JMI Equity Raises $875M for Seventh Fund, Sempra Completes Solar PV Plant, Awarepoint Raises $9M, & More San Diego BizTech News

It was a week for raising money, and software specialist JMI Equity led the way. The private equity firm had plenty of company, though, and we’ve got a rundown here.

—JMI Equity, the software investment firm based in San Diego and Baltimore, said last week it has closed its seventh fund after raising $875 million. JMI has traditionally focused its investments on mature software, Internet, business services, and healthcare IT companies.

—San Diego’s Awarepoint, which provides wireless asset tracking technology for use in hospitals and other healthcare facilities, named Jay Deady as president and CEO. Deady said the seven-year-old startup, which combines wireless mesh networking technology with radio frequency identification tags, recently raised $9 million in a combination of equity and debt.

—The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a grant worth more than $2.1 million to San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless as part of a broader program that’s intended to make the nation’s power grid cleaner and more efficient, reliable, resilient, and responsive. The DOE awarded a total of $19 million in grants to five companies, and the funding for On-Ramp will help support the company’s development of wireless technologies that can monitor power distribution systems that are underground.

—San Diego-based Socialwise has raised nearly $3.5 million of a planned $4 million offering, to support its development of Web-based system that enables parents to monitor and even control their kids’ spending habits.

—A two-year-old San Diego startup, MicroPower Technologies, closed its Series B round of venture funding by raising $2.2 million from a variety of investors. The company is developing energy-efficient wireless video surveillance cameras for use by public safety, government, commercial, and small-to-medium business customers.

—San Diego-based Grid2Home, a year-old startup developing software for two-way data communications in “Smart Grid” applications, has raised $400,000 of a targeted $500,000 securities round.

—Sempra Generation, a power generation subsidiary operated by San Diego-based Sempra Energy (NYSE: [[ticker:SRE]]) completed construction of the largest U.S. photovoltaic solar power plant. The 380-acre Copper Mountain Solar plant in Boulder City, NV, provides about 48 megawatts of electricity for Pacific Gas & Electric, the Northern California utility.

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.