Colin Campbell, Creative Consultant
  colin@colin.org   408-370-6521  

Santa Barbara Tech Companies

Recently I discovered the Santa Barbara Tech List: 488 tech companies located in and around Santa Barbara. 

I looked at all 488 websites but only 260 of the companies are still extant locally as of September 2026.

Now I’m going through them one by one to examine their websites to see how well they present themselves.

First of all, how hard is it to figure out what the company does? What are they offering? Let’s take a look.

2. Aeluma

A generic landing page, generic headline, generic menu bar. A photo of a car on a road with mountains in the background. Whatever it is that Aeluma does, at first glance it eludes me.

The home page text is two sentences of platitudes about semiconductors and one sentence of Aeluma’s opinion of its technology that doesn’t reveal a thing:

Aeluma is a transformative semiconductor company specializing in high-performance technology that scales. Applications include mobile, automotive, AI, defense & aerospace, communication, AR/VR and quantum computing.
—27 words, Grade 18, Ease negative 10.

Scrolling through page after page, it’s “disruptive semiconductor technology” all the way down, with zero further indication of what their disruptive technology is. The same paragraphs are used over and over, “disruptive technology” is all we’re told. What exactly is it going to disrupt?

They make chips using gallium arsenide. Takes you quite a while to discover that.

There’s a highly technical article buried somewhere on the site and the rest is repeated generics.

This website is a fence. A façade revealing nothing. These guys are losing eight million dollars a year.