In Search of Capital, San Diego Taking Startups on Roadshows to VCs

Venture capital and rainfall have always been in relatively short supply in San Diego. Yet somehow this semi-arid region has managed to grow and even thrive as a center of life sciences, technology, and cleantech innovation.

Now, as part of a broader strategic initiative, some of the nonprofit organizations that helped establish San Diego as an oasis of innovation are going to Northern California and Boston in search of new sources of venture funding. Next week, for example, half a dozen local Internet startups will trek to San Francisco to make presentations to Bay Area venture investors as part of a roadshow organized by Connect, the prominent nonprofit promoter of San Diego technology and entrepreneurship.

At CommNexus, another nonprofit industry group representing San Diego technology companies, CEO Rory Moore says he’s been making trips to Silicon Valley to present on behalf of all the startups enrolled in the group’s EvoNexus incubator. There are 22 startups now enrolled in the free incubator, which CommNexus created with financial contributions from scores of San Diego technology companies.

Kevin Hell, the former DivX CEO now overseeing the EvoNexus incubator, also has been making trips. “We’re presenting all of our companies,” Moore says. We go one right after the other, and get feedback in real time.” Moore likes to add that their efforts have been so effective that EvoNexus companies have raised a total of $55 million in venture, corporate, and angel investments since CommNexus created the incubator in 2009.

“One of the issues that San Diego companies face in terms of getting venture capital is that there’s significantly less venture capital here than in other parts of the country, particularly in Silicon Valley and New England,” says Peter Shaw, a Connect board member, veteran CEO, and former partner at Windward Ventures, an inactive San Diego VC firm. Shaw recently volunteered to oversee Connect’s Venture Roundtable, a longtime program that screens local startups, choosing a handful that are “investment ready” to make presentations to venture investors.

Even when the times were good, Shaw says

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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.