Taylor Frigon invests in Schmidt-backed cloud tech firm
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.
Clean Diesel’s Pirelli deal scuttled
Clean Diesel said Nov. 12 that it and the Italian auto parts firm had decided to cancel a project launched earlier this year that brought Clean Diesel’s catalytic converter coatings to Europe.
Banking on a reunion: Funari and Ortega team up
Longtime Santa Barbara bankers Joanne Funari and Eloy Ortega are reunited again. The two bankers, who founded Business First National Bank together in 2001, now have their sights set on building out the The Bank of Santa Barbara on the South Coast.
Venture capital firm hungers for health-foods startups
Santa Barbara-based venture capital firm NGEN Partners has a new investing focus on a somewhat unlikely sector: healthy, environmentally friendly food.
Since its founding in 2001, NGEN has had a focus on funding sustainability-oriented companies. Its early focus was on energy and materials. Catalytic Solutions, a nanotechnology firm spun out of UC Santa Barbara that made emissions scrubbing cheaper and more effective in automobiles, was an early investment. Soraa, an LED lighting firm created by several UCSB professors that has gone on to receive big money from Khosla Ventures and others, remains active in the firm’s portfolio.
Salem profits soar on higher Internet revenue
Christian and conservative media operator Salem Communications Corp.’s third-quarter profits jumped 58 percent to $5.3 million, or 21 cents per share, as revenue increased 3.1 percent to $58.5 million. The Camarillo-based firm’s revenue continued to shift to the Web, with third-quarter Internet revenue increasing 20.4 percent to $9.4 million.
ValueClick profits jump 33%, firm to sell sites
Online advertising firm ValueClick’s third-quarter profits jumped 33 percent to $22.1 million and the firm announced plans to sell off company-owned websites such as Investopedia.com and CouponMountain.com.
“We delivered strong profitability and cash flow in the third quarter, driven by a continued mix shift into our higher-value-added offerings,” ValueClick CEO and President John Giuliani said in a news release. “Solid year-over-year growth in our CRM, affiliate marketing, mobile, video and cross-device solutions was offset by weakness in our insertion order display business within the media segment.”
Murdock completes buyout of Dole Food Co.
Dole Food Co. CEO and Chairman David Murdock has completed a buyout of the company, a deal that takes the Westlake Village-based produce giant private and values it at $1.6 billion.
The merger was approved by shareholders on Oct. 31, the company said. Dole shares will cease trading on the New York Stock Exchange at the close of business on Nov. 1.
