he had created to his friend Paul Kedrosky, a venture investor and senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation (and a San Diego Xconomist), Darugar says Kedrosky’s enthusiastic reaction made him realize that he had created something that was startup-worthy.
Darugar decided to make it a business in 2009. Darugar says he made it possible for users to send information about their personal expenses by instant messaging, e-mail, Twitter, browser search box, voice, iPhone, Android, and WebOS. In 2010, he began adding policy conditions to the system, so, for example, a business expense for more than $5,000 can be automatically routed to a supervisor for approval.
“The early part in the life of a startup is finding a problem that people really want to take care of, and we really have that,” says Darugar, who previously worked at two startups. He was the chief architect at San Francisco-based Blue Titan Software and the founder and chief architect of San Diego’s VelociGen.
The real magic came, though, when Darugar made it possible for Xpenser customers to use their camera phone to take a picture of a receipt and send the image to their own Xpenser home page—where the system extracts the relevant data and enters it into the user’s online spreadsheet.
Darugar, who specialized in machine learning while getting his undergraduate and master’s degrees in computer science at UC San Diego, says the challenge was in coding the system to interpret and categorize messages in any format. The goal is to
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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.
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