santa-monica
(23)
Finality Capital
A Santa Monica firm that has been quietly backing blockchain builders since 2018 - before it had a fund - now runs venture, liquid, and credit strategies on a single conviction: the next internet gets settled onchain.
ProProfs
The bootstrapped software company that turned a free online quiz into a 15-million-user suite for training employees and keeping customers happy.
Stipop
Stipop is a sticker infrastructure company that lets any app add a searchable library of 150,000+ stickers with a single line of code, through its API and SDK. Founded in Seoul by roommates-turned-cofounders Tony Park and Daniel Cho, it grew a marketplace of thousands of global artists, powered sticker features for Google, Microsoft Teams, Canva and Adobe, and joined Snap's Yellow accelerator and Y Combinator (S21). It has since expanded toward monetization tools for character-IP creators and AI chat products.
Iris Yen
Iris Yen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Cupshe, the California-founded swimwear and beachwear brand that grew from a single-category bet into a global direct-to-consumer business with roughly $420 million in annual revenue. She joined in February 2025 after a run through some of the loudest brand-building rooms in the business: Head of Media, Content and Partnerships at Nike; VP and Head of Media, Strategy and Audiences at Red Bull; VP and Head of Communications at GUESS?, Inc.; VP of Communications at American Eagle Outfitters; and VP of Global Marketing and PR at Quiksilver. She started in music, running marketing and PR at Universal Records in the early 2000s, and has built campaigns around names including Britney Spears, Nelly, Kelly Slater, Tony Hawk and Torah Bright. A Washington University in St. Louis graduate who studied anthropology alongside marketing, Yen tends to treat brands as cultures rather than catalogs - a habit visible in Cupshe's 10th-anniversary work, its fourth Miami Swim Week runway show, and its 2026 Casa del Sol collaboration with Jessie James Decker.
Kevin Mitchael
Kevin Mitchael is the Chief Marketing Officer of Careismatic Brands, the Los Angeles-based healthcare apparel group behind Cherokee, Dickies Medical, Heartsoul, Med Couture, Healing Hands, Infinity, Medelita, allheart, Scrubstar, Classroom and Real School. He announced the appointment on LinkedIn in February 2024, weeks after the company entered Chapter 11 restructuring, and stayed through its emergence that June under new ownership. His earlier career was built in apparel brand, product, digital and retail marketing, with work across Carter's, OshKosh B'gosh, Adidas, Carhartt, Lee, Fruit of the Loom, French Toast and Healthtex, according to a 2019 Connecticut newspaper notice announcing his appointment to the board of Flanders Nature Center and Land Trust. He keeps a notably quiet public profile for a CMO: no published interviews, no podcast circuit, and a single LinkedIn account doing most of the talking.
FIGS
FIGS is a direct-to-consumer healthcare apparel brand that reinvented the medical scrub. Founded in 2013 by Heather Hasson and Trina Spear, the Santa Monica company sells comfortable, technical scrubs, lab coats, footwear and lifestyle wear made from its proprietary FIONx fabric, sold almost entirely online to nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals. FIGS reached $631 million in revenue in 2025, serves roughly 2.9 million active customers, and trades on the NYSE under the ticker FIGS after a landmark 2021 IPO.
Aaron Heiser
Aaron Heiser is the first-ever Chief Executive Officer of Malbon Golf, the Santa Monica streetwear-meets-golf brand founded by Stephen and Erica Malbon. Appointed in October 2024, he runs day-to-day operations while the founders steer creative as co-Chief Creative Officers. Heiser arrived after roughly 18 years at Nike, where he ran retail across Western Europe and Greater China before serving as Global VP of Apparel, Accessories and Licensing. A Cornell graduate and former varsity wrestler, he has built a career relocating across Amsterdam, Shanghai and Oregon, and now leads Malbon as it pushes toward roughly $100 million in revenue and deeper international expansion.
LiveControl
LiveControl is a Santa Monica-based company that turns any venue into a broadcast studio without an on-site crew. It combines proprietary PTZ camera hardware and an encoder with cloud software and a nationwide network of professional videographers who remotely pan, tilt, zoom, switch angles, and produce live events - for houses of worship, funeral homes, schools, theaters, conferences, and corporate clients. Founded in 2018 and backed by a $30M Series A led by Coatue, LiveControl produces tens of thousands of professionally streamed events each year at a fraction of the cost of hiring a traditional production team.
Quantum Energy Square
Quantum Energy Square is a Venice, California-born food brand that makes plant-based energy bars engineered to replace the energy drink. Each square pairs 100mg of caffeine from organic green coffee with 10g of plant protein and balanced macronutrients from fruits, nuts and seeds, so the caffeine releases slowly for steady, no-crash energy. Founded by Daniel Medvene and Leah Marquez after 200-plus recipe iterations, the company sells direct-to-consumer and through Whole Foods, Sprouts, REI and Thrive Market, and is the official energy bar of IRONMAN and Rock 'n' Roll Marathon events.
Quinn
Quinn is a Santa Monica-based audio erotica platform - often described as a 'Spotify for erotica' - that turns intimate, narrative-driven stories into 15-to-20-minute immersive audio experiences. Founded by Caroline Spiegel and built primarily for women and underserved audiences, Quinn pairs a creator-driven content marketplace with an ever-growing roster of professional voice actors and Hollywood celebrities. With roughly 300,000 users, over 900,000 TikTok followers, and around $5M in annual recurring revenue, it has reframed adult content around imagination, storytelling, and discreet listening rather than the visual mainstream.
Russ Wallace
Russ Wallace is the co-founder and CEO of Freestyle, a Santa Monica baby-care brand rebuilding the diaper aisle for modern parents. A recovering NYU-trained lawyer who traded courtrooms for supply chains, he cut his operating teeth scaling Hello Bello past a $100M run rate before teaming up with Cameo co-founder Mike Constantiner. Freestyle's tree-free, bamboo-core diapers launched online in 2022 and now sit on shelves at Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods, riding roughly 400% year-over-year growth and a fresh $10M Series A.
Johnny Monsarrat
Johnny Monsarrat co-invented the MMO genre at Turbine in 1994 - the studio behind Asheron's Call, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online before Warner Bros. acquired it for $160M. Now as founder and CEO of Monsarrat, he is building Landing Party, the world's first outdoor AR roleplaying game, with 7 patents, $2.7M raised, and advisors including the former CEOs of PlayStation and Blizzard.
Daniel Medvene
Daniel Medvene is the CEO and co-founder of Quantum Energy Squares, a Santa Monica plant-based energy bar company he started in 2019 with partner Leah Marquez. After years of relying on pre-workout powders and gallons of coffee that left him 'wired but tired,' Medvene set out to engineer a cleaner source of all-day energy. He and Marquez ran more than 200 recipe iterations with a sports dietitian, food scientist, and pastry chef before landing on a bar powered by organic green coffee and balanced plant-based macros. The company raised $2.5 million in seed funding in 2021 from a roster of pro athletes, became the official energy bar of the IRONMAN and Rock 'n' Roll Marathon series, and now sells nationally through Whole Foods and Sprouts.
Alex Bradford
Alex Bradford is the co-founder and CEO of Rain, a Santa Monica fintech that lets hourly and frontline workers tap wages they have already earned before payday instead of turning to payday loans or overdrafts. A former McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and SAC Capital analyst with a Stanford degree and a Harvard MBA, Bradford launched Rain in 2019 after spotting that payroll and timekeeping systems had finally opened their APIs. The company plugs into employers' payroll and HCM systems (including a native Workday integration), has connected millions of workers and distributed more than $2 billion in earned wages, and has raised capital from investors including QED, Invus and Prosus. Bradford's pitch is personal: he grew up with a single mother in the 1980s and built Rain to kill predatory lending and give workers control over their own money.
Homecourt
Homecourt is a luxury home and personal care brand founded in 2022 by actress Courteney Cox and beauty-industry veteran Sarah Jahnke. It applies beauty-grade standards to everyday household products, selling non-toxic, plant-based, fine-fragrance cleaning sprays, candles, body care and laundry products through its own site and retailers including Nordstrom, Bluemercury, Revolve and Amazon. The company raised an $8 million Series A in October 2025 led by CULT Capital after doubling revenue every year with a famously tiny team.
Rain
Rain is a Santa Monica fintech that lets employees tap the wages they've already earned before payday. It plugs directly into employer payroll and time-and-attendance systems to calculate real-time earnings, then pairs instant access with budgeting tools, free tax filing, financial coaching, an AI financial assistant and a debit card. Since 2019 it has reached over 3.5 million workers and moved more than $2 billion in wages, positioning earned wage access as an employer benefit that cuts turnover and financial stress.
Frederic Dijols
Frederic Dijols is the co-founder and CEO of Mixlab, a veterinary-exclusive pet pharmacy that compounds custom medications and delivers them fast and free to pet parents and the vets who prescribe them. A French-trained engineer with degrees from Ecole Polytechnique, Stanford, and Harvard Business School, he traded a healthcare-banking seat at J.P. Morgan for a pharmacy floor after a miserable experience getting meds for his aging pug, Bob. Since 2017 he has raised roughly $46.5M and built Mixlab into a multi-state operation pairing pharmacist-grade compounding with consumer-grade delight.
Ticketure
Ticketure is a cloud-based, mobile-first ticketing, point-of-sale, and membership platform built specifically for museums, zoos, aquariums, gardens, and high-volume visitor attractions. It unifies advance and on-site ticket sales, timed entry, memberships, donations, and visitor data into one connected system, helping cultural institutions grow revenue and understand their audiences. Spun out of TixTrack as a standalone company in July 2025 with backing from Dahlia Equity Partners, Ticketure processes over 200 million visits and $1.5B+ in tickets annually for more than 100 institutions worldwide.
Veo
Veo is a Santa Monica-based shared micromobility company that designs, manufactures and operates electric scooters, e-bikes and cargo bikes for cities and university campuses across North America. Founded in 2017 by Purdue graduates Candice Xie and Edwin Tan, Veo built the industry's most diverse vehicle fleet through an in-house design team and became the first profitable shared micromobility operator in the U.S. Rather than chasing growth at any cost, Veo bet on deliberate expansion, exclusive city and campus contracts, and durable, purpose-built vehicles - a strategy that delivered unadjusted EBIT profitability in 2024 while many better-funded rivals retreated.
WonderHowTo Network
WonderHowTo Network is a Santa Monica-based digital media company that helps curious people learn how to do almost anything. Founded in 2006 by former TV executive Stephen Chao and technologist Michael Goedecke, it began as a search engine and directory for instructional how-to videos and grew into a network of specialized brands - Gadget Hacks, Null Byte, Next Reality, Food Hacks Daily and more - covering smartphones, white-hat hacking, augmented reality and everyday DIY. At its peak the network reached roughly 12 million monthly unique visitors.
Freestyle
Freestyle is a Santa Monica-based, high-performance baby care company building premium diapers and wipes for modern parents who refuse to choose between performance, clean materials, and good design. Founded in 2022 by two dads, Russ Wallace and Mike Constantiner, the brand pairs proprietary absorbency technology (its BambooTek tree-free core and 7-layer Skin Shield system) with Total Chlorine Free, EWG Verified materials. After closing a $10M Series A led by Silas Capital in March 2026, Freestyle is scaling across Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, Amazon, and its own subscription channel.
Stephen Chao
Stephen Chao is the co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo, the Santa Monica how-to video network he launched in 2008 after a combustible career in television. He created the reality formats America's Most Wanted and Cops at Fox, rose to president of Fox Television Stations, and was fired ten weeks later for hiring a model to strip during a speech about censorship in front of Rupert Murdoch. He later ran programming at USA Network. A Harvard classics major and former National Enquirer reporter, Chao built a second act around free, searchable tutorials covering everything from food hacks to augmented reality.
GoodRx
GoodRx is a Santa Monica-based digital healthcare platform that helps Americans find lower prices on prescription drugs. It aggregates real-time pricing and discounts from pharmacies nationwide so consumers can compare costs and access free coupons, then layers on telehealth visits, manufacturer savings programs, and tools for pharma and employers. Since 2011 it has helped tens of millions of people save an estimated $70+ billion on medications.