“I am retired from being a CEO and don’t plan on starting a newco—I am focused on board service and helping companies access capital and of course, arranging an exit, if possible,” former Axonics chief executive Ray Cohen told the Business Journal last summer, noting there was “too much cool technology out in the world these days” to hang up his spurs.
That’s evident with the first big fundraising deal reported in 2026 for an OC company, a $67 million Series A financing for Spiro Medical, a new medical device maker in Irvine that came out of stealth mode last year and is building a first-of-its-kind implantable device to treat asthma.
Spiro’s neuromodulation device has similarities to Axonics, whose implantable product treats incontinence issues; Axonics was sold to Boston Scientific in 2024 for $3.7 billion.
Another common thread between the two companies: the chairman of Spiro Medical is Ray Cohen.
“Once this novel approach comes to market, it promises to have a profound impact on patients suffering from asthma and other breathing related conditions,” said Cohen, who we named a Businessperson of the Year two years ago.
See the features in this week’s edition for more on our latest crop of five Businesspersons of the Year winners and see next week’s print edition for more on Spiro Medical.
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RJ Scaringe earned our nod as a Businessperson of the Year in 2022 after taking Irvine EV maker Rivian Automotive public with its blockbuster $12 billion IPO (Nasdaq: RIVN).
Scaringe now has a blockbuster pay package to aspire to, after Rivian’s board late last year ok’d a new, potential $4.6 billion pay package for the company’s founder, which is tied to revised share price and profit targets.
The award will vest if Rivian hits various stock-price milestones over the next 10 years, ranging from $40 to $140 a share, among other factors.
His prior pay package had substantially higher stock price targets that were deemed unlikely to be met.
Rivian’s shares currently trade at around $20, for a market cap of nearly $25 billion. “I’ve never been as confident as I am today about what our trajectory looks like,” Scaringe told the Business Journal in October.
The company’s newest launch, for a smaller and less expensive SUV model dubbed the R2, is expected this year.
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OC’s biggest IPO since Rivian Automotive came to market in 2021 (it was one of nearly a dozen local firms to go public that year, a record amount for the area) is likely to be Costa Mesa’s Anduril Industries, which has raised over $6 billion in funding to date since its 2017 founding.
Financing news publication Crunchbase has tapped three-time Businessperson of the Year
winner (in 2014, 2020 and 2025) Palmer Luckey’s upstart defense contractor as one of 15 big companies that could go realistically public this year, alongside Elon Musk’s SpaceX in Hawthorne and Torrance satellite firm K2 Space.
Is that IPO buzz realistic? Anduril job postings now note the firm is “implementing IPO readiness programs,” and Luckey stated last year that “we are running this company to be the shape of a publicly traded company.”
