Showing posts with label san jose companies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label san jose companies. Show all posts

Monday, March 11, 2024

San Jose's Super Micro is being added to the S&P 500

Super Micro is an IT solutions provider heavily involved in AI infrastructure. The company saw sales double in Q4 over the previous year to $3.66 billion. 

Their stock has exploded, rising nearly 1,000% in the last 12 months. Super Micro's new market cap has qualified it to join the S&P 500 on March 18th, replacing Whirlpool. This has added yet another boost to the stock price.

It's great to see yet another local company doing extremely well.

Source: SVBJ






Sunday, February 18, 2024

San Jose AI startup raises $72M

Zededa Inc. just announced a $72 million in Series C funding. The company is a cloud-based edge management startup that works with manufacturing, retail, health care, and logistics company. Essentially they bring data closer to where it is needed for faster response times using less bandwidth.

The funds will be used to increase the amount of artificial intelligence and machine learning used in its products.

So far they have raised more than $127 million in funding and are worth about $400 million.

Source: SVBJ



Sunday, January 7, 2024

Samsung is launching new AI-focused smartphones in San Jose

Samsung is gearing up to launch their newest flagship devices on January 17th at their North American headquarters, right here in San Jose. The theme is "Galaxy AI is coming." 

It's not entirely clear how Samsung will spice up their lineup but is easy to speculate that they will have components similar to ChatGPT or Google Bard. The new phones could also have new hardware to accelerate AI functionality or apply AI to phone use itself (e.g. predicting what you are going to do and setting up automatic routines). Whatever happens, they'll be filming here.

Samsung's North American Headquarters is located in North San Jose at 3655 North First street.

Source: The Mercury News



Saturday, October 28, 2023

Green energy startup opening 50,000 SQFT factory in San Jose to turn bricks into batteries

A battery can be a lot of different things. One form I didn't expect was a brick. Antora Energy found a way to store heat inside of carbon blocks and then storing them while the brick stays at temperatures of 1,500 degrees Celsius or higher. When energy is needed, the system can leverage that heat for industrial uses or convert the heat back to electricity.

The 50,000 SQFT manufacturing facility will be built in North San Jose and should be completed in 2024. The first brick batteries are also expected to be manufactured and delivered to customers in 2024.

Source: BayAreaINNO



Monday, October 2, 2023

Artificial Intelligence Incubator coming to Downtown San Jose

Computers, the internet, and smartphones were disruptive tech that completely changed how people work and communicate. Yet, those innovations will pale in comparison to how AI will change the world over the next few years. No tech job will be as important as those involving AI functionality.

For Silicon Valley to continue to be the most innovative place on earth, we need to lean hard into AI. Fortunately, one of Downtown San Jose's biggest advocates, Gary Gillabough, is looking to build an AI incubator right in the middle of our urban core. He believe San Jose should be the capital of AI development, and we really should be.

Gary is working with a partner to bring as many as 40 or 50 AI startups to Downtown San Jose. This would not only fill up some of that vacant office space, but align San Jose with the most transformative technology that is being deployed today. 

As a side-benefit... those bright minds would be roaming the streets of Downtown, and perhaps bring ideas to make San Jose a better place to live. Personally, I would love to see AI incorporated into public art of some kind in Downtown San Jose. How cool would it be if you could go to Sonic Runway, say a sentence, and have that entire experience change based on how AI perceives that sentence. Dynamic, digital, personalized art should be part of the San Jose brand and we will likely need to leverage some form of AI for that.

As Gary mentions in the article linked below, an AI incubator will also create a positive buzz and excitement Downtown that will likely attract even more companies and people that want to be around that type of energy.

Wednesday, September 6, 2023

TikTok has close to 1,000 San Jose job openings with generous salaries

Silicon Valley's demise has been greatly exaggerated. Despite migration to Austin and other cities, the San Jose metro still has the highest proportion of tech jobs and the best salaries for tech in the US. The unemployment rate is near an all-time low and tech companies are beginning to ramp up hiring again post-pandemic.

TikTok's US headquarters are located in San Jose at 1199 Coleman Ave (also known as the Coleman Highline). They have a whopping 987 job openings. That's probably because they are hiring everywhere, right? Nope. Their San Jose openings make up 23% of all of their job openings globally. TikTok has access to far less expensive workers anywhere besides here, but they are continuing to aggressively hire in San Jose.

Examples of job opening are: 
  • Senior machine learning engineers with a base salary of $187,040 to $280,000
  • Lead graphics software engineer with a base salary of $187,040 to $358,000
  • Lead machine learning engineer with a base salary of $210,000 to $358,000
Those are base salary ranges without bonuses, incentives, restricted stock units, or benefits. A top performer could earn double that range. Also, those aren't even managerial positions. 

If you're just starting out, don't worry they also have internships available at $45/hr.

TikTok is also hiring 178 people in Mountain View and 18 in San Francisco. So again, even within the Bay Area they are focused on the Capital of Silicon Valley.

Source: SVBJ

Photo by Abhishek Monangi

Photo by Abhishek Monangi

Photo by Abhishek Monangi


Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Park Avenue in Downtown San Jose is reopening

The massive 200 Park Avenue office tower is pretty much complete, and that means that Park Avenue between Market Street and Almaden can reopen. However, this street got a major facelift with new pedestrian improvements, bike lanes, and bioswales (organic channels or trenches that collect rainwater runoff and filter out pollutants).

200 Park is 19-stories above ground and has four levels of underground parking. There is a total of 840,000 SQFT of office space, 26,000 SQFT of outdoor terraces, and 2,000 SQFT of retail. Each floor of office space is a whopping 54,000 SQFT... it's massive.

Park Avenue won't be open indefinitely as other high-rise projects are planned for City View Plaza across the street from 200 Park. Eventually that entire block will be torn down and replaced with three large interconnected buildings that could add another 3.8 million SQFT of office space to Downtown San Jose. The timing might not be great for that project today, but in the future when funding and demand allow... it will make for a very large tech campus in a great location.

Source: Downtown Dimension




Future CityView Plaza Proposal




Monday, August 5, 2019

Santana West breaks ground on 350,000 SQFT office building

Now that Santana Row is wrapping up its final building, Federal Realty is setting their sights across the street with a new project called Santana West. The first phase officially broke ground last week and consists of an eight-story, 360,000 SQFT office building and a 1,750 space parking structure. Also, by breaking ground I mean there is already active construction on the site--it was not just a formality.

Federal Realty is trying to lease the whole building to a single tenant but is building Santana West speculatively without a tenant in tow. If all goes well, there are two additional phases that will bring the project to one million SQFT.

Unlike Santana Row, this is not a mixed-use development. In fact, there is no retail component at all--not even a coffee shop. The only likely public amenity in the project is the re-purposing of the Century 21 dome. This might seem like a missed opportunity, but two of the most successful retail projects in the United States are just across the street.

If everything goes according to plan, the building will be ready for occupancy in Q1 2021, less than two years from today.






Tuesday, May 7, 2019

BlueJeans moves HQ to San Jose

The popular video conferencing company BlueJeans is moving from Mountain View to the posh Santana Row flagship building at the very end of the row. They are upgrading from a 24,000 SQFT space to 40,000 SQFT in the same area where Splunk is headquartered. In fact, BlueJeans may have to bump up their salaries to keep their neighbor from poaching talent--Splunk has the highest median salary of any large company in the US.

It is an interesting move considering that their key competitor, Zoom, is also located in San Jose (Downtown). A few weeks ago Zoom became the must successful IPO of 2019 and the company is now worth over $16 billion. BlueJeans is smaller player but was worth $728 million four years ago during their last funding round. Who knows, they could be the next epic San Jose IPO.

Source: SVBJ


Monday, April 29, 2019

Google expanding to North San Jose

Google has a long term vision of building an epic 8 million SQFT campus in Downtown San Jose near Diridon. That project that will probably take a decade to come to fruition. Fortunately, there is another Google project in North San Jose with a much shorter horizon.

Google has just secured leases on three buildings totaling 611,535 SQFT that have yet to be constructed at 60 North Brokaw (near Casino M8trix). Peery-Arrillaga, the developer, has already requested permits to start construction. Two of the buildings would be eight stories tall, while the third is four stories.

The buildings could accommodate up to 4,900 employees, and they could start moving in as early as 2021. That sounds like ages from now, but is less than two years away. Since Mountain View real estate is completely tapped out, this is the first step in a long journey for Google to move the majority of their Silicon Valley operations to San Jose. Without major changes in building policies up north, San Jose is without a doubt Google's future.

Sources: SVBJ, San Jose Inside




Thursday, April 25, 2019

Future Motion opening 60,000 SQFT facility in San Jose

Future Motion makes a one-wheel electric skateboard that is becoming increasingly popular. The self-balancing skateboards retail from $950 to $1,800. I see a bunch of them every time I'm in Downtown San Jose.

While the company is currently headquartered in Santa Cruz, they are opening a new manufacturing outpost in North San Jose at 2250 Zanker Road. Future Motion expects to employ 150 people at the new facility.

For additional information on Future Motion and the industrial market in general, check out the source link below.

Source: SVBJ


Thursday, January 31, 2019

Electric Motorcycle Company moving to San Jose

San Jose is getting another cutting edge transportation company. Lightning is a manufacturer of high-end electric superbikes that can top 200 MPH and travel 100 miles per charge. They claim these are the fastest production motorcycles in the world.

Lightning has relocated from San Carlos to 6299 San Ignacio Way in South San Jose. The space is five times larger, which will allow them to expand their in-house design studio and R&D--likely bringing even more jobs to San Jose.

Thanks to Nio, Lightning, and several complimentary companies building EV components like Velodyne, San Jose is establishing itself as the Detroit of next generation vehicles. Even Tesla was originally planning to build their factory in North San Jose.

Source: SVBJ

Thursday, January 24, 2019

Airbnb coming to Downtown San Jose

Another popular Bay Area company is making San Jose their home away from home. Airbnb is opening their first Silicon Valley office at 333 W. San Carlos Street. In an appropriate move for a sharing economy company, they are taking up about 50 seats from the 1,344 desks WeWork offers in the building. However, Airbnb is looking for a more permanent South Bay location in 2020, which hopefully won't be far from this office.

For more info, click the source link below!

Source: SVBJ


Monday, December 3, 2018

Roku is moving their HQ to San Jose

Roku--a popular streaming entertainment company--is taking over the Coleman Highline next to Avaya Stadium. The project will have a total of 8 buildings, all connected by outdoor bridges. Roku has decided to move their headquarters from Los Gatos (where it is subleasing from Netflix) to 570,000 SQFT across four buildings. It will first move into 91,368 SQFT in the first available building this January, followed by three other buildings as they come online.

The lease will be over 11 years, so they are making a major commitment to San Jose. We could see as many as 2,000 new jobs due to their move to San Jose. 

Since the Coleman Highline will eventually have 1.5 million SQFT of office space, that also gives Roku plenty of room to grow assuming other companies don't snap up all of the available floor space.

Source: SVBJSVBJ (2)




Monday, November 19, 2018

Google buys a North San Jose office building for $155M

Google's first campus in San Jose may not be what you expect. Yes, they have been working for ages on a transit-oriented urban campus centered around Diridon Station in Downtown San Jose. That campus will eventually house tens of thousands of employees across a staggering 8 million SQFT of office space. However, one of their first forays into San Jose is going to be a bit more modest than that.

Google has just acquired two office buildings in North San Jose at 4300 and 4400 North First Street. The buildings are just north of Highway 237, which I would consider to be Alviso.

The buildings are partially occupied by Harmonic and Compstak and have recently been renovated. The leases expire in 2020, which is only a little over a year away. Their intentions for the buildings are not yet clear, but this seems like an obvious extension of their Mountain View campus, which is only 8 miles away by car or a 45 minute bike ride away.

Source: SVBJ


Monday, September 17, 2018

Self-driving grocery deliveries coming to San Jose courtesy of a San Jose startup company

The timeline for self-driving cars has been significantly underestimated. Waymo is already running a limited number of rides to beta customers in Arizona with no safety driver. Tesla is 6 months away from enabling basic self-driving features on over 200,000 consumer cars. And AutoX Inc. just started doing self-driving grocery deliveries late last month.

AutoX is headquartered in North San Jose (off of Trimble) and has two satellite offices in China. They raised $43 million in fundy last year from Danhua Capital, MediaTek Ventures, and SAIC Capital.

Several residents in a geo-fenced area near the headquarters are already eligible for service. Customers can either pick what they want to be delivered from the app or make last minute purchasing decisions when picking up the groceries from the car. You read that correctly... the car itself is a store.

They just have a handful of vehicles today, but are looking to grow to 20 cars very soon and expand the service to Mountain View and Palo Alto. For more info, head over to AutoX.ai or watch the video below.

It's great to see a San Jose company both pushing technological boundaries and providing new services to their immediate community!

Source: SVBJ




Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Electric car company grows in San Jose

NIO, a Chinese EV startup, is doubling down in North San Jose. They are moving into a 100,362 SQFT building at 3100 N. First Street, which was previously home to Broadcom and Hitachi. NIO already employs 520 people in San Jose, so this is a positive sign that more high-tech jobs will be opening up soon.

NIO currently only manufactures a single car, the EP9. It's a $1.2M supercar with 1,341 horsepower that currently holds the electric car record for the Nurburgring and for the fastest autonomous lap at the Circuit of the Americas. Like Tesla they decided to start with a halo car and work their way down to cars the masses can afford. Their next car will be a 7-seat SUV called the ES8 that will compete with Tesla's Model X.

NIO has already raised $1 billion and are rumored to be gearing up for a US IPO that could raise another $2 billion. It's clear that the auto industry is going to look a lot different in 5-10 years than it does today. If NIO turns out to be another disruptor like Tesla, then San Jose has a lot to gain as the brand grows.

Source: SVBJ




Thursday, March 29, 2018

HP Enterprises is moving HQ to San Jose

Hewlett Packard Enterprises has long been an anchor tech tenant for Palo Alto. However, yesterday they announced that they are relocating their headquarters to San Jose by the end of the year.

The company will take 220,000 SQFT at 6280 America Center Drive near Alviso. That is large enough to relocate about 1,000 employees. Flextronics, Polycom, and Versa Networks also have a presence in that office park along with a brand new Aloft hotel. The location is minutes away from the @First shopping center and Levi's stadium. While there are few public transit options, BART will soon have a station in Milpitas about 12min away.

This is another big win for San Jose, both in terms of tax dollars and brand. Also, no financial incentives were required to make the deal happen.

Source: NBC Bay Area


Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Kika Tech Moves HQ's to San Pedro Square

As artificial intelligence (AI) integrates into our daily lives, one company is using it to transform the way we communicate.

Kika Tech, a leader in mobile communications, officially announced the company’s expansion to meet worldwide consumer demand for its AI platform that enhances how people engage and interact.

In this capacity, the company establishes new headquarters in Downtown San Jose's historic San Pedro Square, bolsters leadership team by appointing Tami Zhu as General Manager.

Kika Tech’s U.S. expansion builds upon what has been a momentous year for the company. Kika Keyboard, the company’s flagship product, is the #1 rated keyboard app on the Google Play Store in the U.S., providing a seamless mobile experience to more than 60M users each month. Kika has secured $63M in funding and struck key strategic partnerships with global sports franchises (Real Madrid CF, FC Barcelona), mobile manufacturers (Samsung, Huawei, and ZTE), movie studios (20th Century Fox, Warner Bros.), and leading GIF provider, GIPHY.

-Noe Sacoco


Kika Tech Expands Global Presence to Meet Worldwide Consumer Demand
Company Establishes New Silicon Valley Headquarters, Bolsters Leadership Team Appointing Tami Zhu as General Manager

SAN JOSE, Calif.  – Kika Tech, a leader in mobile communications, continues to expand to meet worldwide consumer demand for its artificial intelligence (AI) platform that enhances how people engage and interact. The company today, announced new headquarters in San Jose’s historic San Pedro Square to house its growing workforce and to solidify its presence in Silicon Valley’s innovative culture. Kika Tech has also appointed seasoned business executive Tami Zhu as general manager, whose extensive AI background will lead the company into its next phase of growth. Ms. Zhu’s experience will be leveraged to further Kika’s AI initiatives along with strategic planning, revenue generation, marketing, business development, and results measurements.

My chief interest has always been in artificial intelligence and consumer technology,” said Tami Zhu, general manager, Kika Tech. “Kika Tech’s advancements in AI is transforming the way we communicate. It’s an exciting time to join the company, as Kika Tech expands its global presence. I look forward to driving Kika Tech’s expansion to reach new milestones in the U.S. and beyond.”

An MIT graduate and technologist, Ms. Zhu has worked on some of the most cutting-edge innovations of the times, from launching Internet joint ventures across the U.S. and various international countries, to running digital media organizations in China. In her role as general manager, Ms. Zhu will oversee day-to-day U.S. operations including the continued expansion of the U.S. Kika Tech workforce, as the company plans to hire 50 new employees in marketing, sales, engineering and other positions. Previously, Ms. Zhu served as the GM of an AI and robotics startup in San Francisco, where under her leadership, the company raised over $150M in VC funding, won multiple CES Innovation Awards for two consecutive years and became recognized as a dominant AI player in China.

Earlier in Ms. Zhu’s career, she was vice president at IPG Mediabrands, where she led the innovations of digital media. She also held various executive positions including vice president at IAC/InterActiveCorp and head of AOL Ventures, and was the top female Asian executive in the company. Before that, Ms. Zhu launched Excite@Home’s international joint ventures in the Netherlands, Australia and Japan.

Kika Tech’s U.S. expansion builds upon what has been a momentous year for the company. Kika Keyboard, the company’s flagship product, is the #1 rated utility app in the Google Play Store, providing a seamless mobile experience to more than 60M users each month. Kika Tech has secured $63M in funding and struck key strategic partnerships with global sports franchises (Real Madrid C.F., FC Barcelona), mobile manufacturers (Samsung, Huawei, and ZTE), movie studios (20th Century Fox, Warner Bros.), and leading GIF provider, GIPHY.

Looking forward, Kika Tech aims to revolutionize communications by leveraging the company’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence engine. Incorporating image and voice recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning, Kika Tech’s vision is for individuals to connect five times faster with other users, resulting in more efficient and meaningful conversation.

About Kika Tech

Say it with Kika! Make everyday interactions more engaging and fun with Kika Tech. Integrating into smart devices, Kika Tech enhances self-expression that goes beyond mobile platforms. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), Kika Tech enriches the emotional connection between individuals in the technology-driven world. To download the Kika app, please visit: bit.ly/kikakeyboard. Keep up-to-date with Kika Tech on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.

Monday, October 9, 2017

Microsoft looking to build a 1M SQFT campus in San Jose

The latest big tech company to take a serious look at San Jose is none other than the 800lb gorilla from Seattle. Microsoft has purchased close to 65 acres of "farmland" in North San Jose bound by 237, Zanker Road, and the Coyote Creek. They want to use the space to build either 1.2 million SQFT of light industrial space or a 436,880 SQFT data center and 728,000 SQFT of light industrial space.

Either of the options on the table would not bring as many jobs and tax dollars to the city as a traditional office complex, but it would be a great foot in the door as Microsoft currently has zero presence in San Jose proper. Microsoft has 1,600 employees in the area, but most are in Mountain View. With a grand total of 71,000 employees, San Jose could provide a viable opportunity to move more of their workforce into the tech capital of the world. They would be in good company as both Google and Apple and considering significant operations in San Jose.

Source: SVBJ (Subscription Required)