San Diego’s EvoNexus Incubator Selects First Gaggle of Fledgling Startups

they’re in stealth mode,” Pucher says. She adds that IO (as in input-out) is implementing its technologies “in a way that would reduce costs and power requirements.” The company has been seeking a director of radio frequency design engineering and a director of radio freqency systems engineering, according to its website.

CEO Mark Drucker was previously a senior vice president at Semtech Corp. of Camarillo, CA, and oversaw quality control at Brooktree, a former San Diego chipmaker that specialized in analog to digital conversion technologies.

—Pixon Imaging, has been developing software and hardware products for enhancing digital image processing, based on proprietary methods developed by Richard Puetter, the company’s founding CEO. The company, targeting security, surveillance, and defense markets, has developed proprietary software algorithms for contrast enhancement and reducing haze, fog, smoke, and heat wave shimmering from live video feeds.

Puetter, who also serves as Pixon’s chief scientist, has been working to refine the technology since he began to improve the image resolution of distant stars, when he was an astrophysicist at UC San Diego in the 1990s.

As I reported in June, companies selected for the EvoNexus incubator will get free office space that is fully furnished, including utilities, Internet access, and business mentoring by local executives and other volunteers. Startups will be allowed to stay for as long as two years, and will have no obligations to EvoNexus after they depart. The EvoNexus facility in Sorrento Valley is expected to support 10 to 12 San Diego-based startup companies.

Pucher says she’s received about 35 applications in the second-round for the incubation program, and the selection process is expected to be completed by the end of October. While EvoNexus is no longer accepting applications for the second round, the incubator plans to solicit applications for a new round early next year.

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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.