An Innovation Ecosystem Grows in Pasadena

Pasadena at night (Photo – ©W.K.)

Inside the kitchens of some of America’s biggest fast food restaurants, you might find a new a mechanical fry cook on the job. A robotic arm called Flippy dunks the French fries in sizzling oil at a Jack in the Box location and runs the tortilla chip station at a Southern California Chipotle store.

By Andrew Moseman

The minds behind these robots—Miso Robotics, a startup with a host of Caltech connections—design and test them right in the heart of Pasadena. Co-founders Ryan Sinnet and Rob Anderson chose Pasadena to be close to the robotics research at Caltech, which has its locus at the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST); the firm routinely hires new employees and interns from Caltech because of its robotics focus.

Over the past couple of decades, the start-up ecosystem in Southern California has blossomed and developed an ecosystem with the funding, institutional collaboration, and people to support start-ups in what Andy Wilson, executive director for the Alliance for SoCal Innovation, calls “frontier technologies” like solar energy, telescopes, batteries, and artificial intelligence.

The innovation community is buoyed by the students and ideas that emerge not only from Caltech but also from universities around the region and an acceleration in venture capital and spaces for new start-ups to work. Caltech has grown its partnerships with private industry and is working to build new space for start-ups on Green Street that will stand alongside a new home for the Carnegie Institute for Science.

Xencor is one of the anchors of the Pasadena innovation ecosystem, developing therapeutic antibody and cytokine treatments for cancers and autoimmune disorders. Xencor is just one example of a company begun by a Caltech graduate student with mentorship from a Caltech professor; it is now one of several established biotech firms in Pasadena and a part of a snowballing life sciences innovation community.

Innovation and collaboration in Pasadena and with Caltech are not only occurring in life sciences.

Virtualitics, an AI-driven data visualization start-up which is now headquartered next to campus on Lake Avenue and which was born from a very Caltech idea. Michael Amori, a Caltech grad and co-founder of Virtualitics, was introduced to George Djorgovski of the Center for Data Driven Discoveries; Djorgovski introduced Amori to Ciro Donalek and his research, and Donalek became the co-founder of Virtualitics.

Still, any innovation community requires funding When Virtualitics started in 2016, Amori and his colleagues had to put in extra work to find venture capital to back the company—whereas in places like Northern California, some of the world’s biggest tech investors are right across the street. When Xencor started in the late 1990s, Pasadena had relatively little by way of wet lab spaces that biotechnology firms require.

Now Southern California is coming into its own in providing funding. In 2015, Pasadena and Caltech launched Innovate Pasadena, an organization dedicated to strengthening the local innovation ecosystem and hosting networking events with venture capital firms.  Caltech itself is now working with Wilson Hill Ventures, an independently managed firm whose mission is to advance Caltech-affiliated startups.

Pasadena also is now the headquarters of Alexandria, one of the nation’s biggest real estate firms specializing in creating wet lab space for bioscience companies. The company is collaborating with Caltech on a large new research and development center to be built just north of campus on Green Street. Protomer, which is now owned by Eli Lilly and Company and grew out of Caltech research into therapeutic proteins, has established a Pasadena presence too.

The city of Pasadena is just the beginning. Southern California is a sprawling region with an enormous, diverse population, elite universities, and dreamers who want to solve the world’s biggest challenges. The next challenge is to fully unify SoCal into a start-up powerhouse.

This article is a brief summary of an article appearing at Caltech Magazine. The full article identifies people and technologies summarized here in more detail and with proper credit.