Santa Cruz County’s 2026 watch list marks a shift from invention to execution. These companies are scaling with real organizational maturity, durable advantages, and clear catalysts, while staying anchored locally. From aviation and fintech to climate systems and biotech delivery, Santa Cruz is proving it can build globally and keep value here.

The City of Santa Cruz is thrilled to announce that the State Department of Housing and Community Development has honored the City of Santa Cruz with the prestigious Prohousing designation

JoeBen Bevrit, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Joby Aviation, has led the team since its inception, more than a decade ago.

Tiffany Wise-West, Sustainability and Climate Action Manager for the City of Santa Cruz, shares an overview on the city's Climate Action Plan.

There has been a lot of commotion recently about OpenAI’s tool ChatGPT. We decided to test ChatGPT on how much it knows about the history of the Santa Cruz startup ecosystem.

The City of Santa Cruz announced e-bike rebates have been doubled for downtown employees who enroll in the GO Santa Cruz program

Nearly 500 people attended Launchpad 2022 to apply for 400+ jobs, and to hear innovative new business plans.

The Tech Tribune has compiled the very best tech startups in Santa Cruz. List factored in revenue potential, leadership team, brand/product traction, and competitive landscape.

Introducing the new Onewheel Pint X and Onewheel GT, a quantum leap forward in performance and capability, on and off-road. Ya'll ain't ready for Onewheel GT. More power, more torque, more range, more everything.

In our New Tech event on September 3, 2021, Rosemary Menard gave a brief overview of the current water supply situation and actions being pursued to address Santa Cruz’s long standing water supply reliability issues.

Santa Cruz is booming with new startups. Join us for: Rosemary Menard / Director of Water City of Santa Cruz, Seeds Renewables, RealSeq, DoorFinder, Project Unicorn, Akkio, Waygate

It has been 10+ years since Lydia Synder and Mike Muldoon created this story, but it is still fun. I wonder if they are contemplating how to match Branson’s space flight. Lydia’s blog.

Great line up for March 10: WeFunder, ESAIYO, Lookback, BlueCallom, Iris Automation, PAT, Gears Unlimited. Get you tickets now while you still can.

Joby Aviation announced that it has begun generating revenue as part of achieving another major milestone. The company also announced that it has agreed to a G1 certification.

CruzHacks brings together a community of students and professionals to design solutions for real world problems, with the inclusion of tech.

We recently learned that Melanie Perkins - the founder & CEO of Canva - is a kitesurfer. Melanie is now one of the highest-valued, woman-led unicorn companies in the world.

If you have been following Santa Cruz Works for the last few months you know we are huge Drako Motors fans, including fans of the co fonder Shiv Sikand. So, you can understand our excitement when the Drako GTE was just featured on Jay Leno’s Garage.

Thank you to everyone who came out to the 2020 Titans of Tech Breakfast at the productOps Garage. Here are the photos from the morning.

The AWS DeepRacer platform brilliantly made Machine Learning approachable by gamifying the learning process. DeepRacer is a 1/18th scale autonomous racing car with an onboard computer, camera, and a growing list of sensors such as Lidar and stereoscopic vision.

Welcome to the fifth edition of State of Startups. What started as an experiment in 2015 has since become a treasured tradition at First Round. It's now the industry's largest dataset on what it’s like to run a startup with 3,600+submissions and 190,000+ data points.