OnTech Ends Business

OnTech, a San Diego venture that makes self-heating beverage containers sold under the Hillside Beverages brand, went out of business Nov. 8, according to a brief notice on its online store. Venture Wire, which was the first to report the company had gone cold, says OnTech raised about $31.6 million in equity and $11 million in debt from investors that include DFJ Frontier Fund, Fort Washington Capital Partners Group, GRP Partners, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank. OnTech, which I profiled in 2004, is seeking to recover the value of its business, which it values at between $80 million and $150 million, through an arbitration proceeding against Graham Packaging.


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.