In a recent tweet by new San Diego transplant and Color Capital investor Chris Cantino, he asked “If you could invest in cities like stocks, which would you buy?”
There were plenty of cities mentioned in the thread and naturally I said “San Diego” in my reply, just as I’ve been investing here through talent development, my time, and my capital.
A tweet reply to me from venture investor Abie Katz said. “ I look forward to a higher percentage of the San Diego success stories emerge beyond biotech.” While he’s right, the biotech scene carries us by in large in a number of ways; we should size up what recent success looks like on the tech side.
So in no particular order, here’s some top San Diego non-biotech news of 2021 that shows some of our ecosystems’ recent successes:
- Ecwid, e-commerce company, acquired for $500M and staying in Encinitas.
- Suja Juice acquired by private equity firm while doing $185M in sales in 2021. Staying in Oceanside.
- TuSimple, an autonomous truck driving software company, went public, becoming one of the first tech IPOs in San Diego in years. Market cap is currently $9.75B, putting it in the top 10 most valuable tech companies in San Diego.
- Nuvve, electric vehicle charging tech company, also went public through a SPAC in March 2021.
- Non-pharma/therapeutic startup funding in 2021 has been $2.4B to date, of the $3.7B that’s been raised.
I’m including digital health, genomics, and medical device in this since they are tech from the software, data science, connected devices involved.This is more funding than the total in the entire year in 2018 alone. These fundings also mean jobs, and there are a lot of new hires because of all this capital being raised.
And the Top Five Tech News Stories of the week to watch:
- Seismic Software surpasses $200M in annual revenue
- Cell-grown fish developer BlueNalu advances to next round of new $15M XPRIZE for future of proteins contest
- Sempra Energy is dropping ‘Energy’ in its name
- 65 San Diegans are competing in the Tokyo Olympics
- San Diego maintains the 19th spot in the global tech talent city scoring by CBRE
Cheers,
Follow @FreshBrewedTech on Twitter for daily SD tech news.
