Awarepoint Nabs $13.3M, Kratos Fuses With Digital Fusion, Pocket Communications Financing Signals Challenge for Leap Wireless, & More San Diego Deals News

As people gathered from near and far to celebrate Thanksgiving, a couple of startups with San Diego connections had more than one reason to give thanks, with deals closing on a variety of fronts, including one close to home—at home, really—for Xconomy.

—Cardinal Partners of Princeton, NJ, (not to be confused with Cardinal Equity Partners of Indianapolis or Cardinal Venture Capital of Menlo Park) led a $13.3 million venture round for Awarepoint, a San Diego startup developing wireless sensors for use in hospitals and elsewhere. Cardinal was joined in the deal by Venrock and previous investor Avalon Ventures of San Diego. Awarepoint has developed software and hardware that provides real-time remote monitoring of supplies, equipment, and personnel.

—San Diego’s Kratos Defense & Security Solutions agreed to buy Digital Fusion, a Huntsville, AL, information technology company that specializes in computerized simulation, engineering, space systems, optics and other defense-related work. Kratos said it would issue 25.4 million new shares of its common stock to close the deal, which is valued between $34 million and $38 million.

—The San Diego connection was not immediately apparent when Battery Ventures of Waltham, MA, and Menlo Park, CA, said it had led a $100 million venture round for San Antonio’s Pocket Communications. But the deal, which was joined by Pocket CEO Paul Posner and Charles River Ventures, which also has offices in Waltham and Menlo Park, poses fresh competitive implications for San Diego’s Leap Wireless and its flat-rate Cricket unlimited-calling plan. Pocket’s Posner says he can undercut his rivals on pricing and still make a profit.

—And on the home front, Xconomy closed the first tranche of its second financing round less than two months after launching its third Web site, here in San Diego, for news about technology innovation and the “exponential economy.” New England’s CommonAngels led the deal, as it did with Xconomy’s first round in August 2007. The new round was joined by LaunchCapital, a new investor and a number of individual investors.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.