2021 took us on quite an adventure! We shared many milestones and events through our computer screens but also had the opportunity to once again meet up with friends and family. Over 3,000 people attend 36 Santa Cruz Works events. We built partnerships with CMTC and SBDC to help 50+ startups and business get funded, hire, and thrive. We traveled to a virtual, private island to celebrate CruzHacks 2021 which was a success and broke its own record for the highest number of attendees with over 575+ individuals from 185+ schools and across 25+ countries. We said goodbye to some of our team members and made changes to our team. Surf Legend, Shaun Tomson, gave a talk that inspired hundreds of students and adults in our community to Think Big! We sent a balloon to space to celebrate the launch of our 4th cohort of Santa Cruz Accelerates. We managed to achieve many of our goals but look forward to a new year with more opportunities to collaborate and gather in person. We asked some of you to share your accomplishments and what you are looking forward to. Here’s what you had to say:

2021 Accomplishments

John Felts

CEO Cruz Foam

Cruz Foam kicked-off 2021 with $1 million+ in non-dilutive funding NSF SBIR Phase II Grant and our Final Seed (SAFE) funding round raised $2.5M. We were granted ASTM compostability certifications D6400 and D6868. We are building-out larger production facility on Ingalls Street and also added new team members in executive management, engineering, LCA, product development, product management, and marketing. Several new high-profile advisors Hilary Bryant, Michelle Moskowitz, and Chuck McBride also joined and helped strengthen Cruz Foam's team expertise. Cruz Foam has participated in more than a dozen major speaking, mentor, and investor events including TechCrunch Disrupt, Rabobank's Foodbytes program, Japanese Government’s JETRO program, and Sustainable Packaging Coalition spring and fall conferences.

Cruz Foam looks forward to more momentum in our commercial partner programs as well as adding new members to our growing team. We truly appreciate the support of our local Santa Cruz community and look forward to expanding our involvement in local and national community groups.

Socrates Rosenfeld

CEO, Jane Technologies, Inc.

We grew our company Jane Technologies, Inc. to over 100 employees (with a large portion based in Santa Cruz!), expanded our market share in partnership with 3000+ cannabis retailers and brands, and raised $100M in our Series C round. All this allows us to continue our mission of providing access to a plant that helps millions of people across the country - and we're excited to expand that access across the world one day.

We're looking forward to growing our team - and continuing to create a safe space for our employees to grow as their authentic selves. We're excited to see more state markets like New Jersey, New York, and Virginia end their prohibition on cannabis. And we're eager to continue to build our technology that empowers local brick and mortar businesses to succeed in an ever-evolving digital world.

Cynthia Larive

Chancellor of University of California, Santa Cruz

This past year has been both challenging and filled with remarkable accomplishments for UC Santa Cruz. It’s been incredible to have students back on campus this quarter, and I’m extremely proud of how hard our campus community has worked all year to reduce the spread of COVID both on our campus and in the greater community. Our diagnostic lab has been an important resource helping our campus and community bridge the time without readily available COVID-19 testing resources in our area.

Three major achievements stand out for me. We named College Ten in honor of civil rights leader John R. Lewis, which allows our campus community to recommit to our social justice and equity goals and challenges us to live up to the legacy of Representative Lewis. This fall we launched our Student Success Initiative to raise funds in support of campus-wide efforts to ensure that all of our students have full access to the wide range of opportunities UC Santa Cruz provides. This initiative will help support our students and advance our ongoing efforts to achieve our student-success goals. Finally, our research enterprise continued its record of notable achievements including attracting $234 M in external funding in FY 21, a nearly 25 percent increase over the prior year. We launched our Innovation and Business Engagement Hub to serve as a central node of entrepreneurship, intellectual property and corporate partnerships, and welcomed Ryan Sharp to lead these efforts. I am confident we will continue to make great strides in all of these areas in 2022.

The past two years have shown us the power of technology to bridge great divides. In the face of incredible challenges and hardship, technology has enabled us to continue innovating and making important advances in knowledge and scholarship. We should not overlook, however, the need for human connection. If the past two years have shown us anything, they have revealed the dire need for the arts, humanities and social sciences alongside technological advances. The arts and humanities help us to see our common humanity, to express ourselves, to find deeper meaning in our lives. Both are fueled by human connection, and I am very much looking forward to more of that in 2022 as we hopefully leave the worst of the pandemic behind us.

Bonnie Lipscomb

Economic Development Director/ Successor Agency Director, City of Santa Cruz Economic Development

The City of Santa Cruz Economic Development approved a year extension of over 97 temporary outdoor dining permits to ensure that outdoor dining can continue during the ongoing pandemic and allowing a path for permanent transition to outdoor dining for interested restaurant owners. Partnered with Santa Cruz County jurisdictions and the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) to expand the Grow Santa Cruz loan program countywide through a $2 million grant awarded to the National Development Council, providing leveraged business loans countywide. We secured 22.6M through leveraged tax credits for the Pacific Station South Project, closing the financing gap for a 70 unit 100% affordable project on lower Pacific Avenue that will also provide a new medical and dental office for Santa Cruz Community Health Center and Dientes. We secured $21.9M Infill and Infrastructure Grant for both Pacific Station mixed-use affordable housing projects, funding both affordable housing and related public infrastructure in our downtown including a public paseo connection to the Riverwalk. We also secured $5M affordable housing matching grant from the State Local Housing Trust Program for three of our 100% affordable housing projects downtown.

Looking forward to continuing to assist Santa Cruz businesses grow and thrive in 2002, help create affordable housing and support local art and cultural activities and projects that contribute to the vibrancy of our community.

Aviv Elor

Immergo Labs

This past year, Immergo Labs was awarded a National Science Foundation Phase I SBIR grant to support the research, development, and validation of our immersive exercise-based telehealth platform. We officially opened our office at the Santa Cruz Startup Sandbox, joined the UC CITRIS Foundry and the Santa Cruz Works Accelerator programs, and went on to interview 55 more physical therapists through an NSF facilitated customer discovery program around finding product-market fit. We closed off this year with earning second place at the Santa Cruz Works Startup Rumble 2021 Pitch Competition! All the while, two of our Co-Founders (Michael and Aviv) earned their PhD degrees from UC Santa Cruz. At Immergo Labs, we feel so grateful to have received so much support over the past year and are excited to continue working towards empowering therapists in the metaverse with 3D virtual clinics towards to move beyond the limits of reality for physical therapy!

We'll be kicking things into hyperdrive this January to use our 185 customer discovery interviews towards finalizing a prototype telehealth platform to demo at the American Physical Therapy Association Combined Sections Conference (the largest physical rehabilitation conference in the United States). Our team is meeting with physical therapists weekly within our metaverse-based telehealth platform to co-design exercise tools, user interfaces, and artificial intelligence assisted rehab sessions. In Spring, we'll be performing a large-scale user study with our first group of Alpha testers to get our system into the hands of therapists and patients to compare between our VR platform, video-based telehealth, and in person physical therapy. Lastly, in Fall, we will be applying to our Phase II grant and sourcing investment funding to advance our prototype towards commercialization based on our findings.

Daniel Hernandez

CEO/Founder, The Apptopus

One of my major accomplishments for 2021 was launching The Apptopus to empower Latino Owned Restaurants with the infrastructure to scale their businesses online. Talking to our first customers back in January, scaling our team, establishing partnerships with third-party platforms, and finding capital to operate all seem like a herculean challenge but we made it to the end of 2021 with 100 clients, in 13 cities across California and half a million in revenue.

We want to start 2022 by completing Santa Cruz Works Accelerator, closing a seed round that can help us get to 1000+ clients nationwide, adding strategic advisors and partnerships, expanding our team, and becoming one of Santa Cruz Top Startups along with Jane Technologies, Joby, and Looker.

Becca Fenwick

Director of the CITRIS Initiative for Drone Education and Research, UCSC

2021 has been a busy year for so many of us. My major accomplishment for the year has been launching the brand new UCSC CITRIS Initiative for Drone Education and Research (CIDER) with my Associate Director, Justin Cummings, and CITRIS Assistant Director, Michael Matkin. It's the very first undergraduate drone program at any UC campus and we focus on providing diverse students opportunities for hands-on learning about all things drone-related, participating in research, putting in flight time, and getting their drone pilots licenses. We also provide research support for faculty and contract out to external organizations for drone surveys, data collection/analysis, or image collection which also creates student jobs for our trained pilots. Developing our industry connections through our partnership with Monterey DART has also been exciting. I've been learning more and more about all the ways that drones are being developed and used in our region and will potentially impact our lives in years to come.

Chris Miller

CEO, CloudBrigade

2021 was a whirlwind for myself and CloudBrigade. In 2021, I became an AWS Hero, an elite community of people (250 globally) who build, share, and support others in digital transformation. We successfully pivoted into the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning space. Those strategic investments have begun to pay off, and we are finally escaping the throws of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Looking forward to taking our company to the next level, building a lot of cool and interesting stuff for new clients, and getting married :-)