provide to companies admitted to the program.
“With Qualcomm, the reach we’ll have throughout the region and beyond to get companies to come to this will be phenomenal,” says CommNexus CEO Rory Moore. “It provides a great deal of credibility, but we also have the expectation that this incubator will return high dividends for the region.”
CommNexus manages the EvoNexus incubators and pays the bills. CommNexus, in turn, is supported chiefly by Qualcomm and about 35 other major technology companies in the San Diego area that each pay about $25,000 each as venture sponsors, Moore says. The group’s biggest financial support, however, comes from The Irvine Co., the privately held commercial real estate developer, which provides the office space used by CommNexus and EvoNexus at no cost. The value of that comes close to $1 million a year, says Moore, who estimates The Irvine Co. provided another $1 million in custom tenant improvements for the downtown EvoNexus incubator. “They are the ‘uber’ venture sponsor,” he quips.
Startups will be admitted into the QualcommLabs program for as long as two years. Experienced Qualcomm Labs employees will serve as mentors, and the startup CEOs also will have access to the EvoNexus network of industry experts and investors. In their statement today, Qualcomm and EvoNexus say, “Over time we expect QualcommLabs@EvoNexus companies to graduate the incubator as they secure venture funding or interest from strategic investors.”
Qualcomm Labs maintains a robust pipeline of
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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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