2025 Unwrapped

Dec 29

Santa Cruz County 2025 had one clear theme: Scale

Santa Cruz County has always been good at invention. The harder question is whether invention turns into industry. In 2025, the answer started looking a lot more like yes. Not because the county suddenly produced new ideas. It did what it has always done there. What changed was the follow-through: the manufacturing plans, the deployment partnerships, the grant dollars, the talent pipelines, the local capital that can keep companies here long enough to mature. If you want the theme of the year in one word, it’s scale. If you want it in a sentence: Santa Cruz County got better at building the boring scaffolding that makes the exciting stuff real.

Advanced Aviation: Joby’s shift from aircraft to infrastructure

Joby Aviation is the most important test case for whether Santa Cruz can anchor an industry, not just a company. For a long time, the story around eVTOL was a spectacle story: incredible engineering, incredible videos, incredible promise. In 2025, Joby’s headlines were more industrial than inspirational.

First, Joby announced plans to double U.S. manufacturing capacity and laid out a production ramp that points toward four aircraft per month by 2027. That is not an idea. That is an operational commitment. It implies supply chains, hiring, quality control, processes that repeat.

Then Joby and Metropolis announced a partnership to develop up to 25 vertiport sites across the United States, using Metropolis’ network of parking locations as a pathway to real siting and deployment. Put those together and you get the point. Manufacturing without places to land is expensive optimism. Vertiports without aircraft are just renderings. The interesting story is that Joby is trying to solve both constraints at once: production capacity and the physical network the product requires.

Climate: the county’s climate-tech story gets more measurable

Climate innovation often gets described in the language of moral urgency. That language matters, but markets do not run on urgency. They run on milestones: commercial prototypes, pilots, grants, customers, growth rates, and outside validation that a product is moving from plausible to purchasable.

Prometheus Fuels delivered one of those milestone updates, reporting Titan Forge Alpha at TRL 9 and describing full-scale reactor progress.
Climatize, which sits closer to the capital layer of climate than the chemistry layer, was selected for Plug and Play’s Sustainability Accelerator. That matters because climate adoption is often blocked less by invention than by distribution and financing.
CarbonBridge is a useful illustration of how climate companies become “real.” The company’s work is ambitious: converting methane and carbon dioxide from organic waste into renewable methanol, aimed at decarbonizing marine shipping. In 2025, the story was less “here’s the vision” and more “here are the steps.” Santa Cruz Works covered the move to Harlem Biospace and the company’s presence at convenings like ARPA-E and NREL. That was followed by updates on software-driven bioreactors, patent activity, and an explicit commercialization timeline.
OpenRoad Technologies brought electrification down to the most practical place possible: the home. A $185,000 grant supported a pilot for ultrafast home EV charging, aiming at up to 150 kW without electrical panel upgrades. This is the kind of “grid edge” innovation that matters because EV adoption eventually collides with convenience. People do not want a cleaner future if it is less usable.
MYNT Systems offered a different kind of climate signal: growth. The Inc. 5000 recognition, tied to a 174% three-year growth rate, is not a climate breakthrough, but it is a market indicator. It suggests demand is pulling, not just pushing.
Scoot Science is climate-adjacent in a way that will matter more each year. The company’s analytics platform for aquaculture investors is a reminder that resilience is often an information problem. When ocean conditions shift, you need measurement and forecasting, not just hope.
MBEP’s funding story is what ecosystem-building looks like. The California Jobs First Initiative and regional awards to boost AgTech innovation and workforce development are not “startup headlines,” but they shape how many startups can exist in the first place, because they shape infrastructure, talent, and adoption pathways.
CIONIC does not fit neatly into “climate,” but it fits the year’s deeper pattern: technology that works in the world. The Neural Sleeve 2 recognition is a signal of product maturity and real-world deployment. Biotech: UCSC genomics gets more public, and more entrepreneurial

Biotech: led by UC Santa Cruz

Biotech ecosystems form when research becomes legible outside the lab. Not simplified, not watered down, but visible: demos, networks, partners, investors, founders, and the cultural expectation that translational work is part of the job.

The Genomics Rooftop Mixer (Oct 28, 2025), hosted by Santa Cruz Works with the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, was a clean example of that visibility. The recap highlighted lightning talks and hands-on demos from UCSC labs, framed as a sample from a broader faculty base. That is what an innovation pipeline looks like when it is starting to move in public.

Santa Cruz companies scaling outside the “big three”

It’s tempting to tell Santa Cruz County’s 2025 story as three verticals and a few marquee names. That framing is tidy, but it’s incomplete. Some of the county’s strongest companies are scaling just as aggressively as Joby or Prometheus Fuels. They simply sit in categories that don’t fit neatly under advanced aviation, climate, or biotech.

Fullpower-AI showed what “global scale” looks like from Santa Cruz, announcing a $25M Series C and a long-term licensing agreement anchored by a 10-year partnership with Tempur Sealy International, extending its KOA Sleeptracker-AI platform across the Tempur-Pedic smartbed ecosystem.
Paystand continued to build enterprise-grade financial rails, expanding its reach through the Bitwage acquisition and doubling down on modern payment infrastructure.
Swellcycle advanced circular manufacturing with credible backing.
Newsworthy.ai pushed into practical, revenue-driving AI for communications workflows.
BrandCapsule tackled brand trust and verification in an era of synthetic content.
Force4, operating at the infrastructure layer, delivered the cybersecurity and systems backbone many scaling companies depend on.
Light Links pushed the frontier of connectivity beyond conventional Wi-Fi.

These aren’t “nice local startups.” They’re serious Santa Cruz companies building exportable products and platforms, scaling into national and global markets. They belong in the same conversation as the county’s headline sectors because they reflect the same underlying reality: Santa Cruz County is producing companies that can grow up, ship, and compete.

The enabling layer: capital, infrastructure, housing, workforce

Regions love to tell the story of genius founders and breakthrough inventions. That story is real, but incomplete. Innovation is not only what gets invented. It is what gets funded, what gets built, who gets trained, and who can afford to stay.

Santa Cruz Ventures’ 2025 update is an important marker because it speaks directly to maturity. The firm expanded beyond early-stage into select mid-to-late stage opportunities, citing growing company maturity in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. It also reported participating in a mid-stage financing that minted Portfolio Company #7 as a unicorn (name not yet disclosed), plus an investment in AIO’s $17M Series A as Portfolio Company #8. It noted a near-complete inaugural fund and an ambition to support roughly 30 high-potential local opportunities. That is local capacity. That is the “stay here and grow” option.
Paid Internship Program: Workforce is the third enabling layer, and it is the one that determines whether innovation becomes broadly shared prosperity or a narrow success story. The AHSC Workforce Development grant won by the Santa Cruz City Economic Development, and delivered through a partnership involving Digital NEST and Santa Cruz Works, created six-month paid internship pathways for young people (16-24) in underserved areas, with funding that helps businesses cover intern compensation.
Housing: In 2025, housing progress in Santa Cruz County looked less like a single “breakthrough project” and more like a visible pipeline, tracked in public and moving in pieces. The County itself framed housing as a long-term production challenge and published a Housing Progress dashboard to track housing production, affordable housing, and homelessness efforts. ) Independent reporting added specificity: Santa Cruz Local launched a countywide housing and construction project tracker that organizes major projects by geography and shows how residents can engage. Downtown, Choose Santa Cruz highlighted near-term momentum, including the Downtown Library Affordable Housing Project breaking ground in August 2025 and Pacific Station North’s 100% affordable buildout (128 units total), reinforcing that “production” increasingly means mixed-use, transit-linked projects. Market-rate supply was also part of the 2025 story. Santa Cruz Local reported that Anton Pacific (207 units) was open, and identified LHH Partners, led by Owen Lawlor, as part of the developer team. Meanwhile, Lookout covered the Cruz Hotel’s continued progress alongside major new fees, including a substantial contribution to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and quoted developer Owen Lawlor on how those costs could affect timing and financing.

What We Got Wrong (or could do better in 2026)

Coastal Trail: We spent too long letting the City and the RTC burn oxygen, staff time, and consultant money defending the “Ultimate Trail” as if repeating it loudly enough would make it buildable. Meanwhile, the community did what communities eventually do when the facts are stubborn: it started reading the fine print. By late 2025, the RTC itself moved to advance an Interim Trail configuration to preserve funding and deliver near-term benefits, explicitly tying the shift to keeping roughly $120M in awarded grants on track. Santa Cruz Works’ own survey results show strong support for the Interim Trail direction. The lesson is not that ambition is bad. It’s that “vision” becomes waste the moment it blocks a real, fundable, near-term path that people can actually use. The recent RTC decision to build the Interim Trail for rail corridor segments 9-11 is not flashy. But now we can move forward…?
Murray Street Bridge: The Murray Street Bridge is the other 2025 case study in how good intentions turn into avoidable damage when timelines and mitigation plans are treated like an afterthought. The City’s own project updates show a disruption measured in years, not months, with the westbound lane closed until project completion in January 2028 and additional full-closure windows planned. Businesses around Seabright and the Harbor reported steep declines in sales, commonly in the 20%-40% range, and at least one highly visible permanent closure, Seabright Social, was explicitly attributed by the business to the bridge construction impacts. When local sales collapse, the City doesn’t just lose neighborhood character, it risks losing pieces of its tax base and spends more time and money scrambling for relief measures (loans, parking changes, marketing support, transit tweaks) instead of preventing the damage up front. The project may be necessary. The duration and the mitigation response were not.

What We Got Right

Santa Cruz County’s 2025 story is not that it discovered innovation. It is that it strengthened the pathways that turn innovation into a durable local economy: manufacturing plans, deployment sites, commercialization timelines, capital maturity, infrastructure choices, and workforce programs that widen participation.

In 2025, Santa Cruz didn’t just innovate. It executed.

Get Involved

Every startup needs an angel, whether it’s money or just that magical connection and partnership. If you have the capacity to donate, we can use your resources to fund our Santa Cruz Accelerates Cohort 7. If you have connections and can help our startups build partnerships, we need you, too. If you have experience to share, join our mentor network. It takes a village and Santa Cruz is a very special one. Join us in the new year and let’s keep scaling!!

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