Santa Barbara and Goleta are emerging as top destinations for tech companies.
The South Coast’s emergence has come largely from cutting-edge companies clustering around the latest technologies, from computing and lasers to infrared radiation and space engineering. Many were hatched from or later develop ties to the UC Santa Barbara.
Anchoring the local tech community is one of the nation’s best-known tech powerhouses, Google. The tech giant chose the area in 2013 as the home of Google Quantum AI, an endeavor created to develop a new generation of vastly faster and more capable computers.
Erik Lucero, lead quantum engineer for Google in Santa Barbara, credits “great neighbors and support from the local community, all of which has helped us grow in our leadership and mission to build best-in-class quantum computing for otherwise impossible problems,” in a statement to the News-Press.
It’s not just Google that’s found the South Coast welcoming. Grassroots growth is coming from promising startups that are morphing into industry leaders in their own right.
Lucidian, Curvature and Blue Laser Fusion are examples of companies that are becoming known for innovation in their respective fields.
“Santa Barbara and Goleta have a great start-up technology ecosystem,” Shuji Nakamura, a Nobel laureate and founder of Blue Laser Fusion, told the News-Press. “There are office spaces and labs and a trained workforce who can develop the technology and can keep facilities running smoothly.”
The Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce has actively sought to lure firms to the join the local tech community by marketing Santa Barbara and Goleta as having a distinctive identity.
To create an aura, the chamber bestowed a moniker on the local tech community borrowed from its annual tech summit: TechTopia. The goal was to “try to create this brand that will allow us to attract more companies to come to this area,” said chamber spokeswoman Mary Lynn Harms-Romo.
Google ‘passionate’ about Santa Barbara
Though Google parent Alphabet is based in Mountain View, Google Quantum AI is, in effect, homegrown. Google sited it in Goleta in 2013 largely because so much of the key scientists needed for the project had ties to UCSB or resided in Santa Barbara or Goleta.
Quantum AI is trying to crack the secrets leading to the holy grail of computing, a new generation of machines capable of performing multiple functions simultaneously. That would be a big step up from computing as we know it today, a process involving millions or billions of transistors on a chip operating through a series of ones and zeros.
Google’s quantum progress has come in steps. The last major one was the announcement of Willow, a new quantum chip in 2024. Quantum AI officials said has lower error rates and works substantially faster than the previous quantum chip, Sycamore.
The team boasts that Willow is able to perform a complex calculation in under five minutes that would take a present-day supercomputer 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to complete. (That’s 25 zeros. We counted them.)
“We are passionate about developing the local workforce in Goleta and Santa Barbara,” said Lucero.
He said Google has been an “early and continued” supporter of UCSB. And Google also supports Santa Barbara City College’s program to educate workers in “nanofabrication skills” constructing semiconductors and other tiny devices. nan
He said Google helped shape the curriculum, worked to help secure state and federal funds and contributeed its own funds to scale up the education project. He also said Google continues its close ties with UCSB, including making use of the what’s known as the Nanofabrication Facility, a clean room where new chips can be developed at UC Santa Barbara’s Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering.
How UCSB plays a key role
Known by its abbreviation, the NanoFab is an expansive clean room that bills companies by the hour to have their white-suited researchers work in the same facility as university staff as they independently seek to invent the latest and greatest chips.
Those chips may go into any of a number of applications, It might be better self-driving cars or a new robot, or the in the case of Google, a faster computer.
“What people don’t realize is how good UC Santa Barbara is at semiconductors,” said Demis John, a scientist who runs the NanoFab. Typically, chips are perfected at the NanoFab and go into production elsewhere.
“They will do the initial R&D and when it works…they hit it big,” John said.
They then take their inventions to their own factories. “They have the capital and money to scale” production, John said.
There’s no shortage of demand from local companies. NanoFab has about 250 unique users a month, including Google Quantum.
For students, rubbing elbows in proximity to professionals laboring in the NanoFab hints at what their working lives will be like when they graduate. Undergrads get their first exposure to chipmaking in another clean room next door.
“Here they learn the fundamentals,” said Prashant Srinivasan, a teaching classroom engineer as students donned their head-to-toe suits and ventured into the clean room. There students, often material science, engineering or physics majors, learn how to operate the sophisticated chip-making machines.
Collaboration creates jobs and success
Companies say collaboration has not only allowed them to develop new products, but continues the funneling of promising students from the university to the industry.
“For Blue Laser Fusion, several of our early employees came out of UCSB and we use the UCSB NanoFab cleanroom for some of our critical technology development,” Nakamura said.
Nakamura has served on the faculty at UC Santa Barbara and shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2014 for his role in inventing blue LED light. It was the critical missing piece need to develop the white, energy-saving LED bulbs that illuminate the world today. He founded Blue Laser Fusion to develop more powerful lasers that can be used to make fusion energy possible.
NanoFab isn’t the only concept aimed at commercializing UC Santa Barbara’s inventions . Another is an “innovation hub” called OASIS, which took over a building last October and plans to provide offices and support mostly for startups.
“We’re really thinking about OASIS as place to allow them to take the innovation done…really get them scaled up to the poinit they have a product in the market,” said Tal Margalith
executive director for Strategic Initiatives and Operations for the college. He plans to start out with four firms, startups that usually have anywhere from five to 20 employees.
OASIS — it started as an acronym but now is just a name — plans to offer both office and lab space and maybe its own cleanroom in the future.
Saving the planet from starvation
Some companies say their ties to UC Santa Barbara run deep.
One is Apeel, a firm that developed a coating for fruits and vegetables that retards spoilage.
James Rogers founded the company after deciding while in grad school that he wanted to try to apply his knowledge to trying to increase the world’s food supply.
It took him a while to reach that point. He grew up in Michigan and attended college at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, where he studied steel as part of a material sciences program. He came to UC Santa Barbara to study solar power became fascinated by issues surrounding the world’s food supply. Millions of people globally go hungry, he said. Yet there is still enough food being produced to conceivably feed the planet through 2050. The problem is that too much perishable food spoils before it can be consumed.
“Food goes bad because water goes out and oxygen goes in. It reminded me of my days studying steel — the same reason iron would rust,” Roger said. His solution was to create a coating around a piece of fruit or vegetable to slow down the process of decay.
His food-safe remedy was a compound that people consume already, a fatty substance called lipids that are “one of the primary building blocks of living things.” They are common in products like coconut or olive oil.
Coatings on fruit aren’t new. Wax has been applied to apples for decades to make them shiny and thus more appetizing to consumers. Coming up with coating to prolong their shelf life, however, was another matter.
Rogers said his team worked with local farmers. They tested their coating on an exotic type of fruit, the caviar lime. It’s an oblong fruit that has a tangy bead-like pulp. The Apeel coating extended the fruit’s life to 20 days, up from five days without it. To varying degrees, the coatings worked on other fruits and vegetables as well, Rogers said. The usable life of an avocado can be extended to seven days, instead of three at present, he added.
Rogers said Apeel has a team of about 50 and is focusing its marketing efforts outside the U.S. where he believes the marketing message will resonate. He credits UC Santa Barbara for “being dedicated to supporting the emergence” of startups.
Hayes Commercial worked to move Curvature, an information technology hardware provider; and Umbra Space, a satellite components firm, into a shared building last year that collectively has more square footage than a football field. That deal followed one the year before in which Redwire, a space and defense tech firm, also upsized in Goleta.
Another growth area is companies involved in developing products around artificial intelligence.
One is Santa Barbara-based Lucidean, which is developing optical products for use in data centers. In December, it announced it had raised $18 million in a new funding round.
