By Jenna Greer It was March 2020 and Navy Mckee, then a junior at San Diego State University (SDSU) and Big Island Hawai’i local, had just returned home due to the COVID-19 pandemic when she discovered her father’s 30-year-old drawings of a stormwater filter in her family closet. Mckee, already involved in the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center and familiar with startup culture, knew she had to see her father’s ideas through.     One year of dedication later and Kai Pono...

After only being funded 18 months ago, OmniSync has raised $1M in an oversubscribed seed round. OmniSync helps tech and life science companies raise debt and equity free funds from the government via federal grants. The round was led by Govtech Fund, whose funds are dedicated to government tech startups. Read more here. 

San Diego-based meal prep company, Meallogix, has just raised $1.7M in a pre-series round led by Tech Coast Angels. The team will be using the capital to build its front and back-end enterprise resource planning software, expand its reach in the U.S., launch a meal prep sector-specific online learning platform, and add key leadership roles.  Read more here.

Recently, Prometheus Biosciences went public and raised $190M in its IPO. The company develops precision antibody therapies for IBD and related diseases. Read more here.  

Carlsbad-based GenMark has been purchased by testing giant, Roche, for $1.8 Billion.  GenMark makes tests that detect multiple pathogens simultaneously including pneumonia and sepsis. Roche has likely acquired GenMark to challenge rivals functioning in this space.  Read more here.   

By Avery Guest Tamara Zubatiy, CEO and co-founder of Barometer (formally VeriCrypt) hopes to help organizations better measure biases on their content via artificial intelligence. The startup’s tool is designed to analyze content for bias and other key attributes that may be manipulative or misleading.   Zubatiy graduated in 2018 from UC San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science, specializing in machine learning and neural computation. Following graduation, she decided...

San-Diego Based Founders First closed a $9 million series A led by The Rockefeller Foundation. The funds will be used to fund 400 companies with diverse founders. Read more here. 

As a result of the pandemic, teaching became either hybrid or fully remote for institutions across the country. CourseKey works with organizations that educate many essential workers and works to increase student retention and graduation rates. Things really took off for them at the onset of the pandemic, and they’ve been able to raise $9 million in a Series B after their ARR grew by 200% in 2020. Read more here.

San Diego-based DTx Pharma, a biotechnology company that uses RNA-based therapies to treat genetic factors of genetic diseases, raised $100 Million in a Series B round.  Their platform, FALCON (Fatty Acid Ligand Conjugated Oligonucleotide), allows the team to look into diseases in skeletal muscle, cardiac muscle, and the peripheral nervous system.  Read more about the funding here.   

JMI Equity just closed its latest growth equity fund, JMI Equity Fund X, at it’s cap of $1.7 billion.   The San Diego & Baltimore based fund makes investments of $20 million to $200 million in best-in-class software businesses, and is a backer of many late stage San Diego startups including SOCi, Seismic, Classy, and Lytx    This latest growth fund tops their last, JMI Equity Fund IX, which closed in 2018 at $1.2 billion.   Read more about JMI Equity Fund...