VCs Invest $243M in San Diego Startups in Q1, Tech Drought Continues

Money Tree

K.T. Lim, the Malaysian billionaire who runs the gambling conglomerate Genting Berhad.

Venter said a “not insignificant” part of the funding also came from Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]), which is providing two of its new HiSeq X Ten genome sequencing systems. Each system costs $10 million. The Menlo Park, CA, venture firm DFJ also invested in HLI, but no amount was listed in the MoneyTree data. The MoneyTree Report only counts venture capital investments, however, and some aspects of the HLI deal might not have met their criteria for inclusion.

Here is the MoneyTree list of all companies in the San Diego area that received venture funding during the first quarter that ended March 31:

Lumena Pharmaceuticals; San Diego; $45.5 million.

Luxtera; Carlsbad, CA; $37.4 million.

Abide Therapeutics; San Diego; $25 million.

Suneva Medical; San Diego; $20 million.

Thesan Pharmaceuticals; Carlsbad, CA; $17.4 million.

Ruiyi; San Diego; $15 million.

Elcelyx Therapeutics; San Diego; $12.7 million.

Vital Therapies; San Diego; $12 million.

Lithera; San Diego; $8 million.

TakeLessons; San Diego; $7 million.

Avelas Biosciences; San Diego; $6.85 million

Emotient; San Diego; $6 million.

Axikin Pharmaceuticals; San Diego; $6 million.

Cebix; San Diego; $6 million.

Mogl; San Diego; $5.9 million.

PatientSafe Solutions; San Diego; $3 million.

Assay Depot; Solana Beach, CA; $3 million.

GroundMetrics; San Diego; $2.3 million.

SGB; San Diego; $1.7 million.

Kyriba; San Diego; $1.4 million.

Ambrx; San Diego; $110,000.

Human Longevity; San Diego, no amount given.

Precision Repair Network; San Diego, no amount given.

 

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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.