What’s Changed in the California Market

We’ve been watching Silicon Valley and San Francisco’s tech scene for over a decade, from the inside during earlier stints at companies like Intel and IBM Watson, and more recently from the outside as advisors working across US, Japanese, and European markets. We also worked with R&D companies in LA and San Diego. AI hype has been present there for a decade already, but the shift that stands out is how much closer the relationship between universities and industry has gotten, and how concretely that’s showing up in where companies choose to put their offices and their research budgets.

Then versus now

A decade ago, the Stanford-to-startup pipeline was mostly a talent pipeline: founders and engineers who studied there, then left to build somewhere else. The university relationship mostly ended at graduation. What’s different now is that the relationship is staying open after the company scales, structured as ongoing research partnerships rather than a one-time credential.

Oura is a clean example

Oura, the Finnish wearable company behind the Oura Ring, made San Francisco its US headquarters in 2026 after a funding round that valued the company at roughly $11 billion, purchasing 500 Pine Street outright rather than leasing. But the more interesting move for our purposes is the University of California San Diego partnership: Oura is running a joint research study using Oura Ring data to study the link between the autonomic nervous system and depression. Oura also maintains a standing office in San Diego alongside San Francisco, which puts engineering and business teams physically close to the research partner rather than managing the relationship remotely.

That’s a different model than sponsoring a lab or funding a chair. It’s a company treating a university as an active data and research partner on a specific clinical question, with its own office presence built around that proximity.

The university side is building infrastructure for this, not just tolerating it

Stanford’s Venture Studio recently added dedicated AI labs giving student teams direct access to compute resources for building AI products, moving well past the seminar-and-mentorship model of five years ago. StartX, Stanford’s founder accelerator, is now the anchor tenant for a new innovation hub called The Link inside Stanford Research Park, opening in 2027, putting the accelerator’s portfolio companies physically inside the same real estate as Stanford’s sponsored research programs. On the Berkeley side, Bakar Labs gives early-stage biotech and health startups spinning out of UC Berkeley wet-lab space on campus rather than requiring them to relocate before they’ve even hired their first scientist.

Why this matters beyond California

For a firm like ours working across financial services and emerging tech in Japan and Europe, the pattern is instructive. The advantage US companies are known for building capital and talent density. But they’re also shortening the distance between a research question and a company that can act on the answer, literally, in terms of office proximity, and structurally, in terms of formal data-sharing and research agreements. That’s a model worth studying regardless of which market you’re building in.