It was a busy week, with several meaty stories from San Diego’s tech front. Our Monday briefing is ready for your reading pleasure.
—Jason Mendelson, a partner and co-founder of the Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group, talked about the factors that helped create a critical mass of new company formations and funding activity in Boulder’s software sector. Mendelson told me that San Diego’s splintered software community sounds a lot like Boulder was almost six years ago.
—Intuit’s chief technology officer, Tayloe Stansbury, gave Xconomy San Francisco Editor Wade Roush a tour of the annual innovation gallery during investor day at the company’s Mountain View, CA, headquarters. Intuit also has about 900 employees in San Diego. Wade embedded seven video summaries in his story, including demonstrations of an iPad-based check-in system for patients at doctors’ offices, QuickBooks Mobile for Android, and Pre-paid Visa cards and card readers for merchants who use Intuit’s GoPayment system.
—Hanwha International, which is affiliated with South Korea’s Hanwha Group, led a $50 million investment in OneRoof Energy, a San Diego company with a lease program that enables homeowners to install photovoltaic (PV) solar tiles on their roofs without paying upfront costs. Boston-based Black Coral Capital, a cleantech investment firm and a subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp, also helped to raise an unspecified fund with OneRoof Energy to finance these residential solar installations.
—San Diego’s Avalon Ventures was among the VC firms and angel investors who have added another $24 million to their investment in Boulder, CO-based TechStars, a technology accelerator that provides seed-stage mentorship (and funding) for startups in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York. The new infusion brings TechStars total funding to roughly $34 million, raised from more than 75 venture capital firms and angel investors.
—San Diego-based Independa closed on $1.6 million in early stage financing for its Web-based services for the elderly. Founding CEO Kian Saneii says investor interest has been strong enough to extend the round to $2.2 million. The company also secured an additional $200,000 loan from Silicon Valley Bank.
—Solana Beach, CA-based Nukona was among 12 startups in the first class of startup companies to be accepted in the Santa Clara, CA-based Startup Accelerator program established earlier this year by Florida-based Citrix Systems. Nukona, which develops software that enables IT administrators to manage consumer-oriented mobile apps, did not disclose terms of the funding, but Citrix said in April that the first 12 startups accepted into its program would be eligible for up to $400,000 each in seed funding.
—Web companies that offer online “daily deals” are in the midst of a spike in M&A activity, according to a report from CB Insights, a New York data services firm. The number of global mergers and acquisitions in the daily deal industry climbed to 22 during the second quarter—more than twice the nine M&A deals during the first quarter of the year. An additional 22 M&A deals in July and August have brought the five-month total to 44—and that doesn’t include the deals from this month.
—San Diego’s TriTech Software Systems, a specialized provider of software used by public safety for computer-aided dispatch, said it acquired Castle Hayne, NC-based VisionAir, a privately held company providing similar software products and services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
