Crowd funding isn’t really about raising money. It’s about gathering data and contact information whose long-term value far outweighs the one-time cash that comes in. A group of crowd funding experts hammered that point home at an Oct. 20 event hosted by the Central Coast MIT Enterprise Forum at UC Santa Barbara. Crowd funding, in Read More →
Thousand Oaks-based ImmunGene, a cancer treatment firm led by a former Amgen scientist, has raised $9 million from Ally Bridge Group, an investment group with ties to Hong Kong.
ImmunGene’s so-called antibody-cytokine fusion technology could help improve the cancer-cell targeting in therapies. President and CEO Sanjay D. Khare was formerly the scientific director at Amgen, the biotech giant. Prior to the funding, ImmunGene had received several hundred thousand dollars in federal research grants.
Antibody technologies hold promise for creating cancer treatments that do less damage to healthy cells. Molecules are crafted to mimic the body’s own immune system and bind to specific defects in cancer cells.
Alongside its everyday wealth and investment management business, San Luis Obispo-based Taylor Frigon Capital Management has been quietly making venture capital investments over the past five years that are gaining attention from Silicon Valley heavyweights.
Taylor Frigon’s venture investment arm, Taylor Frigon Capital Partners, was an early investor in a company called Otoy in Los Angeles. The company has recently inked deals with a spate of big players — Firefox parent Mozilla, Amazon’s cloud services branch and Autodesk, the gold-standard for 3-D rendering software — to crack a previously unachievable goal.
“It became evident that, if you don’t think creatively about AB32, it could really restrict your business’ growth,” Hullar said. “But if you play your strategies right, you can make a lot of money with AB32 – if somebody is buying, that means somebody is selling.”
The $1.6 billion Westlake Village-based digital advertising company has been under fire from investors — and trial attorneys — for its reliance acquisitions to produce revenue growth. It has also faced criticism of the steep losses it has taken on selling off business lines that didn’t work out.
Goleta-based Yardi Systems is jumping back in the legal ring to defend its intellectual property less than a year after settling another high-profile case over its software and services. Yardi is one of the biggest players in property management software and among the largest privately held companies in the region. In late October, Yardi filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles against Utah-based Property Solutions International.
Wall Street trusts billionaire David Murdock of Dole Food Co. to repay his debts but doesn’t agree with his valuation logic.
Murdock succeeded in taking the Westlake Village-based firm private on Oct. 31 in a deal that valued the company at more than $1.6 billion when counting net debt, fees and expenses. At the same time, investors clamored to help Murdock take on debt to finance the deal, with a reported order book of more than $10.5 billion for only $300 million in debt.
