Banking on a reunion: Funari and Ortega team up
Longtime Santa Barbara bankers Joanne Funari and Eloy Ortega are reunited again. The two bankers, who founded Business First National Bank together in 2001, now have their sights set on building out the The Bank of Santa Barbara on the South Coast.
Dole investors file suit over CEO’s buyout
Wall Street trusts billionaire David Murdock of Dole Food Co. to repay his debts but doesn’t agree with his valuation logic.
Murdock succeeded in taking the Westlake Village-based firm private on Oct. 31 in a deal that valued the company at more than $1.6 billion when counting net debt, fees and expenses. At the same time, investors clamored to help Murdock take on debt to finance the deal, with a reported order book of more than $10.5 billion for only $300 million in debt.
Venture capital firm hungers for health-foods startups
Santa Barbara-based venture capital firm NGEN Partners has a new investing focus on a somewhat unlikely sector: healthy, environmentally friendly food.
Since its founding in 2001, NGEN has had a focus on funding sustainability-oriented companies. Its early focus was on energy and materials. Catalytic Solutions, a nanotechnology firm spun out of UC Santa Barbara that made emissions scrubbing cheaper and more effective in automobiles, was an early investment. Soraa, an LED lighting firm created by several UCSB professors that has gone on to receive big money from Khosla Ventures and others, remains active in the firm’s portfolio.
In good company: Co-working spaces proliferate in region
This has been the year co-working hit the Tri-Counties. With the opening on Nov. 4 of Connect Ventura in the Working Artists Ventura building, there are now co-work spaces in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.
Grown in Ghana: Santa Barbara startup makes African superfruit supplement
A Santa Barbara startup hopes to bring the rumored superfood qualities of the African baobab fruit to the U.S. market. The company said the product provides a highly-concentrated source of nutrition and has a sweet-yet-tart flavor that blends grapefruit, pear and vanilla, and an oil.
Appellate attorneys lend eye for legal issues to trial lawyers
Let’s face it: Sometimes you lose. And sometimes, it’s really not your fault. Judges and juries are only human and can misapply the law to the facts. That’s where appellate attorneys come in. The region has a number of bar-certified appellate law specialists who work closely with trial attorneys on whether and how an appeal can be pursued.
