OFFICE SPACE
Job recruitment startup Jobot is moving its headquarters next week from Los Angeles to WeWork’s coworking location at Irvine’s Boardwalk office development, along Jamboree Road.
The Boardwalk offices are expected to be a temporary home for Jobot, which has plans for its headquarters to be built elsewhere in Orange County next year. Details on the custom built office space aren’t yet being released, but Chief Executive Heidi Golledge said the company’s forthcoming space will be large enough to hold over 100 employees.
Jobot launched its recruiting service in a Los Angeles office last October, and is privately funded by Golledge, who began two other successful startups, including Irvine-based job board CareerBliss, and Irvine-based Cybercoders, which sold to L.A.-based professional service company ASGN Incorporated in 2013 for $100 million.
Jobot currently has 20 employees, and Golledge said the company will expand to 50 in its OC operations by October.
FINANCING
Irvine-based medical technology firm Cactus Medical was awarded a $225,000 Small Business Innovative Research grant from the National Science Foundation.
Cactus is working to improve diagnosis for ear infections in children through a newly designed otoscope. The device works similar to a traditional otoscope—it has a light and is inserted into the ear—but also uses light wavelengths to detect fluid behind the eardrum and can see through earwax.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Dr. Samir Shreim said ear infection misdiagnosis is the leading cause of unnecessary antibiotic use, but the company’s technology can increase diagnostic accuracy from 60%, the current average based on medical studies, to 98%.
“Pediatricians are good at making accurate diagnoses, but the pediatrician is looking at subtle differences in the way the eardrum looks,” he said. “The majority of the information that is indicative of fluid behind the ear drum is beyond the spectrum that humans can see.”
Shreim comes from a medical technology background. He’s held positions at Irvine-based Masimo Corp., Laguna Hills-based Metronom Health, and Santa Margarita-based Applied Medical Resources Corp. before launching Cactus in 2017.
In December, Cactus was accepted into the West Coast Consortium for Technology and Innovation in Pediatrics, an FDA-sponsored pediatric device accelerator based out of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
PRODUCTS
Irvine-based drone accessories company Satori Aerial LLC has been granted a design patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for Co-Pilot, a mount that allows a drone operator to affix their controller to a tripod, rather than holding it or wearing it on a neck lanyard.
Company founder Gary Clayman, a FAA certified remote drone pilot, came up with the idea after he was injured in a bicycle accident and had difficulty holding the drone controller.
Last year, Satori started selling Co-Pilot and other drone accessories such as tripods, wheelchair mounts and bicycle mounts. The company had received $150,000 in equity investment, but Clayman said it is cash flow positive and sustaining itself with sales.
Satori is seeking space near Irvine’s Spectrum area to do fulfillment, packaging and shipping, and Clayman said the company will likely be expanding its team to meet demand.
Medical technology device maker Laser Associated Sciences has received 510(k) clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for its FlowMet-R device, which uses light-based technology to measure blood flow in the legs. The 510(k) clearance from the FDA signifies the device is effective and safe to market.
The device can be used by doctors during revascularization surgeries, a type of surgery that opens up blockages in a patient’s blood vessels to address peripheral artery disease. It clips onto a patient’s toe to monitor whether the surgery has restored blood flow to the leg tissue in real time.
Chief Executive Sean White said roughly 10 million people in the U.S. suffer from peripheral artery disease, and hundreds of thousands of those will have revascularization surgery each year.
Laser Associated Sciences currently operates out of University of California-Irvine Applied Innovation’s The Cove.
It said it has received funding from multiple sources including venture capital and corporate investors, but hasn’t disclosed details.
Irvine-based “knowledge management” software firm Unika launches its new artificial intelligence-powered sales system this week.
Unika’s cloud-based platform is designed for organizations to better connect sales and marketing departments, allowing for asset sharing, collaboration and providing data on what sales assets are most engaging and providing the most conversions.
The software also has an AI-powered knowledge assistant that helps answer questions, perform research, and find assets.
Unika started in August last year with software targeted specifically to law firms, but is now expanding to other industries. It was developed in the product incubator of Irvine-based technology consulting firm Neudesic, but will be spun out into its own separate company, much the same as Irvine-based retail data company PriceSpider was previously.
Senior Marketing and Sales Manager Tyler Suss said the software is built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and that Unika is working with the tech giant to launch its next component, an AI document search function that automatically tags and catalogs all company assets and paperwork, which should launch this summer.
Irvine-based mental health-focused app developer MindTapp has released the private beta version of its “mindset training” app, a game-like program that allows users to create positive or negative mindset associations to achieve their goals.
Founder Thomas Sy, Ph.D, a University of California-Riverside psychology professor and former U.S. Army Green Beret said the app uses associative learning, similar to the famous Pavlovian experiment in which dogs were conditioned to salivate at the ringing of a bell.
Sy said it can be used to help make people better leaders, increase a positive attitude, or even reduce suicidal ideation or negative behaviors, and that tests have shown a significant shift in mindset after just a week of using the app for roughly 10 minutes a day.
Users first collect images, and then play brain teaser games that condition an association of those images with their goals.
MindTapp launched in 2016, and has been bootstrapped so far. Sy said the private beta is being tested by companies, university students and the U.S. Army, and the app will be publicly available later this year.
EVENTS
Tuesday, April 30
• SBIR Grants: A Practical Guide (SBDC Orange County Inland Empire), Irvine, noon, free, (714) 564-5200, bit.ly/2IFee7o
Thursday, May 2
• Marketing & Promotion: Finding Your Niche (SCORE Chapter 114), Fullerton, 6 p.m., free, (714) 550-7369, orangecounty.score.org
• Vincit Dev Talks 8.0 (Vincit Dev Talks 8.0), Irvine, 6 p.m., free, vincitdevtalks.com
Friday, May 3
• Lunch & Learn: Creating Customer Loyalty (UCI Applied Innovation), Irvine, noon, free, (949) 824-2683, bit.ly/2L4Yspt
Monday, May 6
• The New Culture of Surveillance (Illuminations), Irvine, 5:30 p.m., free, (949) 824-2683, bit.ly/2UKPFNP
RECURRING
• 1 Million Cups (UCI Applied Innovation), Irvine, every Wednesday, 7:45 a.m., free, (949) 824-2683, innovation.uci.edu
