Being named an Innovator of the Year by the Business Journal was just the start of the awards circuit for 2020’s batch of IOTY winners.
The five people recognized during our event last September kept getting additional accolades, from CNBC’s Disrupter 50 to “Best Investment Opportunity” to “Best Product of the Year.”
In between, those winners kept up a heavy work load as well.
Below are some of the activities of our winners from the past year; this year’s presentations will be made at the Irvine Marriott on Sept. 9.
Reza Rofougaran: A Hint of an IPO
Reza Rofougaran, the co-founder of Irvine-based wireless technology firm Movandi Corp. along with sister Maryam Rofougaran, provided a big hint of the future when the siblings reached back to their days working at Broadcom by hiring its former chief financial officer, Bill Ruehle.
“I was first introduced to Maryam and Reza when I acquired their company Innovent while at Broadcom in 2000 and watched them grow Broadcom’s wireless business to over a billion dollars and shipping billions of radios per year,” Ruehle said at the time of his hiring in March. “Can I help Movandi get to be a large public company? I’d love to do that. That’s what keeps me going.”
Scott Burri, also a Movandi co-founder, gave his CFO role to Ruehle and assumed the newly created position of chief administrative officer of the company.
Movandi expanded internationally when in July, it announced a deal to provide super-fast telecommunications in Ban Chang, billed as the first “smart city” in Thailand.
Big data will be used in Ban Chang to improve people’s quality of life, including a 3D system to boost people’s incomes, a closed-circuit TV system to ensure public security, and various other innovations to enhance local life, in addition to the state-of-the-art 5G system.
In May, Movandi was named to the 2021 CNBC Disrupter 50, which identifies fast-growing startups. IOTY winner Reza Rofougaran, who is the chief technical officer in addition to being co-CEO, holds at least 850 patents and is reported to be one of the top 30 patent holders in the world. Maryam, who is chief operating officer as well as co-CEO, holds more than 250 issued patents.
OC “is as good of any other place for chipmakers due to its location in Southern California with very well-known and established public semiconductor companies and rising startups,” Reza told the Business Journal earlier this year.
“There is so much talent, knowledge and experience, as well as fresh young talented and motivated students with new and fresh ideas.”
Michael Dennin: Surviving the Apocalypse
UCI Physics Professor Michael Dennin kept up his role as “the Superhero Scientist” on a YouTube show, “Fascinating Gadgets Gizmos & Gear Based Technologies,” where last month he reviewed the movie, “The Mitchells vs. The Machines.”
“I absolutely loved the movie,” he said while wearing a cowboy hat. “I’m a fan of zombie apocalypses. I’ve thought long and hard about the physics of surviving the apocalypse.”
In the past year, Dennin also kept busy with his full time jobs as vice provost for Teaching and Learning and as dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Irvine.
“The biggest thing for the past year was keeping the teaching going during the pandemic and teaching remotely,” he told the Business Journal. “That was a huge deal.”
He published 17 blogs that discussed in depth the coming fall semester, touching on details such as grades to integrity to prerequisites. He’s also an active user of Twitter, such as a recent day when he made six tweets to discuss his blogs.
Dennin also managed to find time for five new episodes of his podcast, “Conversations with the Vice Provost” where he interviewed UCI experts in their fields, such as how a library works in today’s world.
Dennin, who has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton University and a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, began discussing the “Science of Superman” after arriving at UCI in 1997. Soon, local newspapers took notice and Dennin was asked to appear on Ancient Aliens, Star Wars Tech and several other television shows. He even designed an online course for AMC’s “The Walking Dead.”
“I’ve always been very skeptical of the AI-takes-over-the-world-and-kills us movies,” he said on the show reviewing the Mitchells movie.
“This one was way more believable like ‘Oh yeah, that is a mistake we would make as humans.’”
Martha Montoya: An Agricultural Tech Star
Martha Montoya, who has been in the data industry for farmers and food buyers for more than 25 years, kept hitting home runs after winning a Business Journal Innovator of the Year award last year.
The CEO of Irvine-based AgTools Inc. was named the Rising Star Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the Women’s Venture Summit, “Best Investment Opportunity” in Next Wave Impact’s Founders of Color Showcase and one of 20 winners from a pool of more than 4,500 companies in Pepperdine University’s Most Fundable Companies competition.
In May, her company won the Judges and Audience award of the QuickPitch of the San Diego Venture Group.
“It has been humbling and rewarding—yes, the cash helped us bring a full-time sales person too!” the company wrote on its blog site.
In 2017, Montoya launched AgTools with her two younger brothers, both engineers, Gustavo and Oscar. AgTools’ platform uses artificial intelligence to provide real-time data to help farmers increase profits and reduce waste. At the same time, it assists buyers and shippers with data on product availability, pricing and routing.
AgTools was a member of the UCI Beall Applied Innovation Wayfinder incubator and last year closed a $1.4 million seed round of financing, with participation from the Tech Coast Angels.
This year, it was one of nine companies selected to join Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator in partnership with Cargill and Ecolab. Montoya met 120 possible mentors in the industry.
“We then had the tough decision to select 7-10 mentors to help us … almost impossible!” the company’s website said. “It was like going to Disneyland, not knowing which ride to take, with all of them being so great!”
Kurt Busch: 1M to 15M in a Year
A year ago when Syntiant Corp. announced it shipped more than 1 million processors to customers, Chief Executive Kurt Busch promised the Irvine-based chipmaker would ramp up production.
Did it ever. A year later, the Irvine-based company has shipped more than 15 million of its processors that are for always-on applications in battery-powered devices, such as smartphones, smart speakers, earbuds, hearing aids and laptops.
“We believe there isn’t another chip company dedicated to machine learning that has been able to achieve what we have accomplished in a little over three years,” Busch said earlier this year.
Among other highlights of the past year, Syntiant:
• Was one of the companies featured during Alexa Startups Showcase as part of the annual conference for app developers on Amazon’s voice assistant platform.
• Was called “one of the coolest chips” by the CRN industry website.
• Was named “Best Product of the Year” by the tinyML Foundation.
• Made it onto Fast Company’s prestigious list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2020.
• Was a CES 2021 Innovation Awards Honoree.
• Announced a joint development of a voice-controlled solution for security cameras and smart appliances with Renesas Electronics Corp.
To top it off, Syntiant was named in July to the Business Journal’s Best Places to Work.
“This is the second year in a row our company was named as one of the best places to work in Orange County and we couldn’t be prouder,” Busch said. “While the company has grown considerably since 2017, our culture of innovation and exceptionalism remain at the heart of Syntiant’s success, which is a direct result of the talented, hardworking and dedicated employees we’re so grateful to have on board.”
Bob Wolpert: GSF on Top of Food, Tech Trends
Irvine-based Golden State Foods, long one of OC’s largest privately held businesses with an estimated $5 billion in annual sales by manufacturing and distributing food for many fast-food restaurants, is right in the middle of shipping problems currently plaguing world trade, whether it’s trying to import seasonings from China or seeing demand for boxes go sky high.
“It’s a big challenge to keep everything in stock,” Bob Wolpert told the Business Journal. “It’s like whack-a-mole. Something’s always coming up.”
Wolpert, the company’s chief strategy and innovation officer, has been busy implementing a digital supply chain at some of its biggest customers who he’s not allowed to identify.
It’s also made Volvo’s largest order to date of its electric trucks by agreeing to use 15 Volvo Electric Class 8 trucks, the first zero-emission, battery-electric trucks to be deployed in GSF’s fleet. The first truck, which arrived this past March, is running last-mile delivery routes to Starbucks locations throughout Southern California. The leased electric trucks are assisted with funding by a $3.9 million grant awarded to Volvo Financial Services from the Mobile Source Air Pollution Reduction Review Committee’s (MSRC) Inland Port Program.
“The drivers just love these trucks,” Wolpert said.
He’s also proud that Food Processing Magazine recognized GSF with a R&D Teams of the Year Awards, including GSF’s Liquid Products North America. In 2020 alone, the 25-person product development team serviced over 700 projects, created more than 1,200 product prototypes, and launched 135 new products.
In the past year, GSF introduced a next-gen packaging and sauce dispensing product for an environmentally friendly, cost-effective, and waste-reducing solution, while improving food safety. He also pointed out that GSF’s Zaxby’s Caribbean Jerk Sauce earned top honors in 2020 as Sauce of the Year, awarded by the Association for Dressings and Sauces.
A year ago, farmers were dumping excess milk due to unexpected changes in supply chain caused by the pandemic.
GSF’s dairy products subsidiary, KanPak U.S., launched a surplus milk bottling initiative. In the past year, GSF has sold at cost more than 4.6 million bottles of shelf-stable premium milk to food banks and donated 137,280 bottles through the company’s nonprofit GSF Foundation.
“Many food banks in Orange County received these bottles,” he said. “We’re really proud of this program.”
