New Tech Comes Home to the River

Jun 4

Written By Doug Erickson

Santa Cruz Works brought its June New Tech gathering to River Row — a new riverfront venue beside the San Lorenzo — and debuted an expo-style format that let founders, engineers, and community members actually talk to each other. Seven companies showed what innovation looks like when it grows from this place.

There's a question worth sitting with: what does it mean for a tech community to have a sense of place?

Silicon Valley famously doesn't. It's a geography of campuses and freeways, optimized for scale and largely indifferent to the land beneath it. Santa Cruz has always been something different — smaller, weirder, more rooted — and the June 4th New Tech gathering at River Row made that contrast feel vivid and worth defending.

The setting mattered. River Row sits at 444 Front Street, alongside the San Lorenzo River — a waterway that, for too long, existed as backdrop rather than heartbeat. Laurie Egan of the Coastal Watershed Council opened the evening by naming something most locals feel but rarely say aloud: a city's relationship with its river is a proxy for its relationship with itself. Activating that riverfront isn't cosmetic. It's a civic argument.

Santa Cruz Works debuted a new “expo format” this month — more open floor than lecture hall — that let attendees move between founders rather than sit and receive them. The result was a different kind of energy. Less performance, more conversation. More of what these gatherings are actually for.

The companies on the floor were doing genuinely interesting work. Scoot Science — an SCW Accelerator graduate — delivers real-time underwater weather forecasts to fish farmers and marine operators, which sounds niche until you consider how much of the global food supply depends on what happens beneath the surface. Kaimarra is rethinking plastic from the molecular level, using reactive chemistry to build compostable composites that are actually cost-competitive. Alamento is applying AI and 25 years of building inspection data to help property owners see capital problems before they become emergencies.

Then there were the quieter bets. CherryWheels, founded by Gauri Jain, makes designer wheel covers for wheelchair users — a product so obvious in retrospect that you wonder why it took this long. Dream Builders, a student-led nonprofit supporting Santa Cruz’s unhoused and underserved youth won the hearts of every attendee. Judging.dev, built by two UCSC students, had already run competitions for more than 1,300 participants before taking the River Row stage. Standby used AI voice technology to address one of the highest-stakes information gaps in American civic life: helping incarcerated people understand their legal rights.

This is what regional economic vitality looks like up close. Not unicorn press releases. Founders solving real problems, building in public, accountable to a community that showed up on a Wednesday evening beside the river to see what's next.

The river was there the whole time. It just took this long to invite it in.

Thank you to our event sponsors AIO, Cabrillo College, Wynn Capital Management, Digital NEST, and David Lyng Real Estate.

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