MoneyTree Reports Drop in San Diego Venture Funding, Verve Wireless Hires New CEO, Fallbrook Aligns Transmission Deal, & More San Diego BizTech News

It was a short week for news with the Martin Luther King holiday, and it showed. Here’s a short and (we hope) sweet wrapup of San Diego’s tech sector.

—Venture capital investing in San Diego startups plunged during the fourth quarter that ended December 31st, with $193.1 million invested in 26 companies, according to the MoneyTree Report from the National Venture Capital Association, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Thomson Reuters. That was a 43 percent drop in dollars invested and a 25 percent decline in deals, compared with the fourth quarter of 2009, when $343.9 million in funding went to 32 local companies. Total funding in 2010 amounted $846.9 million in 115 local companies, compared with $943.9 million in 109 San Diego area companies.

—Nationwide, the MoneyTree Report found that venture firms invested $5 billion in 765 deals nationwide, a nearly 7 percent drop in dollars invested and an 11 percent decline in deal count compared with the same quarter of 2009, when $5.4 billion went into 864 deals.

—Verve Wireless of Encinitas, CA, hired Tom MacIsaac as CEO, replacing founder Art Howe, who will remain as chairman of the mobile media technology company. MacIsaac, who is the former CEO of ExtendMedia, will remain in the Washington D.C. area, where Verve has established a new office. The arrangement raises a question as to how long Verve’s headquarters will remain in the San Diego area.

—Transaction Wireless, a San Diego startup that provides virtual and mobile gift cards, named Doug Schneider as President and CEO. He is the former CEO at Genea.

—San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies said it has established a partnership with Team Industries of Detroit Lakes, MN, to develop electric vehicle transmission prototypes. Fallbrook and Team Industries plan to develop the power train for a low-speed vehicle electric vehicle, the Tomberlin Anvil. Fallbrook has been developing a more energy-efficient, continuously variable transmission that does not use a conventional gear and clutch.

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.