Follow the Money

Social media management platform Soci closed an $8.5 million Series A round this week. The round was co-led by Vertical Venture Partners of Silicon Valley and Grayhawk Capital in Arizona. Additional participants included the Stanford University DAPER fund, Peninsula Ventures in the Bay Area, and Tallwave Capital in Arizona. According to Xconomy, much of the funding will flow to Austin in the form of a new office and new employees. Sales and marketing functions will primarily be in Austin, while development, customer relations, and a portion of marketing will stay in San Diego.

Former Redfin Employees Launch Approved

Redfin sought to disrupt the real estate market. Now two of its employees are trying to do the same thing to the mortgage side of the market with Approved. Andy Taylor was the director of product management and Navtej Sadhal was the development manager for platforms at Redfin. They chose to make the move from the Bay Area and locate their new business in San Diego for a few reasons, some expected and some not. Taylor shared that the quality of life made San Diego an obvious choice. But there were some solid business reasons as well. First, the lower costs of starting a business in San Diego make their initial funding last longer. Second, he cited the robust real estate market in Southern California giving his company instant access to a large population of its customers. Approved markets itself to mortgage companies to help them digitize mortgage information instead of requiring the documents in paper form. After a pilot of the platform, lenders reported a 50% reduction in the time it took to get the documents needed for a mortgage. Approved just announced a $1 million pre-seed round led by Social Capital and Precursor Ventures.

Southern California Startups Report

A new report from Silicon Valley Bank surveyed startup companies across the United States and shows a different startup experience for companies based in Southern California. More companies in Southern California found the fundraising atmosphere extremely challenging compared to the nation as a whole. While 16% of companies in the US expect an IPO, that is true for only 4% in Southern California as more of them expect to be acquired or stay private. More than 70% of the companies plan to hire at a higher rate in 2017. As a follow-on to that, the most important policy issues to the companies were access to talent and healthcare costs.

Center for Novel Therapeutics

UCSD and BioMed Realty announced last week the construction of a new facility where UCSD can partner with researchers to help move technology and medical science focused on cancer and other chronic diseases to benefit patients. The 100,000 square foot Center for Novel Therapeutics will partner researchers with private sector companies and will open in early 2019.

TakeLessons Acquires Chromatik

TakeLessons added to its offering last week when it moved to acquire Chromatik, a leader in digital sheet music and music education with a large, well-established community. Steven Cox, CEO of TakeLessons, said, “While we offer over 200 categories of lifelong learning, our roots were planted in music as our first category, so we’re very happy to welcome Chromatik members. Chromatik has done an incredible job building a community of people passionate about learning music.”

CyberTech Brings in Naval Intelligence

CyberTech San Diego, part of a global cybersecurity and Internet of Things ecosystem, has brought in the Navy’s former vice admiral for information warfare and naval intelligence, Ted Branch. In his volunteer role, he will be working with the 100 small- and medium-sized tech firms in the Entrepreneur in Residence program. He hopes to connect them with university, non-profit, and government leaders through strategic relationships.

Pivots and Opportunities

San Diego Venture Group is now accepting applications for its Cool Companies recognition.

Be There or Be…

• Transforming the Energy Scene
  Wednesday, April 12, 8–11 a.m. at Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, 2880 Torrey Pines Scenic Drive
  Cleantech San Diego showcases technologies from the first nine startup companies accepted into the San Diego Regional Energy Innovation Network
• Startup Week Tickets
  San Diego Startup Week runs from June 19–23
  Early bird prices are available through April 30

Tags: Approved, Blogs, Redfin, Soci, Startup Buzz