mostly life science companies for this first cohort, but they also said they want to do some tech investing. So I'm going to be keeping the lookout for some tech investments. I'm sure Mike Crin is actively looking at some deals there. And I think another thing just call out is they also write checks between 500,000 to 2,2 million. So they're not necessarily leading rounds. So I think there is, you know, a need for local capital at an institutional level. In our defense tech chat, we talked about how there's, you know, some big VCs writing checks into local companies multiple times throughout the year. They might as well just set up shop here in San Diego. So I would love to see next year institutional vc, you know, open an office here. They it's, it's a matter of time with this happening. But yeah, congrats to them to writing five local checks and many more to come.

Yeah, I agree. We talk a lot about the domestic capital loop, which is local funds and local LPs, so that when a company exits, the money flows back out to the LPs and stays local. The this is how you do it, right, is you have a sole LP who says, we'll only invest in San Diego, and that's how you build a domestic capital market. So kudos to the Prebys Ventures team for putting that together and actually doing it, writing some checks. Let's Talk about the Brainstorm Therapeutics winning an Nvidia Award. This is pretty cool to see. What do you got? News backstory on this.

Yeah, so this is actually kind of new to my radar. This is a biotech company that's working at the intersection of AI. They actually were recognized by Nvidia, which is obviously a global semiconductor company who was leading the way in the AI charge. And the headline was Making Brainwaves AI Startup speeds Disease Research would Lab in the Loop. So yeah, congrats to them on being recognized. And San Diego is definitely leading the charge. In AI bio. I think you host some quarterly or maybe monthly meetups with some AI founders and biotech. I think we're uniquely positioned to tap into the both biotech talent that we have here. Also the AI talent. So we're going to see more companies being recognized in this space.

Yeah, we just did. Just last Friday we did our AI Bio monthly meetup. Yetiri Bio talked about their proteomics which is kind of this whole new field that's emerged. It's kind of we've talked about DNA that the genomics and this is like the protein aspect of, of how we're designing proteins, which really like is at the core of where disease and function comes from medically. So it was cool to have them and now I know we got to reach out and get brainstormed to come to the next one. Let's talk about some tech fundings. There were some big ones fabricate labs which I think is a series B or C. This may have been a C round. I don't think it was labeled. But they've been at the center of really of hard tech. I would say they're really focused on like where off nominal materials for 3D printing in manufacturing format or really now maybe they found more metals, 3D printing of metals and other materials like that. I think there is a new another $50 million round. I think their last round was 50 as well. So they've raised a good amount of capital and I know that new fund ventures or really it was TCA back when they invested actually had some members in on their preceder seed round which is pretty cool to see that we have some local money here on the Fabric 8 lab investment. You got any other news or backstory?

Yeah, just some facts of the local company. I believe Anzu Partners is also an early investor which is a local VC firm. They also had a partnership last year with Porsche and so it's great to see this company continue to succeed. Obviously they've got some partnerships, they got funding. It's really validating the traction that they've created for themselves. This new funding will accelerate their capacity of manufacturing. So expect them to grow their manufacturing footprint as well as growing their team. So if you're looking for a cool company to join, this might be one of them. And there were some other tech findings that came on my radar. Two other ones was Muse Software. This one is creating technology for leading museums. So think art and creatives. This was a new company came on my radar that came from both San Diego and I think they have presence in Miami. And infra cost, they raised a pretty sizable Series A round. Came out of nowhere. 15 million Series A. I believe they are based in Incas. Looks like the founders have some ties to Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, Alumni Ventures. You know, this is the most tech funding I've seen in this quarter all year round. So overall it's good, good sign for tech companies who are trying to raise whether you're an AI or tech, defense tech, it's, it's definitely picking up.

Yeah. And we're seeing the same biotech too. Some serious series B funding. Iambic Therapeutics, our friend Tom Miller do I think this company started as a different company name, had a name change and it's a, it's also at the core of where AI and pharmaceuticals is headed. You're gonna see a lot more of these because we saw you and I saw a bunch at the recent two phase or phase two investor day. Excited to see all this here. You got any more backstory on this?

Yeah, we had, we had two AI fundings. It was Iamic Therapeutics, there was 100 million Series B funding. They're probably the leading biotech company in AI in San Diego in my opinion. And then we also had a smaller company, Model Medicines, which was ran by a co founder of Daniel Hayters who used to be at Sway Ventures in La Jolla. And they were also working at the intersection of AI and biotech. And so it's a great time to be a biotech founder who's working in AI. We're seeing both early stage and late stage investments happen at a record breaking pace, which is something I'm closely following.

Yeah, yeah, same here as well. Congrats to the teams. These are close, these are people we're close with because the team at Model really spun out of Sway Ventures. Daniel Hayters, they're known for a long time doing investments together. And then Tom Miller at Iambic when it originally started, he was one of the first to present at our AI bio group just two years ago I think and here they are raising $100 million Series B round. So love it and we'll keep building here. Wishing all of you a very happy Thanksgiving. Have a great holidays. You know that we will be back on the mic right away, right afterwards. You can always catch us on our substacks and on our LinkedIn. It's probably where we are most active there so make sure you're following Fred Business of San Diego Substack and we have rebranded ours to Ryzen Tide Partners Substack so you will see less of FreshProo tech and more of Ryzen Tide Partners. We'll get around to actually doing some announcement or launch about it, but you know where to find us. So thanks everyone for tuning in. Please share this with others, share your news with us. We love sharing and amplifying your news and then celebrating with you out in the community as I know we will be doing today and tomorrow we all will get it in before Thanksgiving. So Fred, thanks so much and we'll see you again soon.

Always a pleasure Neil. See you next time.

Later everyone.

Guacamole keeper counting counting beans Montador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping paella tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a craft beer and coffee my coating yoga posse polter body origami we be surfing Coronado eating tacos el gordo the taco stain in puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to coasting goes 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 Tacos 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 get the party. Startups get the party started. You want decking, tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got it.

Hey.