SD BizTech Roundup: Ortiva Acquired, EcoATM, & Grid2Home Raise Cash

Here’s a quick roundup of new from San Diego’s technology sector over the past week.

—In a move that has implications for San Diego’s tech community, the University of California named Pradeep Khosla, dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, to succeed Marye Anne Fox as chancellor of the University of California, San Diego. Although UCSD officials are declining comment for now, former UC president (and UCSD chancellor) Richard Atkinson has been telling people he’s enthusiastic about the choice, and that Khosla is very “entrepreneurial.”  Khosla’s nomination is scheduled to come before the UC regents for approval at their regular meeting on March 16 in Sacramento, CA. Information about Khosla’s compensation—which became a point of contention with Fox and some other UC officials—will be disclosed at the regent’s meeting. If confirmed by the regents, Khosla will be the eighth chancellor of the 29,300-student UCSD campus in August.

—Granite Ventures led a $2 million round of financing for Grid2Home, the San Diego developer of smart energy and home automation software for smart grid applications, according to a regulatory filing. Grid2Home develops wireless and wired network solutions for smart meters, lighting controls, in-home displays, water heaters, solar energy control modules, electric vehicle chargers, and other smart appliances.

—San Diego-based EcoATM, which developed sophisticated kiosks to recycle cell phones and other consumer-electronics, said it has raised $17 million from investors plus a federal grant to roll out its program nationally. Current backers Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar Inc. and Tao Venture Partners returned for the Series B round. New investors include

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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.