4 UC San Diego Startups to Watch from Innovation Day 2024

Article Content

They’re developing new therapeutics and treatments for cancer patients, building artificial intelligence personas to maximize employee efficiency and creating cutting-edge tools to reduce pesticide use—and they’re all powered by the University of California San Diego’s world-class innovation ecosystem.

During San Diego’s third annual Innovation Day 2024, held Sept. 24 at Petco Park, the founders and CEOs behind these novel technologies represented just a few of the 25 startups that filled the UC San Diego Innovation Pavilion, located in the ballpark’s Western Metal Supply Building. There, they shared their visionary ideas with venture capitalists, angel investors, industry executives and others, collectively exploring the future of technology and life sciences in what’s widely regarded as one of the most innovative regions in the world.

A global hub for innovation and entrepreneurship, UC San Diego proudly co-sponsored the event with startup accelerator Connect, transforming the bustling ballpark into a vibrant showcase of groundbreaking solutions. With expert panels, pitch competitions, live performances and endless networking opportunities, Innovation Day was more than just a display of technology—it was a convergence of ideas, partnerships and creative collaborations.

“As a leader of Innovation Day in San Diego, we are proud to foster strategic alliances and create an environment where such a wide array of businesses, startups and innovators can collaborate to address global challenges from AI tools to medical devices. Our commitment to advancing technology and driving social impact positions us at the forefront of solutions that will shape the future,” said Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation Corinne Peek-Asa. “Together, we have a world-class innovation ecosystem that makes San Diego and all of its academic, industry, community and government partners a global hub where cutting-edge research and entrepreneurship thrive.”

With more than 1,000 campus-affiliated startups launched in the past 30 years, UC San Diego stands as a leader among top universities in startup creation. These efforts are supported by a range of incubators, accelerator programs and a 74,000-square-foot Design & Innovation Building where students, faculty and staff can design, create prototypes, test, fabricate, launch startups and commercialize.

“San Diego—powered by UC San Diego—has one again demonstrated that it is a global leader in driving the future of so many technology sectors, creating entirely new industries in digital health, space innovation, defense and climate adaptation through the convergence of existing technologies,” said Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and CommercializationPaul Roben. “The multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving at UC San Diego, and its national leadership in startup company formation, have been key elements in creating this convergence economy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the cutting-edge technologies showcased by the UC San Diego-affiliated startups at Innovation Day."

Learn about four of the UC San Diego-powered startups featured in this year’s event and hear how the university’s innovation ecosystem has helped them turn groundbreaking ideas into real-world solutions:

Leveraging AI to increase employee efficiency

Imagine having an artificial intelligence persona that knows your company’s proprietary information, handles repetitive tasks and frees up your team to focus on strategy—all without compromising sensitive data.

That’s the vision behind Personal.ai, a rapidly growing startup creating personalized AI models that transform how businesses operate. By creating “digital twins” for professionals across industries that range from health care to law, Personal.ai is reshaping workflows and boosting efficiencies.

“We build small language model AIs for enterprises handling sensitive data and proprietary information that can’t be uploaded to models like ChatGPT,” said Alec Lowi, AI architect at Personal.ai, as he gave a demonstration of the tool at the company’s Innovation Day booth. “Our main value is increasing the efficiency of the employee, not replacing the employee."

Led by CEO Suman Kanuganti, a Rady School of Management MBA graduate, Personal.ai has already made significant strides since launching its product 10 months ago, boasting nearly $2 million in annual recurring revenue. Personal.ai also had the honor of being named to Connect’s 2024 “Cool Companies,” a cohort of top-performing startups selected by a panel of judges and matched with quality venture capital for series A funding.

Personal.ai is housed on the fourth floor of UC San Diego’s Design & Innovation Building, where the team benefits from the vibrant creative ecosystem of the university’s Entrepreneurship Center.

“Everyone in the Entrepreneurship Center is either struggling with the same thing or has struggled with the same thing,” said Lowi. “It’s been great to learn from and collaborate with other startups even if they’re not in the same industry. You wouldn’t get that anywhere else."

Attacking tumors from the inside out

Liver cancer is considered one of the deadliest cancers in the United States, but biotechnology startup OxyLo, founded by UC San Diego postdoctoral scholar Tom Molley from the Jacobs School of Engineering, is working to change that by revolutionizing treatment from the inside out.

Molley, alongside fellow UC San Diego postdoc Gisselle Gonzalez and an international team of scientists, has developed HypoxyCaps—an injectable, biomaterial-based microcapsule designed to starve tumors of the oxygen and glucose they need to grow and survive. This approach focuses on patients with tumors that are inoperable, offering new hope to those who need it most.

Molley credits OxyLo’s success to the support they’ve received from the UC San Diego Institute for the Global Entrepreneur’s MedTech Accelerator, which helps innovators navigate the complex process of bringing medical technologies to market.

“The amount of support that I’ve gotten is incredible—I never would have been able to do this without UC San Diego,” said Molley. “As we work to validate the treatment’s efficacy, we need to find regulatory consultants and people who can help us move to the next stage—and Innovation Day provides the perfect environment for us to make contact with a lot of these people."

Supporting the future of farming

Wild Genomics is transforming pest management in agriculture with its cutting-edge DNA sequencing tools that provide farmers with real-time, actionable data. By collecting and analyzing environmental DNA, the startup helps farmers pinpoint pest problems early, reducing pesticide use and protecting crop health.

Co-founded by Rady School of Management graduate Eirik Torheim and bioinformatics expert Bilgenur Baloglu, the company works with various farmers—from soybean to avocado growers—providing them with data on fungi, bacteria, insects and even mammal species to help target specific problem areas in their fields.

“By pinpointing where the pest problem is on the farm, farmers don’t have to spray the whole field,” said Baloglu. “Through our technology, we can save them time and money—and also reduce the amount of pesticides affecting our food and our oceans.”

Through a subscription-based model, Wild Genomics aims to enable farmers to continuously monitor crop health without the need for large upfront investments.

“The innovation ecosystem at UC San Diego has helped us tremendously,” Baloglu said. From The Basement, which is dedicated to student innovation and entrepreneurship, to the StartR accelerator at the Rady School of Management and the StartBlue accelerator, which partners with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Wild Genomics team has taken advantage of many of the university’s offerings for entrepreneurs. Today, the company is pre-revenue but actively fundraising to continue building its platform and expand its team.

Wild Genomics also provides valuable hands-on experience for students like Manasa Maddi, a second-year data science major at UC San Diego who has been working on the startup’s data team. She’s helped integrate DNA sequencing results into an iOS app for farmers and says the experience has inspired her to pursue a career in biotech.

Enabling safe early cancer treatment

Another standout startup, AirSurgical, attracted a crowd with its demonstration of their robot-guided ablation system, designed to improve the precision of minimally invasive cancer treatments. The system relies on CT scans and advanced algorithms to accurately navigate a needle during tumor ablation, a procedure that kills cancer cells while reducing the need for open surgery.

Co-founded by Dimitri Schreiber, who earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at UC San Diego and completed his Ph.D. in the Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab, AirSurgical’s technology began as a senior design project before evolving into a Ph.D. project.

“We did all of our testing and initial earlier devices at UC San Diego, licensed our intellectual property at UC San Diego, and now we’re building a company around it,” said Schreiber. He credits the Institute for the Global Entrepreneur’s MedTech Accelerator and Tech Management Program—which helps engineering students gain business skills—with equipping him to turn his research into a business and allowing him to collaborate with MBA students at Rady School of Management. AirSurgical’s team now includes Schreiber’s fellow UC San Diego alumni Akanimoh Adeleye, Zhaowei Yu, Hamed Aryafar and Alan Moazzam, an assistant professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine who earned an MBA from Rady.

“Through the accelerator programs, we did a lot of customer discovery, talking to users and trying to understand what they actually need, and that resulted in pretty big changes between the research and the product,” Schreiber said during the event. “Innovation Day is really exciting, and our hope is to connect with investors as we try to launch from being a ‘garage startup’ to raising external money and hiring people full time."