los-angeles-startup
(25)
Derek Jeter Wants to Keep Your Cards Out of the Shoebox
The Hall of Fame shortstop and the founder of LegalZoom built a company around a simple frustration: card collecting is a great hobby wrapped in a bad logistics problem. Arena Club grades, vaults, and trades the cards so collectors do not have to.
Ornadyne
Ornadyne is a Los Angeles defense-tech startup building autonomous flapping-wing drones - ornithopters - that look, fly, and sound like real birds. Its flagship O1 is a crow-shaped, propeller-free aircraft designed for low-detectability military reconnaissance, offering hour-class flight times and a low acoustic signature so it blends into the visual and acoustic 'noise' that counter-UAS systems already ignore. Founded in 2026 by Geourg Kivijian and Armen Arakelyan and backed by Y Combinator (P26).
CAKES Body
CAKES Body is a Los Angeles-based, women-led direct-to-consumer brand founded by twin sisters Taylor Capuano and Casey Sarai in 2022. It makes reusable silicone nipple covers and bra alternatives from medical-grade silicone that grip to skin using natural body heat instead of adhesive. After a viral organic-content strategy and a December 2023 appearance on ABC's Shark Tank - where it took a $300,000 investment from SKIMS and Good American co-founder Emma Grede - the bootstrapped company scaled to roughly $95 million in net sales in the fiscal year ending June 2025.
Steno
Steno is a Los Angeles-based legal technology company that combines a nationwide network of certified court reporters with purpose-built litigation software and flexible financing. It handles the logistics of depositions and trials - scheduling reporters, videographers and interpreters, running remote proceedings through Steno Connect for Zoom, deferring payment via DelayPay, and analyzing transcripts with its generative-AI tool Transcript Genius - so litigators can focus on their cases instead of the paperwork behind them.
Franki
Franki is a Los Angeles-based mobile app that reimagines the restaurant review as short-form video. Often described as a 'TikTok for restaurant reviews,' it lets diners discover local spots through authentic video recommendations from vetted local creators, then earns them cash back when they eat and drink at participating venues. Creators earn for posting, consumers earn for going out, and restaurants get measurable, conversion-focused advertising - a three-sided platform aimed at the multibillion-dollar experience economy.
Ad Hoc Labs (makers of Burner + Dialed)
Ad Hoc Labs is a Los Angeles-based independent mobile software company that builds communication tools giving people control over how they can be reached. Its flagship app, Burner, launched in 2012 as the original disposable second phone number - a privacy layer that lets users spin up, use, and delete alias numbers on demand. Its second product, Dialed, packages a business phone line, contact management, and marketing tools into one app for solopreneurs and micro-businesses. Founded by Greg Cohn and Will Carter, the company remains independent and remote, focused on utility and reliability over feature volume.
Blizzfull
Blizzfull is a Glendale, California restaurant technology company that bundles online ordering, POS, self-service kiosks, kitchen screens, branded websites and apps, marketing, and loyalty into one AI-powered platform. Founded in 2012 by web developers Adam Dougherty and Zach Zurn, it charges restaurants a flat monthly fee and takes 0% commission on direct orders, positioning itself against third-party delivery apps that take up to 30%. Blizzfull's pitch is that independent restaurants should own their customers, their data, and their revenue, and it says it powers more than 1,000 restaurants nationwide.
GEM
GEM is a Los Angeles-based wellness company that reimagines the daily multivitamin as a whole-food bite rather than a pill or gummy. Founded in 2018 by Sara Cullen, GEM packs 20+ vitamins, minerals, superfoods, prebiotics, probiotics and microalgae into a single real-food chew, sold mainly through a subscription model plus retail and Amazon. Its pitch is 'food is medicine' - transparent, plant-based, and traceable nutrition for people who distrust synthetic supplements.
Illuminant Surgical
Illuminant Surgical is a Culver City / Los Angeles medical device startup building Skylight, a real-time anatomical projection system that displays a patient's internal imaging directly onto their skin during surgery. Using AI, computer vision and dynamic projection mapping - technology borrowed in part from entertainment-industry projection artists - the company aims to give surgeons a kind of 'x-ray vision' for spine surgery, cancer biopsies and other image-guided procedures without forcing them to look away from the operating field.
Mavida Health
Mavida Health is a Los Angeles digital health company delivering specialized virtual mental health care for women navigating reproductive milestones - pregnancy, postpartum, fertility, loss, and menopause. Founded in 2023 by reproductive psychiatrist Dr. Sarah Oreck and health-tech operator Emma Sugerman, it pairs one-on-one and group therapy, family counseling, and prescribing with community programming under the banner 'mental healthcare for every mama.' The company reached licensed clinical operations across California, New York, New Jersey, and Texas, and in June 2026 was acquired by insurer WPS Health Solutions to run as an independent subsidiary.
Memorang
Memorang is a Los Angeles-based education-technology company building what it calls the AI stack for education - an all-in-one, agentic platform that lets testing providers, publishers and training organizations create standards-aligned content, assessments and branded learning apps at scale. It began as a consumer flashcards-and-quizzes app for medical and professional exams and has since pivoted into a B2B platform that pairs knowledge graphs with AI agents and human-in-the-loop workflows. After winning first place among roughly 1,500 startups in the Vercel AI Accelerator, the bootstrapped company says it has delivered hundreds of millions of assessments and serves tens of millions of annual test-takers.
Mento
Mento is a performance-coaching platform that pairs leaders and teams with 1:1 executive coaches, adds a lighter layer of mentorship, and uses AI to connect what happens between sessions. Built on an 80/20 coaching-to-mentorship methodology and staffed by former C-suite, VP, and director-level coaches, Mento sells leadership development to companies that want to grow and keep their highest performers. Co-founded in 2019 by Jamie Albers and Alex Marcus, the Los Angeles company counts Anthropic, Dropbox, Brex, Gusto, and Vercel among its clients.
Oceanworks®
Oceanworks is a Los Angeles-based B2B platform that makes it easy for brands to buy verified recycled ocean and ocean-bound plastic and to fund the cleanup of plastic that has no resale value. It runs a global marketplace connecting collectors and recyclers with major consumer brands, backs every transaction with its Oceanworks Guaranteed traceability system, and sells IMPAC+ plastic offsets that work like carbon credits for plastic waste. The idea is simple: turn corporate demand into a paycheck for the people pulling plastic out of coastlines before it reaches the sea.
Onlife
Onlife is a spatial-AI company that turns where people go into what they might do next. It began as the parent company behind Aglet, a location-based 'sneakerverse' game that had players walking real streets to collect virtual sneakers, then used the resulting movement data to build a Spatial Behavioral Engine and a consumer 'Smart Map' that fuses calendars, to-do lists and location into a self-organizing daily planner. Founded by former adidas trends director Ryan David Mullins, Onlife straddles the line between a playful consumer app and a serious geospatial-intelligence platform.
Oro
Oro is a Los Angeles social fintech that turns housing into a workplace benefit. Its B2B platform lets employers offer housing wellness to every worker - renters, buyers, and owners - through concierge housing assistance, rent-to-credit reporting, homebuyer education, down payment savings programs, and housing loans. Founded by former Big Law partner George Fatheree, Oro is a Delaware public benefit corporation that raised $3 million in seed funding in January 2026 to make housing the next standard employee benefit.
People Science
People Science is a Los Angeles clinical research organization that turns rigorous clinical trials into software. Its platform, Chloe, lets wellness and health brands design, launch, and run decentralized, IRB-approved studies entirely from participants' homes - integrating wearables, lab partners, and remote data collection so that supplements, nutraceuticals, cannabinoids, psychedelics, and food-as-medicine products can earn real clinical evidence at a fraction of the cost and time of a traditional CRO. Founded by MD-PhD co-CEOs Belinda Tan and Noah Craft, who previously built Science 37 into a billion-dollar clinical trials company, People Science aims to bring evidence to an industry long defined by claims.
Pirros
Pirros is an AI-powered content intelligence platform for architecture and engineering firms that lets designers find, compare, reuse and standardize Revit details and families across every project, team and office. Founded by former structural engineers Ari Baranian and Peter Johann, the Los Angeles company automatically ingests a firm's historical drawing sets and makes them searchable by geometry - no manual tagging - so designers stop digging through cluttered server folders and start reusing vetted work. Often described as 'GitHub for construction,' Pirros integrates directly with Revit and Autodesk ACC/BIM 360 and serves over 300 firms and 15,000+ users.
Vendorflow
Vendorflow is a Los Angeles-based unified communications platform for trucking fleets, freight brokers, ports, and terminals. It consolidates voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and ELD in-cab messaging into a single shared inbox that integrates with TMS and ELD systems, so dispatch and operations teams can collaborate on driver conversations in one place - no app installs required for drivers.
Wonder Sciences
Wonder Sciences is a Los Angeles-based mental health and research company reengineering psychiatric care through psychedelic medicine, clinical research, and AI. Best known for its consumer brand Wondermed - an at-home, low-dose ketamine-assisted telehealth protocol for anxiety and depression - the company is building an AI-native clinical operating system that fuses medication, therapy, and behavioral data into actionable insights. Founded by Ryan Magnussen in 2022, it raised roughly $4.6M-$5.6M in seed funding from investors including Aubrey Marcus and James Foster.
YepChat
YepChat is a Los Angeles company that builds a phone and communication platform made specifically for restaurants. It routes calls dynamically, captures missed calls, turns inbound phone traffic into digital orders and reservations, filters robocalls, and layers on SMS and analytics. It began around 2015 as an intelligent business-texting product powered by IBM Watson, then pivoted to serving the restaurant industry, where phones ring at the worst possible moments.
Bold
Bold is a Los Angeles-based digital healthy-aging company that delivers personalized, clinically validated exercise, nutrition, and virtual-care programs to older adults. Available at no cost to roughly 12 million Medicare members through partnerships with Medicare Advantage plans and provider groups, Bold treats movement as medicine: its programs have been shown to reduce falls by up to 46%, increase weekly physical activity by 182%, and earn 91% member satisfaction. Founded by Amanda Rees and Hari Arul, the company has raised $27 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Rethink Impact.
Lucy
Lucy (Lucy Goods Inc.) is a Los Angeles-based consumer products company building tobacco-free nicotine products for adults - nicotine gum, pouches, lozenges, and its capsule-popping Breakers pouches. Founded in 2016 by three former Soylent executives, Lucy treats nicotine as a product-design and manufacturing problem rather than a tobacco one, aiming to give adult nicotine users a better-tasting, better-engineered alternative to cigarettes and dip. The company sells primarily direct-to-consumer online and in retail, and pursues FDA authorization for its products with its stated mission of reducing nicotine-related harm.
Maestro
Maestro is a Los Angeles-based interactive video and live streaming platform that lets brands, creators, and rights holders build their own direct-to-consumer streaming destinations. Instead of renting an audience on someone else's platform, Maestro customers own the experience end to end - custom branded sites, interactive overlays (chat, polls, tip jars), and built-in monetization through ticketing, subscriptions, live shopping, and tips, while keeping their data and most of their revenue. Founded in 2015 by Ari Evans, the company powers streams for names like Billie Eilish, the Grammys, Coachella, Fortnite/Epic Games, and Microsoft.
Output Inc.
Output is a Los Angeles-based music technology company that builds software instruments, effects, and AI-assisted tools for musicians, producers, and sound designers. Founded in 2013 by composer Gregg Lehrman, its plugins - including the cloud-connected sampler Arcade and the AI-powered Co-Producer - have shaped records by Drake, Justin Bieber, Coldplay and Rihanna, as well as scores for Stranger Things and Game of Thrones. The company bootstrapped for seven years before raising a $45M Series A from Summit Partners in 2020.
Pray.com
Pray.com is a faith-based audio and social app that delivers daily guided prayers, a dramatized audio Bible, Christian meditations, and celebrity-narrated Bedtime Bible Stories. Founded in 2016 and based in the Los Angeles area, it has grown into one of the most-downloaded prayer apps in the world, blending Hollywood production with congregation tools and a premium subscription model.