CMEA’s Jain on San Diego’s Innovation Economy, E&Y Reports on IPO Activity, Wildcat Discovery Gets $7.5M, & More San Diego BizTech News

We saw a potpourri of tech news in San Diego last week, which included funding for an emerging cleantech startup, new technology from Tealium, and an acquisition by Qualcomm. Our briefing begins now.

—CMEA Capital’s Sumeet Jain offered his perspective on what’s missing, besides capital, from the tech sector of San Diego’s innovation community. Jain, who focuses on deals in software, consumer Internet, digital media, and mobile, says it would help if there were a better way to curate San Diego’s tech companies and entrepreneurs, because, as he put it, “screening companies is not a good use of my time.”

—The IPO window appears to be re-opening to pre-recession levels, with 140 companies nationwide registered for an initial public offering during the three months that ended June 30, according to the latest the “Ernst & Young U.S. IPO Pipeline Report.” In San Diego, the Active Network successfully raised a total of $190 million in its May 24 IPO. Meanwhile Ambit Biosciences withdrew its IPO on June 7 and Fallbrook Technologies withdrew its IPO registration on April 29. The IPOs for two other San Diego companies are pending: semiconductor design company Peregrine Semiconductor and a drug developer, IASO Pharmaceuticals.

—San Diego-based Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a five-year-old cleantech startup, has emerged after raising $7.5 million through a combination of equity, convertible debt, and securities. Wildcat is using high-throughput screening technologies to identify and develop new materials for batteries, hydrogen storage, gas separation, carbon capture, and in other technologies and processes.

—San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) acquired certain assets related to gesture recognition technology from Sunnyvale, CA-based GestureTek. The move suggests Qualcomm could be moving to develop technology to compete with Microsoft Kinect, computer vision technology developed for the Xbox 360 video game console. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

—San Diego-based Tealium rolled out TealiumiQ, its technology that enables corporate marketing departments to easily manage JavaScript-based tags on their web pages, using a universal tag management system.

—The National Science Foundation unveiled its plans to put $5 million a year into the I-Corps, or Innovation Corps, a program that’s intended to university scientists and engineers build startups around their technologies. As Wade reported, the centerpiece of the NSF program is a $50,000 cash award for 25 teams each quarter and a nine-week crash course in technology entrepreneurship. The program is now accepting proposals and will name its first batch of 25 awardees on September 30.

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.