San Diego’s Free EvoNexus Tech Incubator Gains Qualcomm Expertise

Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the San Diego wireless technology giant, says today it is joining forces with EvoNexus, the free tech incubator operated by the nonprofit industry group CommNexus.

The move adds a new dimension of business and technical expertise to EvoNexus, which relies heavily on volunteer tech executives and others to help mentor entrepreneurs enrolled in the program. EvoNexus operates two incubators in San Diego, one is downtown and the other in the University City neighborhood, and provides fully furnished office space, utilities, and other services to startups at no charge.

“A big differentiator for EvoNexus—from an investor’s or entrepreneur’s point of view—is that we are the best deal in the country because we’re completely free, except you have to pay for your parking,” says Kevin Hell, the former DivX CEO who has been overseeing EvoNexus for the past year.

Now EvoNexus will collaborate with Qualcomm Labs to develop a track within EvoNexus called QualcommLabs@EvoNexus.

Qualcomm Labs is expected to serve a role at EvoNexus that is similar to its function within Qualcomm, where it helps to identify and assess new products and market opportunities developed internally through Qualcomm R&D. For example, Qualcomm housed its wireless health initiative in the Qualcomm Labs business unit (known at the time as Qualcomm Labs Services) before moving it into its new Qualcomm Life subsidiary.

Qualcomm Labs also wants to guide startups developing innovative technology in certain areas, such as machine-to-machine communications, into the EvoNexus program. Qualcomm and EvoNexus did not disclose the financial terms of Qualcomm’s participation in the program, if there are any. But startups admitted into the QualcommLabs program will get separate seed funding from Qualcomm Labs as well as free space in an EvoNexus incubator.

Qualcomm did not disclose how much seed funding it plans 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.