San Diego Deals Roundup: Deal Current, PCN, BrightScope, & More

cash, folding money,

white-label daily deal software company accelerate its growth by expanding sales and marketing and advancing its technology. The company provides online discounts for media companies in more than 100 cities, including American Consolidated Media, the Journal Broadcast Group, Buffalo News, and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

The company’s website says Deal Current was launched in 2008 by Jimmy Hendricks and Patrick Dillon.

—BrightScope, a San Diego startup that analyzes the performance of 401k plans for its corporate sponsors, has raised half of a planned $3 million round of funding, according to a recent report in U-T San Diego.

BrightScope CEO Mike Alfred confirmed the report for me last week, saying the company has not officially announced its third round of angel funding, which is expected to close before the end of the year. Brightscope, founded in 2008, says on its website that it previously raised a total of $3 million in angel funding through two separate rounds. The company also named former ID Analytics CEO Bruce Hansen to its board.

The Web-based company maintains a comprehensive database of information on roughly 46,000 corporate 401k retirement plans. BrightScope says it helps the human resources departments that manage 401k plans by analyzing and rating the performance of investments held by the plan. BrightScope says its technology helps plan sponsors optimize the structure of their 401k plans and choose providers that provide the most value for the fees they charge.

—San Diego-based GroundMetrics, founded in 2010 as part of the QUASAR group of companies, said it used proceeds from $1.2 million in Series A funding raised earlier this year to conduct

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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.