Friday, August 5, 2016

Santa Barbara Gets Another $100M Plus Exit, At Aurrion

Add another, high dollar exit for a young startup in Santa Barbara, adding to the region's growing list of successful technology exits: Aurrion. According to a 10-Q, quarterly filing from acquirer Juniper Networks on Thursday, it paid $165M for Goleta-based Aurrion, a fabless, wafer scale silicon photonic technology provider. Aurrion is a spinout of UC Santa Barbara, and develops technology being used to make high speed optical networking in a more cost effective manner. Juniper had announced its acquisition of Aurrion earlier in the week, but had not disclosed how much it had paid for the small startup. The Central Coast Region has been seeing a miniature boom in exits in recent years, with such acquisition as the $1.5 billion acquisition of Lynda.com by LinkedIn; a $100M plus exits at Ansible (acquired by Red Hat) last year, and three IPOS -- at MindBody, Appfolio, and CytomX Therapeutics. CytomX also was a spinout of technology from UCSB. The Santa Barbara region has had an outsized number of successful startup exits over the years, given the region's geography and population.

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