el-segundo
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The Garvey Group Makes Complicated Companies Sound Human
For three decades, Marie Garvey's small El Segundo consultancy has taken on the moments when a polished press release is least useful - a contested development, a hostile interview, a corporate crisis, a room that has already made up its mind.
Group 22 makes the brand survive the handoff
From Honda training screens to Wham-O toy boxes, the El Segundo design studio’s portfolio shows what happens after a logo leaves the presentation.
Wonderful makes the pretty part work
Behind the jewelry, supplements, and nonalcoholic beer is an agency doing the unglamorous work of digital commerce: fixing subscriptions, taming catalogs, and making a brand easier to buy.
Lady Gaga Burned Down Her Own Makeup Brand - Then It Grew 400%
Haus Labs failed quietly on Amazon. Then Gaga and CEO Ben Jones threw out every formula, moved to Sephora, and bet the company on fermented arnica and 51 shades.
The Studio Betting Your Next Favorite Restaurant Won't Have a Dining Room
Founded in 2020 in El Segundo, DFG Ventures builds delivery-first food brands with celebrities and chefs - and runs the kitchens too. Goop Kitchen is its proof.
How Two Golf Buddies Sold America Clear Skin at 2 A.M.
Guthy-Renker turned late-night television into a direct-to-consumer machine - Proactiv, Meaningful Beauty, JLo Beauty - by pairing a famous face with a subscription box decades before subscriptions were cool.
Rare Beauty
Selena Gomez built a makeup company where a blush that sells every three seconds funds therapy for teenagers. Here is how Rare Beauty turned self-acceptance into a business worth around $2 billion.
Fabletics
Fabletics is a membership-based activewear brand founded in 2013 and headquartered in El Segundo, California. Built on a VIP subscription model that pairs monthly credits with data-driven personalization, it sells women's and men's activewear, footwear, swimwear, loungewear, and medical scrubs across e-commerce and 120+ retail stores. In 2025 the company crossed $1 billion in annual revenue with more than 3 million active customers, roughly 2.7 million of them VIP members.
General Galactic
General Galactic is an El Segundo, California deep-tech startup building water-based propulsion and propellant-generation systems for spacecraft. Its Genesis platform splits water via electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen, powering a multimode engine that pairs high-thrust chemical burns with efficient electric maneuvering. Founded in 2023 by Stanford-trained, ex-SpaceX and ex-Varda engineers, the company frames itself as the future 'energy and logistics company' of the solar system - and is applying the same electrolysis reactor tech on Earth to turn waste CO2 into fossil-free natural gas.
Matter Intelligence
Matter Intelligence is a remote sensing and AI company building the world's first sub-meter hyperspectral and thermal satellite sensors paired with a foundational 'Large World Model' that lets machines understand the physical world at a molecular level. Founded by former NASA JPL engineers, the El Segundo startup emerged from stealth in October 2024 with $12M in seed funding to deploy sensors across satellites, drones, and aircraft for agriculture, defense, energy, and environmental monitoring.
CX2
CX2 (CX2 Industries) is an El Segundo, California defense-technology startup building AI-enabled hardware and software for the electromagnetic spectrum. Its systems detect, classify, geolocate, and disrupt hostile RF emitters in jammed and GPS-denied environments, aiming to give allied forces an edge in electronic warfare at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems. Founded in 2024 by a team including Nathan Mintz, Porter Smith, Lee Thompson, and Mark Trefgarne, CX2 has raised about $46M, led by a $31M Series A from Point72 Ventures, and launched its Wraith airborne EW platform in December 2025.
Smack Technologies Inc.
Smack Technologies is a frontier AI lab for national security, founded in 2024 by two Marine Special Operations veterans, Andy Markoff and Clint Alanis. The company builds domain-specific AI models trained through deep reinforcement learning inside proprietary synthetic warfare environments. Its goal is what it calls 'Decision Dominance' - compressing the Orient and Decide phases of the military OODA loop from months to minutes. Two product suites carry the work: Omega, a command-level stack that turns commander intent into executable plans, and Alpha, an edge stack with lightweight models and proprietary hardware for tactical platforms operating in degraded, low-bandwidth conditions. Smack raised $32M in combined seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, and has secured seven-figure contracts with the Joint Fires Network and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.
Varda Space Industries
Varda Space Industries builds spacecraft that manufacture materials in microgravity and bring them back to Earth inside autonomous reentry capsules. The El Segundo company is best known for crystallizing pharmaceuticals in orbit - it grew crystals of the HIV drug ritonavir on its first mission - and for selling its capsules as hypersonic test platforms to the U.S. government. With its W-series vehicles, Varda is trying to turn low Earth orbit into a working factory floor and a routine, high-cadence delivery service back to the planet's surface.
Northwood Space
Northwood Space is an El Segundo, California company building the ground side of the space economy: rapidly manufactured, software-defined phased-array ground stations that pull data down from satellites. Its flagship product, Portal, electronically steers beams to track many satellites at once instead of mechanically pointing a single dish, which the company argues removes the bottleneck choking modern satellite constellations. Founded in 2023 by CEO Bridgit Mendler, CTO Griffin Cleverly, and head of software Shaurya Luthra, Northwood has raised $136.4M total, including a $100M Series B in January 2026, and holds a $49.8M U.S. Space Force contract to modernize the Satellite Control Network.