There’s been a flurry of deals among San Diego’s tech startups in recent weeks, perhaps reflecting an effort to get financing and other transactions secured before the holidays—and while market conditions remain good. In addition to funding rounds raised recently by Mogl and the cleantech company Noble Environmental Technologies, other noteworthy tech deals include:
—San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless has raised about $500,000 of a planned $4.8 million financing round from investors, according to a recent regulatory filing. The company has developed wireless networking technology for efficiently connecting billions of hard-to-reach devices over metropolitan-scale areas and other challenging environments.
On-Ramp Wireless says its technology is well-suited for field use in the utility, energy, and agricultural sectors, and that rival cellular and mesh networks lack the reach, capacity, and scalability of On-Ramp’s wide-area, machine-to-machine (M2M) technology. The additional $4.8 million in debt and convertible securities appears to be another extension of the Series C funding round that On-Ramp disclosed last year, and which the company increased to nearly $39 million earlier this year.
—Scoperta, a San Diego materials company that specializes in making innovative amorphous metal alloys and coatings for a wide range of industries, has raised $1 million of a planned $4 million round from venture investors, according to a recent regulatory filing. Proceeds from the offering will be used for general working capital and payroll, according to the filing.
Scoperta’s website says it produces amorphous alloys, or metallic glasses, for uses that require stronger, harder, and more corrosion-resistant materials than conventional metal alloys. Scoperta says its materials are intended for use in the military, mining, offshore, and power-generation industries, but the company has technical specifications on its website for just two types of wire products.
Scoperta was founded in 2005, and has raised several rounds from San Diego’s Enterprise Partners Venture Capital and Boulder, CO-based Vista Ventures.
—Poway, CA-based 405Labs, a computer-security startup founded earlier this year, intends to raise slightly more than $2.3 million from investors, according to a recent regulatory filing. The company plans to use the funding for working capital and employee salaries.
The founding CEO is Alex Watson, a co-founder of BTS and APX Labs who led security research at Websense, the San Diego network security company now based in Austin, TX. On its 405Labs website, the company says its team includes “security researchers, data scientists, and machine-learning experts” from the U.S. intelligence community, cyber-security firms, and academia.
—Samsung Electronics said it has acquired San Diego-based Proximal Data, a three-year-old company that specializes in software that improves storage performance by controlling and storing frequently used data more efficiently. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Rory Bolt, a former NetApp technical director, founded Proximal and raised about $6 million in venture capital from San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and Correlation Ventures, as well as Seattle-based Divergent Ventures. The deal follows Samsung’s 2012 acquisition of NVELO, a Santa Clara, CA-based creator of caching software for a type of high-performance data storage technology known as server-based SSDs (solid-state drives).
