San Diego startups had a good quarter raising money, pulling in a near record amount of $1.26B (as reported in the San Diego Union Tribune). San Diego County startups pulled in $1.26 billion in the second quarter, the region’s largest single quarter of venture funding since at least 2014, according to the National Venture...
Procopio has a nice article warning startup founders and investors about changes that are coming to SAFEs, the popular convertible investment device developed by Y-Combinator. While the standard terms of convertible notes have remained fairly constant over the years, Y-Combinator has recently made significant changes to their standard form of SAFE, recasting it as a...
San Diego startups have a new potential source for raising VC capital, as Anzu Partners is looking to raise $150M for local investments. Their focus isn’t strictly on the life sciences, but many of their investments are in this area. Anzu’s managing partner David Michael said their areas of interest include life sciences tools, microfluidics,...
This is part 2 of my interview with Ross Bundy, CEO of Nanomedical Diagnostics, in which the focus is on the challenges and advantages of building a startup in San Diego. Be sure to catch part 1 of the interview if you’d like to hear more about the technology that Nanomedical is building. Shawn...
Two recent reports show that San Diego startups continue to land big investments. The first, from MoneyTree, has local startups pulling in $346M in Q1 compared to $217M from the same period a year ago. The second report, the Venture Monitor, came up with different numbers, but a similar conclusion: $547M in Q1 compared to...
The latest issue of GEN summarizes the VC activity in the biotech space for 2017 so far. There were 205 deals through the end of Q2 in which a total of $4.697B was raised. Three genomics companies alone accounted for $1.335B of that total: GRAIL = $900M (Q1) Guardant Health = $360M (Q2) WuXi NextCode...