By Jorge Mercado Monday, October 28th, 2024

By Jorge Mercado

Co-Managing Editor 

In an effort to show the community the vast amount of impressive companies housed in Santa Barbara County, the first annual Santa Barbara Investing Summit will take place at the Cabrillo Pavilion on Nov. 14.

Hosted by the Sustainable Change Alliance, the goal of the event is to focus on the importance of investing in and supporting companies whose products or services enhance the well-being of people and the environment all around the world.

Tom Washing, founder and chair of the SCA board, told the Business Times that there has “never been a conference” done to this magnitude.

The event will feature more than a dozen startups aiming to make a change for the betterment of the world.

One example of this is Santa Barbara-based Beni, a free-to-use browser extension meant to amplify secondhand shopping efforts.

The goal of the platform, which has grown tremendously since being founded in 2021 and raised over $4 million, is to encourage people to buy secondhand clothing.

The website does this by notifying users when they find an article of clothing on a regular retail site or other secondhand options from one of its partners.

The company also has grown its product to have over 40,000 users and has partnered with over 40 companies.

Other companies that will be at the event include: DataUnite, Vine Medical, Collective Energy Co., BioZen Batteries, World Telehealth Initiative, Sunstone Energy, BioZen Batteries, Leeta Materials, Maaia Mark Productions, Parker Clay, and the California NanoSystem Institute from UC Santa Barbara will also be available.

Washing said all of the 14 companies will have their founders or CEOs at the booth, allowing both the investing community and the community at large to get to know these companies directly.

He noted that the event is also open to the public and completely free. People just need to register at sustainablechangealliance.org/ to have a name card at the event.

“There has never been this type of conference done in Santa Barbara, especially with just our companies,” Washing said.

“With this conference, we hope to educate the public about the type of companies that exist in the community and that are making a difference not just in the immediate area, but in the world.”

Washing said that if the conference is successful in November, then maybe next year’s event could be even bigger, adding that they could reach out to companies in neighboring counties such as Ventura and San Luis Obispo.

“Our thought was just, let’s do this and see how successful it could be,” Washing said.

“We have a template for this type of event now and so if we have hundreds of people show up and it’s a big success, we can definitely keep this going.”

The event will also feature a keynote speech from Dr. Yulun Wang, who previously founded InTouch Health in Santa Barbara. InTouch was sold in 2020 to Teladoc Health for $600 million.

After the keynote, there will be a panel on impact investing and feature Jackie Carerra, the CEO of the Santa Barbara Foundation, Andreas Forsland, the CEO and founder of Cognixion, and Tim Hade, chief development officer and co-founder of Scale Microgrids. It will be hosted by Kia Jordon.

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