We were proud to partner with Neal Bloom and Rising Tide Partners on this year's SD HardTech 50 analysis — and the numbers speak for themselves.

The SD HardTech 50 has become something the broader innovation community pays attention to. What started as a way to make the case for San Diego as a serious hardtech ecosystem has grown into an annual benchmark that founders, investors, and ecosystem builders now look to. This year, for the first time, it was joined by the inaugural Next Wave 30: 30 companies worth tracking before they're on everyone's radar.

Circa 80 companies in total, spanning defense and autonomy, energy, medtech, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, agtech, and more. All building real products. All developing technology that matters.

The IP picture

The $10.1 billion raised across this cohort is the headline. But for us, the more telling number is what sits beneath it.

As part of our partnership with Rising Tide Partners, we ran a full IP analysis across both cohorts. The HardTech 50 alone holds 689 patent families and 1,935 patent filings. That's an IP moat being built, sector by sector, right here in San Diego.

Our analysis looked at where protection has been sought geographically, how filings have evolved, and what patent citations reveal about the quality and influence of the innovations being developed. Citations matter - when other inventors and examiners reference your patents, it signals that your work is leading the charge, not following it. The variation across the cohort was meaningful, and that variation is exactly why IP analysis like this is worth doing. Fundraising numbers alone can't show it.

Why this matters

IP is a proven, leading indicator of high-growth, scalable companies. In HardTech, where development cycles are long and competitive moats are everything, IP portfolio strength is often the difference between a business that scales and one that stalls. And yet there is still no easy, standardized way to identify and diligence IP-rich companies at scale.

That's what the IPRSCORE™ was built to solve. Developed by IP experts, backed by 10 years of scoring data, and validated against global IP standards, it gives companies and investors an objective measure of IP strength across five asset classes: Brand, Patents, Software, Critical Databases, and Trade Secrets.

Congratulations to every company in the HardTech 50 and the Next Wave 30. The work being done across this cohort deserves to be recognized, and protected.