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By Stephen Nellis / Friday, November 8th, 2013 / Banking & Finance, Top Stories / Comments Off on 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.
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By Tony Biasotti / Friday, November 8th, 2013 / Features, Small Business, Technology, Top Stories / Comments Off on In good company: Co-working spaces proliferate in region
This has been the year co-working hit the Tri-Counties. With the opening on Nov. 4 of Connect Ventura in the Working Artists Ventura building, there are now co-work spaces in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.
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By Erika Martin / Friday, November 8th, 2013 / Features, Small Business, Top Stories / Comments Off on Grown in Ghana: Santa Barbara startup makes African superfruit supplement
A Santa Barbara startup hopes to bring the rumored superfood qualities of the African baobab fruit to the U.S. market. The company said the product provides a highly-concentrated source of nutrition and has a sweet-yet-tart flavor that blends grapefruit, pear and vanilla, and an oil.
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By Stephen Nellis / Friday, November 8th, 2013 / Columns, Law & Goverment, Top Stories / Comments Off on Appellate attorneys lend eye for legal issues to trial lawyers
Let’s face it: Sometimes you lose. And sometimes, it’s really not your fault. Judges and juries are only human and can misapply the law to the facts. That’s where appellate attorneys come in. The region has a number of bar-certified appellate law specialists who work closely with trial attorneys on whether and how an appeal can be pursued.
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By Staff Report / Thursday, November 7th, 2013 / East Ventura County, Technology, Top Stories / Comments Off on ImmunGene raises $9M
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.
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By Marlize van Romburgh / Friday, November 1st, 2013 / Banking & Finance, Banking Industry, Top Stories, Tri-County Economy / Comments Off on Treasury nets $3.2M loss on TARP in region
As the last bank in the region exits the Troubled Asset Relief Program on the five-year anniversary of the federal aid program, the U.S. Treasury has recouped most of its investment in the Tri-Counties, taking a loss of $3.2 million on the $259.6 million it disbursed to area lenders.
By paying off $2.1 million in federal aid it received at the height of the financial crisis, Ojai Community Bank becomes the last of the region’s banks to exit TARP. All told, the U.S. Treasury received $256.4 million on the $259.6 million in aid it disbursed to nine banks in the Tri-Counties.
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By Stephen Nellis / Friday, November 1st, 2013 / Real Estate, South Coast, Top Stories, Tourism / Comments Off on Court launches bids for eight Nesbitt hotels
Montecito hotel magnate Pat Nesbitt could lose as many as half of his Embassy Suites properties under a recently approved bankruptcy reorganization plan.
Nesbitt and his company, Windsor Capital Group, parked a portfolio of eight Embassy Suites hotels in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, listing more than $100 million in debts, after being unable to work out a deal with his servicer, New York-based Torchlight Investors. Nesbitt’s Embassy Suites properties in Lompoc and San Luis Obispo were not involved in the case.
Court documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Barbara indicate the eight hotels in the bankruptcy are now slated to go to the auction block.
