When I worked as a technical recruiter we'd work on filling roles for Los Angeles based companies in addition to some of our roles for Bay Area based companies. This was pre-pandemic and often the location of the candidate and their ability to commute to the office mattered. My very first placement was a Ruby On Rails developer at a gaming company. The skillset was straightforward -- they needed to know Ruby On Rails. Later I went on to work more requisitions, "reqs", for companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. While working those roles I learned the difference in the talent market between LA and SF. A developer in the Bay Area will often have to know many technologies in addition to their core competency. No one in the Bay Area just wanted a ROR developer. They wanted a ROR dev skilled in SQL performance tuning, an expert on system design with Lucene and similar startup experience for at least five years. This was about four years ago and there were stark differences between the tech talent markets in SF and LA.
That may be changing now though. With the rise of Web3 and development of LA's tech scene startups need more and more talented folks of all stripes. In this blog post we'll highlight some startups that are headquartered out of the Los Angeles area. Specifically we queried for companies with their primary headquarters listed as in one of the following cities:
- Los Angeles
- El Segundo
- Venice
- Santa Monica
- Walnut
- Burbank
- Beverly Hills
- Culver City
- Marina Del Rey
- Marina del Rey
- Glendale
- Malibu
- Sherman Oaks
- Hawthorne
- Westlake Village
- West Hollywood
- Hollywood
- Ontario
- Duarte
- Venice
- Costa Mesa
- Pasadena
- Hermosa Beach
- Irvine
On the Employbl dashboard we currently have 1,417 companies with headquarters listed in one of those Southern California cities. That's not counting many more companies that may be based in the LA area but we don't have HQ location info on. Posting a blog post with over one thousand companies in plain text would be pretty useless, which is part of the reason we built the Employbl dashboard. We narrowed this list down to fifty one companies using the following methodology..
About the data
At Employbl we utilize data harvested from the public web to build our database of 11,000+ tech companies and startups. We generated the list for this blog post by looking up companies that are headquartered in the Los Angeles area, have been invested in by top tier Venture Capital firms (pretty subjective I know) and were founded in the past five years. We excluded any company that has gone public (via IPO or SPAC) or that has been acquired. Finally we sorted the list by the total investment amount each company has raised. Raising more money isn't always a good thing but it is a strong signal that an organization is doing something big. Though we try to stay focused on "tech startups" the line between say a D2C brand and a tech startup isn't always clear cut. We didn't do any filtering by industry or market opportunity for the purposes of this blog post. If you'd like to explore the data on your own and segment the data further, feel free to create an Empoybl account. It's totally free.
Top LA Startups to Watch in 2022
Without further ado here's the Employbl list of top startups to watch in the LA area.
| Company Name | HQ City | Year Founded | Total Investment Amount | Company Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anduril Industries | Irvine | 2017 | $692,499,968 | Anduril Industries, Inc. provides security solutions. The Company offers solutions for military based security, energy facility protection, wildfire detection, and infrastructure defense. Anduril Industries provides its services in the United States. |
| Orca Security | Los Angeles | 2019 | $632,000,000 | Orca Security provides cloud-wide, workload-deep security and compliance for AWS, Azure, and GCP - without agents! |
| Blockdaemon | Los Angeles | 2017 | $398,230,016 | Blockdaemon Inc. provides solutions. The Company offers multi-chain multi-cloud network management tool for public and private organization, mining algorithm, and contract customization. Blockdaemon serves customers in the United States. |
| Whatnot | Marina del Rey | 2019 | $224,700,000 | Whatnot is a Los Angeles-based startup that creates a place where avid collectors could come together over shared interests. Whatnot is a marketplace to buy and sell authentic collectible items. |
| Sidecar Health | El Segundo | 2018 | $163,000,000 | Health insurance the way it should be. |
| 100 Thieves | Los Angeles | 2017 | $120,000,000 | 100 Thieves, LLC operates as a lifestyle, apparel, and esports organization. The Company participates in leagues and championships, and also retails sports apparel through its online store. 100 Thieves serves customers in the State of California. |
| OCTANT | Los Angeles | 2017 | $115,000,000 | Octant, Inc. operates as a biotechnology company. The Company develops a multiplexed technology that uses synthetic biology, genome engineering, next-generation sequencing, and computational tools to measure the activity of receptor pathways in human cells. Octant serves customers in the United States. |
| Hadrian | Hawthorne | 2020 | $99,500,000 | Hadrian manufactures precision components for cutting-edge technology companies. |
| Modern Animal | Los Angeles | 2019 | $89,000,000 | A new kind of veterinary clinic for animals and their humans. |
| FitOn | Los Angeles | 2018 | $70,049,000 | Best Workouts. Always Free. Always On. |
| Metropolis | Los Angeles | 2017 | $61,000,000 | Metropolis is an AI and computer vision start-up built to modernize parking and empower the future of mobility. It was founded in 2017 and is based in Los Angeles, California. |
| Lightship | El Segundo | 2018 | $60,000,000 | Lightship is the premier provider of enterprise level, direct-to-patient clinical research solutions. We engage patients at home, making participation in clinical research more accessible to everyone. |
| Fernish | Los Angeles | 2017 | $58,687,920 | Furniture on your terms. |
| Entos | Los Angeles | 2019 | $53,000,000 | Entos uses machine learning-technology for energy and force evaluations required for R&D labs. |
| Kitchen United | Pasadena | 2017 | $50,000,000 | Kitchen United provides restaurant operators a turnkey way to accelerate growth and reach the off-premise diner. |
| Singularity 6 | Los Angeles | 2018 | $49,000,000 | Singularity 6 Corporation designs and develops video games. The Company offers video games for consoles, handhelds, and personal computers. Singularity 6 serves customers in the United States. |
| Coco Robotics | Santa Monica | 2019 | $41,500,000 | Coco Robotics is an organization currently based in Santa Monica, California, United States. It has been founded in 2019. |
| Pragma | Culver City | 2020 | $38,200,000 | Pragma is a “backend game engine” that enables multiplayer and social games. Pragma provides developers full extensibility, visibility and scalability. Our platform is made up of 5 interconnected applications: accounts & social, payments, player data, telemetry, and game loop. Pragma is built by engineering leaders that built platforms for some of the largest live service games like League of Legends, Valorant, Plants vs Zombies 2, and Eve Online. |
| Pinecone | Los Angeles | 2019 | $38,000,000 | Be There Now |
| Goldfinch | Walnut | 2020 | $37,700,000 | Digital Rescue for Businesses in Covid Era. |
| Mountaintop Studios | Los Angeles | 2020 | $35,500,000 | Mountaintop is a new game studio from veterans of Naughty Dog, Oculus, Respawn, Epic, Double Fine, and Hidden Path. |
| LiveControl | Santa Monica | 2019 | $33,200,000 | Think of us as your full-service production crew... except completely remote. Welcome to the future of live streaming. |
| Arc Boats | Los Angeles | 2021 | $30,000,000 | Arc Boats is electrifying the world of boating, starting with high-performance watersport boats. |
| Verishop | Santa Monica | 2018 | $30,000,000 | Verishop is a premium lifestyle destination for everyday luxury in fashion, beauty, home and more. Verishop aims to be a go-to lifestyle shopping destination whenever the customer in search of elevated brands and quality-driven products. |
| Profitboss | Beverly Hills | 2018 | $29,200,000 | We power online ordering for restaurants and help them automatically market using their data to increase profits |
| Steno | Los Angeles | 2018 | $26,500,000 | Steno offers court reporting and other litigation support services on a deferred-payment, non-recourse basis. It aims to improve the litigation process—offering dependable court reporting with undeniable innovation and exceptional customer service. Steno was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. |
| rct AI | Burbank | 2018 | $25,728,944 | rct AI is providing AI solutions to the game industry and building the true Metaverse with AI generated content. By using cutting-edge technologies, especially deep learning and reinforcement learning, rct AI creates a truly dynamic and intelligent user experience both on the consumers’ side and production’s side. The founding team ever built a company, Raventech together and helped make it acquired by Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) in 2017. |
| Dispo | Los Angeles | 2019 | $24,000,000 | Live in the moment |
| Forta Protocol | Walnut | 2021 | $23,000,000 | Forta is a neat project that comes at an interesting point for the larger blockchain community. When bitcoin came to market, it attracted interest as a potential medium of exchange, or perhaps a store of value. The latter use case wound up being the key bitcoin value offering. But while bitcoin was maturing, other blockchains were built that featured more native programmability, allowing developers around the world to leverage smart (self-executing) contracts for a host of use cases. |
| Trellis | Los Angeles | 2017 | $20,620,000 | Trellis Research is a research tool for litigators. |
| First Resonance | Los Angeles | 2018 | $19,300,000 | ion is a manufacturing software platform that manufacturers trust for speed, collaboration, and real-time visibility. |
| Open Raven | Los Angeles | 2019 | $19,100,000 | Open Raven is a developer of data security tools. Open Raven is the modern data security platform that brings visibility and control to an organization’s data protection program. |
| Product Science | Los Angeles | 2021 | $18,000,000 | Product Science increases product metrics for mobile applications and helps apps work faster by providing insights into key performance issues that impact user experience. Product Science analyzes the code and actual runtime data to pinpoint performance issues. Our AI enables us to do it more efficiently by providing unique insights for data visualizations to help mobile developers to identify the problem right away. |
| Pearpop | Los Angeles | 2020 | $16,000,000 | Pearpop is the marketplace for social collaborations between the teeming hordes of musicians, craftspeople, chefs, clowns, diarists, dancers, artists, actors, acrobats, aspiring celebrities, and actual celebrities. |
| The Expert | Los Angeles | 2021 | $15,000,000 | 1:1 video consultations with the world’s top design experts |
| Groundswell | Los Angeles | 2021 | $15,000,000 | Groundswell provides a SaaS platform for philanthropic giving, which enables companies to fund personal donor-advised funds for each employee. Employee users are also provided with tools such as tax-free investment opportunities, customized giving opportunities, frictionless donation options, and centralized impact reporting. |
| Pace | Los Angeles | 2020 | $14,900,000 | Pace is a fitness and social wellness platform that redefines mental health through groups that are effective, fun, social, and challenging. Its investors include SciFi VC, Next Play Ventures, SV Angel, WorkLife Fund, BoxGroup, and angel investors who lead various public technology companies. Pace brings people together to work on their mental and emotional health, wherever they are. As seasons of your life change, Pace connects people with other real people through technology to talk with one another, work on themselves, and feel less alone together. |
| Trust | Los Angeles | 2019 | $14,600,000 | The smarter way to do business |
| Pearl | West Hollywood | 2019 | $11,000,000 | A computer vision company focused on solving challenging problems in the dental industry. |
| 360VUZ | Los Angeles | 2017 | $10,768,000 | The #1 Immersive Video Mobile App that gives you Access to the Impossible. Teleport in Time 🚀 |
| Big Time Studios | Los Angeles | 2020 | $10,300,000 | Big Time Studios is a new game company dedicated to crafting online adventures through space and time. |
| Whatifi | Los Angeles | 2020 | $10,000,000 | Whatifi provides a new way to watch movies on your phone with friends. Whatifi unlocks the ability to discuss, debate and decide what happens next in the movies you watch with friends and family, offering dozens of plotlines, character arcs, and endings. |
| Inversion Space | Los Angeles | 2021 | $10,000,000 | Inversion Space is a privately held company driven to change how humanity utilizes space. Its builds affordable, high cadence return vehicle for the commercial and defense industries. |
| Artie | Los Angeles | 2018 | $10,000,000 | Artie is a platform for next-gen mobile games that can be shared and played instantly inside popular social apps. |
| Talyn Air | Los Angeles | 2019 | $6,300,000 | Talyn Air is an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft system. It separates and recombines in the air and allows each vehicle to operate at peak efficiency without wasting energy. Jamie Gull and Evan Mucasey established it in Los Angeles, California. |
| BuildOps | Santa Monica | 2018 | $5,800,000 | Industry leading all-in-one software solution for subcontractors driving profitability through best-in-class technology |
| Winden | Los Angeles | 2021 | $5,300,000 | Winden is a financial services company currently based in Los Angeles, California, United States. It has been founded in 2021 by Daniel Sathyanesan. |
| Emile | Los Angeles | 2020 | $5,300,000 | Building the MasterClass for high school education. Members can access on-demand premium courses across multiple subjects for actual high school and college credits, and join a global community. |
| Daylight | Los Angeles | 2020 | $5,000,000 | Daylight is the first and only digital banking platform in the USA built for LGBT+ people, by LGBT+ people. |
| WAYV | Venice | 2017 | $5,000,000 | The Future of Cannabis |
| MarqVision{:target=""_blank""} | Los Angeles | 2020 | $5,000,000.00 | MarqVision helps global brands remove counterfeits from online marketplaces. |
If you're interested in viewing all of this data in a TSV format you can do so here.