This Week in San Diego Tech News – June 24, 2022

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Neal: Welcome everyone to the weekly San Diego Tech News by Neal Bloom and Sesha Machiraju from Fresh Brewed Tech. Every Friday at 12:30pm Pacific on Clubhouse and now we record them for you to enjoy as well. Find these episodes on Freshbrewedtech.com and favorite podcast player for Tacos and Tech Podcast

I’m Neal Bloom, entrepreneur, investor, and community builder.

Sesha: Hey I’m Sesha, former biotech data person, currently working on cyber & cloud evangelism at Microsoft Azure. SD transplant by way of Seattle, fond of all things tech, startups, and data. 

For June 24, 2022:

• Stone getting acquired for $167M
• Qualcomm News:
  • • Co-founder Franklin Antonio passed away – one of 7 co-founders – UCSD grad and philanthropist, with a new named building at CSE department
    • Bought Israeli Startup Cellwize Wireless Technologies, a leader in mobile network automation and management – 5G Network Deployment and Automation
    • Partnering to work on road safety through C-V2X (cellular vehicle-to-everything) technology
    • Qualcomm Robotics RB6 Platform and the Qualcomm RB5 AMR Reference Design will support evolving applications for OEMs and robot manufacturers looking to integrate ground robots in industrial use cases across sectors including government service applications, logistics, healthcare, retail, warehousing, agriculture, construction and utilities as well as power autonomous robots and drones for uses like delivery and monitoring.
    • ​​To supply system-on-chips (SoCs) for CARIAD’s software platform designed to enable assisted and automated driving functions for VW vehicles expected to hit the market around 2025.
• Pytheas for all: Scripps develops open-source RNA sequencing app Pytheas
  • Processing mass spectrometry data is an extremely cumbersome and slow process
  • Pytheas analyzes RNA data through mass spectrometry, and can be used to identify and quantify modified RNA molecules (such as the ones used in the Covid vaccine)
  • Developed in Python, this app takes in RNA mass spec data and outputs the RNA sequence, modifications, and quantitative analysis
  • Use case: companies that manufacture RNA vaccines can use this app not just to speed up the process but also monitor quality
  • Available for use and experimentation on the GH: https://github.com/ldascenzo/pytheas
• ‘FluentPet’ lets you have a conversation with your furry friend
  • ‘FluentPet’ a Del Mar based startup founded by Leo Trottier, allows you to record your voice into special buttons that dogs, cats can press down on with their paws in order to “talk” with their humans.
    • Bunny the dog on tiktok!
  • $7M in revenue, crowdfunding campaign on Republic.com in Jan 2022 raised $740k from more than 1k investors
  • Part of a bigger study at UCSD called “Theycantalk.org” which focuses on animal cognition and communication
  • Next up for Trottier is “Fluent Pet Connect” – released in January and in prod by Q3 – which includes mobile apps that will essentially let plets pets send texts to their humans!
  • Trottier said “85% of those using Fluent Pet are dog owners but that cats can also make excellent learners”
• Spotlighting SD’s Bluetech Scene
  • SD County is home to 4320 maritime, water, and bluetech businesses – 5% of the region
  • Bluetech employs 114k – 9% of the workforce from a 2020 study – but this number could be much lower than the actual numbers
  • Between 2020-2022, bluetech revenue grew 18% and total jobs increased by 163%!
  • Multiplicative effect: “For every dollar put into the San Diego bluetech sector, we get $2.26 out of it. For San Diego County that ripples out to $2.34 and for the state of California, it’s $2.68”
  • SD = Silicon Valley for Bluetech
  • More government support for bluetech following this report
    • Protect Program: $2.6B in grant funding for coastal ecosystem restoration, port infrastructure programs
• Global Algae Innovations competing to sequester carbon in the XPRIZE competition
  • X Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis and our fav, Elon Musk create $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition for companies working on carbon removal tech at scale
  • On April 22, 15 of 1132 companies in the running were awarded $1M prizes for progress in this 5-year competition – one winner was our very own Global Algae Innovations founder Dave Hazlebeck
  • Global Algae Innovations works on algae farming at scale to offset palm-oil production in favor of low-impact protein and oil products
    • Palm oil production is a huge driver of deforestation
    • Algae farms can produce “nine times as much oil and 23 times as much protein per acre compared to palm or soy”
    • Algae farms will promote rainforest regrowth and therefore promote CO2 sequestering; Global Algae is hoping to capture 11M tons of CO2 in rainforest regrowth every year
    • Key is mass adoption
  • Started work on algae at General Atomics with funding from DoD to look into alternative fuels
  • Algae is superior to cellulose-based fuels and has the potential to “meet the whole world’s demand, not just the U.S. demand”
  • Other use cases: jet fuel, polymer
  • R&D Lab, Farm 160, in SLO – will need to prove it can sequester carbon at a much higher rate to win XPRIZE – we wish them luck!

 

• Shoutouts:
  • Have you seen those custom branded Monopoly sets? Made in Carlsbad!
  • Little blue penguins coming to Birch Aquarium!
  • Housecall Pro new funding $125M