#316: Rope Partners, Switchback Systems, Unnatural Products, and more tech

Digest #316

I ran into Chris Bley last week on the day his company, Rope Partner, an international leader in wind turbine blade repair and maintenance, was acquired. The scoop is below. (Just as a reminder, another one of Bley's companies, InspecTools, was acquired just 15 months ago.)

Lou Pambianco, Startup Sandbox CEO, has started producing a series of video interviews with some of the key people behind the nascent companies in the bioscience incubator. This week, we share two such video interviews. You already know that UCSC's Genomics Institute and Baskin School of Engineering have put Santa Cruz on the map as a world-class hub for genomics/biosciences. Startup Sandbox provides bioscience entrepreneurs with an off-campus incubator space to launch their companies and productize their research.

As usual, there's much more. Scroll down and see what else is up.

Sara Isenberg

Founder, Publisher, Editor-in-Chief

Santa Cruz Tech Beat

http://santacruztechbeat.com

PS- If you want to stay on top of the news without waiting each week for this digest, follow us on Facebook and Twitter .

Top Stories

Rope Partners, leader in wind turbine blade repair, maintenance, and performance-enhancing services, has been acquired. Read this article .

Saudi Arabia’s Abdul Latif Jameel bets on flying taxis. Joby Aviation’s latest round of funding brings total investments to $720M. Read this article .

MicroSolutions, GenEqual, Greenery Solutions, MyAirPal, and Drank strut their stuff at CSUMB's recent Startup Weekend hosted by iiED . Read this article .

Watch: Mary Noe, founder/CEO of Switchback Systems, an early stage startup working on DNA data storage, and a venture-back member of Startup Sandbox. Read this article .

Unnatural Products, a drug discovery startup pairing AI with chemistry to create treatments for drug targets that aren’t amenable to current therapeutic strategies, received $6M in funding . Read this article .

SellHound has been selected as just one of eight companies representing the SF Bay Area to pitch at South by Southwest (SXSW) in March 2020. Read this story .

Social media platforms are changing how they regulate political and issue ads. Cosmic shares "the new rules for paid ads on social media -- and how they impact nonprofits." Read this article .

Getting people on board with data has a lot to do with two terms that were thrust into the limelight last year: ‘data culture’ and ‘data literacy.’ Read this article .

Jenny Reardon, a leading voice in the field of genomics, has been named a fellow of The Hastings Center, an organization that brings together scholars from across the disciplines to address ethical questions in medicine, science, and technology. Read this article .