los-angeles-startup
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Matt Soule
Matt Soule is the founder and CEO of Parallel Systems, a Los Angeles company building autonomous, battery-electric railcars that move freight in small, self-propelled platoons instead of behind diesel locomotives. A former SpaceX avionics leader who once ran a 300-person department, Soule started Parallel in 2020 to pull short-haul freight off congested highways and onto underused rail. The company has raised more than $91 million, secured a Federal Railroad Administration pilot near the Port of Savannah, and aims to convert a slice of the $700 billion U.S. trucking market to cleaner rail.
Javier Vidal
Javier Vidal is the Madrid-born founder and CEO of Moonware, a Los Angeles startup building HALO, the world's first AI-powered Ground Traffic Control platform for airfields. A mechanical engineer trained at Duke who filed his first patent at 15 and became one of Tesla's youngest employees at 19, Vidal cut his teeth on autonomy at Tesla, Uber ATG, and Uber Elevate before setting out to replace the walkie-talkies and whiteboards that still run airport ramps. Moonware has raised roughly $9.3M and deployed HALO with carriers and handlers including British Airways, dnata, Aerocharter, Japan Airlines, and PrimeFlight.
Ari Baranian
Ari Baranian is the co-founder and CEO of Pirros (YC W23), a Los Angeles startup building a detail management platform for architects and structural engineers. A structural engineer turned software builder, he created Pirros to solve a problem he lived daily at his old firm: engineers constantly recreating the same construction details from scratch. Pirros integrates with Revit, automatically extracts and catalogs details with their metadata, and makes a firm's institutional knowledge searchable and reusable. The company is profitable, reached roughly $6M ARR with 300+ firms on the platform, and closed a Series A reported around $15-17M in 2025.
Eldrick Millares
Eldrick Millares is the co-founder and co-CEO of Illuminant Surgical, a Los Angeles deep-tech company building Skylight, the first real-time anatomical projection system. It paints a patient's internal anatomy directly onto their skin so surgeons get a kind of live X-ray vision, no headset required. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who immigrated from the Philippines to West Virginia, he built sensing systems at Apple and a lidar startup before teaming up with Stanford classmate Dr. James Hu. The pair went through Y Combinator, were named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare, and raised an $8.4M seed round in 2026.
Eric Rodriguez
Eric Rodriguez is the CEO and co-founder of Vendorflow, a Los Angeles SaaS company building the communications layer for trucking and logistics. After a decade in venture-backed startups - spanning restaurant analytics, document-management SaaS, and clinical research - he landed in freight at NEXT Trucking, where he met his technical co-founder Greg Bujak. Vendorflow unifies voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and ELD messaging into a single shared inbox that sits on top of the TMS, so dispatch and operations teams can work driver and carrier conversations in one place. The company raised $1.3M in seed funding in October 2021, led by TenOneTen Ventures. A UC Berkeley Haas graduate with degrees in business and economics, Eric once invented a 'Strategic Philanthropy' course and pitched it from the TEDxBerkeley stage.
Jamie Albers
Jamie Albers is the co-founder and co-CEO of Mento, a Los Angeles career-health company that pairs people with coaches who blend 80% coaching and 20% hands-on mentorship from operators who have done the job before. A University of Pennsylvania grad who spent five years across Google and then ran growth and marketing at Jigsaw, she built Mento after her own executive coach reshaped how she led and felt at work. Mento has raised about $11.5M, including a $6M seed in 2023 backed by M13, and is now folding AI into coaching to make high-quality guidance affordable at scale.
Robert Page
Robert Page is the CEO and founder of Pulse Protocol (formerly MedRepublic), a Los Angeles healthcare marketplace and B2B SaaS platform that helps clinics and facilitators run medical-travel businesses - matching patients to vetted providers, automating coordination, payments and marketing. A global-health operator since 2000, he previously built MedToGo International, co-authored three industry guidebooks, took MedRepublic into TechCrunch Disrupt's top 25 startups of 2016, and graduated from Amplify LA's accelerator. His through-line is unglamorous but stubborn: transparent pricing, quality control, and giving patients real options.
Yermie Cohen
Yermie Cohen is the founder and CEO of Memorang, an AI stack for education that lets organizations build, launch, and scale custom learning and assessment content. A med student who arrived at UCLA from MIT with biology and mechanical-engineering degrees, he was buried in flashcards and frustrated by tools that were either too simple or too expensive, so he built his own. Memorang began as a free spaced-repetition study app in 2013 and has since become a platform pitched at publishers, institutions, and professional organizations who want to turn expertise into AI-driven courses, quizzes, and exams with humans kept in the loop.
David Renteln
David Renteln is the co-founder and CEO of Lucy, a Los Angeles consumer brand making tobacco-free nicotine gum and pouches built around a stated mission of reducing tobacco-related harm to zero. A Harvard human evolutionary biology graduate and former Harvard Rugby president, he deferred a Caltech bioengineering PhD to help build Soylent, where he served as co-founder and chief marketing officer. In 2016 he started Lucy with Soylent alumni John Coogan and Samy Hamdouche, raised a $10M Series A in 2020 from RRE Ventures, Vice Ventures, Greycroft and Y Combinator, and has since pushed nicotine into the productivity-and-wellness conversation.
Jessica Toh
Jessica Toh is the co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry Labs, the AI-powered children's sleep and parenting app she built with her husband Seng Toh after their own son woke every two to three hours for 20 months. A UC Berkeley triple major in electrical engineering, computer science, and math & statistics with a Cambridge MBA, she turned a personal sleep crisis into data science, then into a company that now reaches more than 5 million families across 150+ countries - including roughly 15% of U.S. babies. Her mission is to make expert-grade parenting guidance affordable for everyone, not just families who can pay a sleep consultant thousands a year.
Nhon Ma
Nhon Ma is the CEO and co-founder of Numerade, a Los Angeles-based education technology company building AI-powered STEM tutoring at scale. The son of Vietnamese refugees who grew up in south-central LA, he turned a full-scholarship private-school education and a two-tour stint at Google into a mission to close the educational opportunity gap. Numerade hosts one of the largest STEM video libraries online and an AI tutor named Ace, and raised a $26M Series A at a roughly $100M valuation.