los-angeles-startups
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Bambee's $65 Million Bet: Main Street Needs a Human Before It Needs Another Dashboard
Most small employers cannot justify a full-time HR manager. Bambee's answer is to fractionalize the human, automate the paperwork and charge by company size - a clever model whose value rises or falls with the person on the other side of the chat.
Akash Nigam Bet on Avatars Before AI Learned to Speak
A failed chat app, a rejected exit and a stubborn interest in how people express themselves led Akash Nigam to spend nearly a decade building digital characters. Now Genies is trying to give artificial intelligence a face, a wardrobe and somewhere to play.
Persist Is Running Founder Auditions With Real Startups on the Line
The Los Angeles venture studio does not ask would-be founders for another pitch deck. It asks them to build - then uses salary, equity and a shared operating bench to turn the strongest prototypes into companies.
The Million-Dollar Commute Between Seattle and L.A.
Unlock Venture Partners built its seed strategy around a simple map: two major technology cities, too little early capital, and founders who need more than a wire transfer.
Matthew Loper
Matthew Loper is the co-founder and CEO of Wellth, a Los Angeles digital-health company that pays people small cash rewards for sticking to their care plans. A biological engineer from MIT turned healthcare banker and investor, he built Wellth around behavioral economics rather than technology - the idea that immediate, tangible incentives change what people actually do about their chronic conditions. Under his leadership Wellth has raised more than $73 million, including an oversubscribed $36 million Series C in 2025, and reports steep drops in hospital and emergency-room use among the high-need Medicare and Medicaid populations it serves.
Greg Cohn
Greg Cohn is the co-founder and CEO of Ad Hoc Labs, the Los Angeles product studio behind Burner, the app that pioneered disposable, on-demand phone numbers back in 2012. A former Yahoo product leader who spent his early career in book publishing and content strategy, Cohn built Burner after his first app failed, turning that stumble into a durable, privacy-focused business that has outlived most of its venture-funded peers. He is an advocate for building consumer apps that deliver lasting value over chasing hypergrowth.
Molly Yang
Molly Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Hgen, a Los Angeles climate-tech company building modular, mass-manufacturable alkaline electrolyzers to make clean hydrogen cheap enough for heavy industry. A former energy product lead at Tesla, she teamed up with childhood friend and ex-SpaceX engineer Colin Ho to shrink the electrolyzer roughly twentyfold and package it into shipping containers that need only water and electricity. Hgen has raised $7M total from Founders Fund, Seven Seven Six, and Fontinalis Partners, and Yang was named a 2022 Breakthrough Energy Fellow.