CNN’s Van Jones: Genius is Everywhere

Spencer Rascoff

Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.

CNN’s Van Jones: Genius is Everywhere

Van Jones hosts his own show on CNN, and he's the founder of The Dream Corps, an accelerator that supports economic and environmental innovation. Its #YesWeCode initiative aims to help 100,000 young people from underrepresented backgrounds find success in the tech sector. Van is an important voice on social justice and STEM education, and Time Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. In this episode, Van joins Spencer at Zillow Group's New York office for a live recording in front of employees. The two discuss Van's impressive background working in communities and promoting green jobs, how to increase diversity in tech and why young people have the power to change the world.


Press Play to hear the full conversation or check out the transcript below. You can also subscribe to Office Hours on Apple Podcasts and PodcastOne.

Spencer Rascoff:Thanks, everybody. We're here in the New York office of Zillow Group. I'm here with our guest, Jones. Please, everyone, give Van a welcome.

Van, thanks for coming on Office Hours. I wanna start by having you walk us through your career. We know you as a public media personality on CNN, but there's a whole career that preceded that. So, tell us how you got there, and walk us through your career.

Van Jones:I think probably the best way to start is just to talk about where I was born and raised, and then just go from there. But I was born in Jackson, Tennessee. I was talking to a friend from Kentucky. I was born in Jackson, Tennessee. My dad had been born in segregation and poverty in Memphis in 1944. So, he grew up basically in a shotgun shack, joining the military to get out of poverty.

Everybody else was running out of the military. My dad ran into the military to get out. When he got out, he put himself through college. He married the college president's daughter, who was my mother, 'cause Willy Jones was bad. My dad was bad.

And then, he put his brother through college. He put his cousin through college. And then worked with my mom, put me and my sister through college. And I'll always point out, when my father died, the picture that we put of him on the funeral program was him standing in front of Yale Law School the day I graduated with his hands in the air —

Rascoff: Proud moment.

Jones:Yeah, proud moment for him, given where he started from. So, but my dad was such an “up and out of poverty guy. He got himself out of poverty, then he was a cop in the military, then he was an educator. And I just felt like my dad helped so many people, including my whole family, get out of poverty really with nothing.

How could I have a Yale law degree and not try to at least beat him, if not best him? So, I became a — 24 years old, graduated from Yale Law School, moved to the Bay Area and started working on criminal justice, police reform. I was woke before y'all had alarm clocks.

Rascoff:I'm guessing most of your Yale classmates pursued a different path?

Jones:You know what's so funny? Everybody I went to Yale with, they wanted to be in politics, and they wouldn't take on any controversial issues. They were worried about their Supreme Court testimony. And when I was just on the left side of Pluto. I was on every issue, every protest, every demonstration.

And I wound up working in the White House, and they didn't. Just saying. Follow your heart, follow your dreams. I started an organization called the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and we worked to try to fix the juvenile justice system. We wound up closing five abusive youth prisons in California, and we cut California's youth prison population by 80 percent with no increase in youth violence or youth crime. A big cost savings. Stopped them from building a super jail for kids in Oakland. Reformed the San Francisco Police Department. This is all in the 1990s, early 2000s.

Rascoff:All your early to mid-20s?

Jones:Twenties to early 30s, and I just burned out. It was too hard. A lot of funerals. You work with urban youth. You wind up going to a lot of funerals. You got young people in the caskets, and then old people with white hair sitting up in the pews, which is the reverse of what you expect. And there were so many — I've still gone to more funerals in Oakland than graduations.

And you're in a situation when you have that much bad stuff happening — even little things that you don't think about. Like, there's so many sidewalk memorials that when little, bitty kids see balloons, they sometimes start crying 'cause they think that the balloon is — they associate that with memorials of kids who have gotten killed.

So, just — that kind of stuff, that's just too hard for me. So, I wound up deciding to do something very different, just trying to get jobs for kids coming home from jail. And we had a big solar boom happening in California at that time — now you're about 2005, 2006.

And people were ordering the solar panels for their houses, which you can find on Zillow —

Rascoff:Thank you. Well done. [Laughter]

Jones:But they were ordering solar panels for their houses, but it would take them three months, six months, nine months to get the solar panels up 'cause they didn't have enough well-trained people to do the work. And so, I saw a big opportunity to try to get young folks from the community trained to put up solar panels.

And that became a huge breakthrough because we got money to train youth to put up solar panels, and a woman named Nancy Pelosi, who had just become Speaker of the House, came and saw what we were doing. And she went nuts. She says, “You're fighting pollution and poverty at the same time by getting these young people jobs, cleaning up the environment, bringing in the clean energy revolution."

So, she took me to Washington, D.C. She had me testify in front of almost every one of her committees, and we got a guy named George W. Bush to sign a bill called the Green Jobs Act of 2007 to spread my program across the country. That was a huge victory. And then I wrote a book about it in 2008 — “The Green Collar Economy," available on Amazon. [Laughter]

And that book became a bestseller. A guy named Barack Obama read the book, and so, suddenly —

Rascoff: Did that happen organically? He was a community organizer in Chicago at the time. How did you get on his radar screen?

Jones: He was running for Senate — I mean, he was in the U.S. Senate, and he was getting ready to run for president. And Al Gore at that time was making a huge noise about the climate crisis and depressing everyone because it's just such a big problem, and I was seen as somebody who had a solution.

So, then he brought me to Washington, D.C., to help him, and wound up moving about $80 billion with a B from the federal government into clean and green solutions, $5 billion for solar — $5 billion during the so-called stimulus package. So, it was my job to coordinate that spend out for the president.

After that, I went to Princeton, taught there for a while. Then I wound up on CNN with my second book, and that's where I am. But my TV career is the shortest part of my career. I spent literally 25 years working in communities, doing tough stuff, trying to help people, and I'm mainly known for talking about tweets on CNN.

Rascoff: It's funny how life happens. What are advice to young people and common threads from that career path? What do you pull out as some things that you'd want to make sure a 25-year-old self or 20-year-old self would hear?

Jones: You have a lot more power than you think, that's the main thing I would say. Especially when you're young and you're new. You see a lot of stuff that could be improved. You see a lot of gaps. And often you're almost scared to say anything 'cause you don't want to get in trouble, you don't want to seem like you're a troublemaker.

But my experience has been if your heart's right about it, if you really are trying to, say for instance, make Zillow be the best possible thing or whatever it is, you can actually make a tremendous difference, wherever you are. You don't have to have the big title. You don't have to be the head of stuff. You can actually make a tremendous difference.

I think, number one: Don't underestimate your power and your influence. People said we'd never close a prison in California. They just built 20 of them. They said, “You're never gonna close any prisons." We were just too young and dumb to know any better and wound up closing five and making things better.

Another thing I would say is that I think most people have some calling inside themselves. Almost like secret hope about your life that you might be able to make a difference, help people. You're almost embarrassed to share with people — something you want to write, something you'd love to see happen.

It's almost embarrassing, but it keeps coming back, and it keeps coming back. That's why you were born. That thing. It's why you're here. Now, you're getting skills and experiences and meeting people, doing a lot of other stuff, but that's the thing. And if you can, without getting yourself fired or evicted — which, having had both happen to me, I don't recommend — if you can find a way to just continue to move in the direction of that dream, it's amazing what happens in your life.

All the stuff that makes no sense in your life — the crazy people you've met, the bad things that have happened to you, your nutty family — all that stuff winds up being fertilizer to help you do something really beautiful and really amazing. And I think, more than ever, it's gonna be unlikely people that do awesome stuff.

I think the people I see at the top of the game in Washington, D.C., right now — they're stuck, and they're fighting. I see people in D.C., I see people in Wall Street, I see people in Silicon Valley, Hollywood. The people at the top, they're having a hard time adjusting to all these changes in technology, in society and everything else.

They're really, really struggling, whereas the newer people, they seem to actually have a little bit of an inside track on what's next. If you can combine that generational perspective with a deeper purpose and a deeper calling, I think you can do a lot more than most people would assume.

Rascoff: I wasn't alive in the '60s, but obviously there seemed then to have been this sense of upheaval and of empowerment, and youth were able to make an impact. It does seem like we have a lot of that today, and some of that is because of the democratization of media and social media. Some of it is because of millennials and just young people feel they want to be part of something bigger, connected to some sort of a mission, whether it's at a company or in politics or in society.

It does feel different than it did 10 or 15 years ago.

Jones: Even five years ago.

Rascoff: I'm trying to adapt to that as a CEO of what's it like to run a company in that environment. I think the media's trying to adapt to what's it like to inform people about what's happening in the world around them in that sort of environment.

Jones: I think people have a sense, and they're not wrong, that maybe help is not on the way. And in that situation, you want to do something. And I think, frankly, people who are not in government and who are not in politics are gonna have to do more. It used to be that the future was written in law in Washington, D.C. It was written in law by senators, by congress people, by Supreme Court folks, people who have been democratically selected to figure out the future for America and write the future in law.

Now, frankly, the future is being written in code — computer code — in Silicon Valley and places like this. They're updating your phones right now. You didn't ask them to, they're just busy doing it. If you think about that, what that means is that the private sector — whether it's finance or technology or media — the momentum is there, the power is there, the money is there.

But the people who are sitting in those chairs, in your chairs, nobody's coming to you and said, “You're supposed to save the world." They say, “You're supposed to get your project done. You're supposed to meet these earnings reports." But increasingly, you're gonna feel an urgency about the world. And you don't think you can wait four years to vote on it and hope it works out okay.

And so, this is a new reality, I think, for the private sector — that you actually have the ability to make a change. You have a whole generation that wants to make a change, and there's a big failure at the government level. And not just United States — throughout the West.

That's gonna be something that's important to take seriously 'cause I think to keep your best folks and to get your best work out of your best folks, that social purpose has to get elevated a little bit.

Rascoff: Companies like ours have been pulled into this by their employees really saying, “We want you to be more engaged civically. We want you to either be more philanthropic or more outspoken on political issues or both." And it's complicated managing a company in that type of environment, especially such a polarized, politicized situation.

I know there are things that our employees want me to speak out on, topics that I have chosen not to engage on, where other CEOs have. The litmus test that I've made for myself is does it directly affect our employees or our company?

What have you seen, either guests on your shows or others that you're interacting with in media and business landscape — how are they navigating that?

Jones:The reason I like what you're doing is because it's authentic to you. I think the most important thing is that you do you.

But I think trying to figure out how to let that authenticity bubble up through the rest of the company — that's a more difficult management challenge. I'm looking around at CNN, and I'm new to CNN, but I'm not young. So, I was born in '68, so I'll be 50 years old this year.

I'm new to CNN, but I'm not young. Because I'm new, I have more in common with the younger people, though. And I'm watching all these younger people — they have just brilliant ideas. Just unbelievably brilliant ideas. What they think is newsworthy is not what we are putting on the news.

I think we're leaving a ton of value on the table, just because the thing is just not set up to listen to the 24-year-old who's been there for 18 months. And so, that I think for companies of this size, figuring out some way — you should be authentic to yourself, but keeping your ear big for the authentic voices in your building, which will actually change what you're authentic about, I think that's the big challenge.

Rascoff: The nice thing about young people is — you once were in your mid-20s, started to take on the criminal justice system — is they don't know any better. So, they're hopelessly optimistic and naive.

In my world, in the startup world, that enables them and encourages them to start companies, 'cause they don't know any better.

You focused on criminal justice, then the environment, and then, more recently, STEM and underserved populations or underrepresented populations in technology. So, tell us about #YesWeCode and what you're up to more recently.

Rascoff: Part of the tragedy of what I see happening on is just what I call wasted genius. I spent a lot of time in tough schools visiting prisons, juvenile detention centers. Geniuses, just super ridiculously smart people. Genius is actually pretty uniformly spread out, but opportunity is not.

And so, when I was at Yale, I saw kids doing all kind of drugs and terrible stuff. The cops never got called, nobody went to prison. At worst, they went to rehab. Maybe they had to take a semester off, and that was it. And then, those people went on to become doctors, and lawyers. George W. Bush, president of the United States, that — you could have a bad couple years if you're at a certain income level and a certain zip code.

But a few blocks away, kids doing fewer drugs got seven years, 13 years, 22 years in prison. And so, we're just wasting a ton of genius, some of those young people who are behind bars right now could be the Mark Zuckerbergs, or they could start the Zillows or whatever, but they just won't have that shot.

And so, we started #YesWeCode as really an opportunity to try to connect some of the brilliant urban youth that we know in the Oakland part of the Bay Area with Silicon Valley. And Prince, the late rock star, was a person who really wanted us to do that. And so, Prince and I were the co-founders on #YesWeCode.

And it's been a really powerful experience because, just from a physical point of view, Oakland is only about 37 minutes from the Google campus, and I think 41 minutes from the Facebook campus. It's very, very close. But it may as well be on the other side of the moon in terms of somebody who's going to — what used to be Castle Von High School and their thought about the fact that they could ever work at Facebook; it's just completely on the different side of the moon.

Rascoff: What can companies do to improve underrepresented minorities in technology?

Jones: I think a couple things. First, how many people here ever had an internship any place? So, just that. Just doing internships and apprenticeship programs is so important. Because the thing about it is when you try to hire somebody for a job, there's only one of two outcomes. They're either gonna make it, or they're gonna get fired.

And that can be scary for everybody. It's like, “We hired somebody." The thing about an internship: You win if you just complete it. I had an internship — nobody's expected to ace the internship. They just had it, and they did a good job, they made some friends, they learned some stuff, they got some mentorship, their sights got raised.

That is not happening for huge sections of our country. Just literally people can't even get their foot in the door. I think internship programs are important, and then apprenticeship programs, where somebody's paid to work for three months or six months, and they complete the apprenticeship.

Maybe they're great, and they're awesome, and you hire them, you could say. But if not, they at least successfully completed an apprenticeship program. They might be able to go someplace else and get a job. These are the kinds of things that an HR department doesn't want to have to deal with the brain damage and the heartburn around, unless there's a passion in the company and not just the CEO.

By the way, stuff like this — it can't just be the CEO. If the CEO's excited about the internship program and you're not, it'll be the worst internship program ever. If the CEO's passionate about diversity and you're not, or passionate about apprenticeships and you're not, then even the people who see the video and who come will have a miserable experience.

So, it's really about you as a cohort recognizing the importance to yourself of bringing in some of these new voices and perspectives. When I first started doing this, I thought about it more honestly as, “This is great for the young people." I didn't realize how great it was for the companies.

It took, actually, a while for me to realize how great it was for people with completely different perspective, Rolodex, understanding to come in.

We occasionally do these hack-athons through #YesWeCode, and we get urban kids in the same room with engineers from top companies, and every single time we do it, the engineers are blown away by how smart these kids are. We've done it in Baltimore, in Oakland, in New Orleans and all over the country.

And top engineers — they come in, they think they're gonna teach these kids stuff, and within 20 minutes their mouths are hanging open. Not just by how smart the young people are, but also by the kids of problems that young people want to solve using technology.

We did a hack-athon once where a young girl — the problem she was trying to solve was that she was in foster care, African-American, tough background. And she said, “Mr. Jones, when you're in foster care, your parents aren't around, and you just have to wear whatever clothes your foster parents find for you.

“So, sometimes when you go to school, people laugh at you because of the way you look. So, young girls like me, we sometimes do stuff that we're not proud of to get money to buy clothes so we don't get laughed at." Her solution, very simple, “Could we build an app where people who are donating clothes" — 'cause a lot of their clothes are donated — “where the clothes could be found on an app, and we could pick our own clothes, so that way we'd be picking clothes that would be good for us?"

The engineer sitting next to me said, “That's probably a multibillion dollar idea because second-hand, used clothes — that's a global market. And nobody's ever actually even suggested that." And what I said is, “Poor kids have billion-dollar solutions because they've got billion-dollar problems."

And when you start listening to what some people are going through, you'd wind up finding whole other market opportunities — all kinds of adjacent possibilities that just aren't available to you if it's just everybody who went to fancy schools like me.

This whole #YesWeCode experience — and I just appreciate so much your support of it — I didn't realize what an elitist snob I was. I'm just gonna be honest. The first time we did a hack-athon in Oakland I showed up, and you got all these kids, and they're from tough neighborhoods, and some of these neighborhoods don't get along.

And I walk in there, and my first thought is, “I hope there's not a fight." This is anti-racist, civil rights guy. But the bias in my own head, my first thought was, “I hope there's not a fight." And three days later, by the way, when these kids had shown up 20 to 30 minutes early every day — they're sitting there, waiting for us to open up the building, and you can't drag 'em out there at the end of the day. And they've come up with ideas that are 20 times better than anything anybody has come up with from my sector of society. I was embarrassed.

I had to tell 'em, I thought, “Listen, I totally underestimated you guys. And if I'm doing it, Lord knows what other people are doing." And it just made me a complete zealot lunatic about creating more opportunity for folks in those places. And if Zillow can be a place to absorb even a fraction of that talent, there's no telling what can happen here.

Rascoff: I wanna talk about the state of news media. Yeah, I know. [Laughter] It's a fraught topic —

Jones: I thought you liked me.

Rascoff: Probably a year or two ago, if you had said, “The state of news media," the topic of conversation would have been about how difficult it is for print — maybe broadcast — but mostly print to make money in an increasingly digital environment. Now, fast forward a couple years, and it's more about what role does the media play to inform the public? How do politicians interact with the media?

From your perch, where you sit as a media professional, what would you wish that politicians did differently?

And I'm not just talking about Trump. I'm talking more generally to try to make for better discourse.

Jones:I don't know. I wouldn't necessarily blame the politicians. I sometimes feel like I work in the tobacco industry. Like, “Don't use our product; it's bad for your health." Sometimes, I feel that badly about the way that the media has responded.

I don't blame the politicians; they do what they do given what's available to them. I blame, really, us in the media system. There's another round of innovation. We now have a system based on the phones in your pocket — a ton of data, no wisdom at all. That's how I would describe it.

You are overwhelmed with data, and you can't find wisdom no matter what you do. And it's really the lack of wisdom that I think is causing the problem. I don't know what's gonna happen, but this is not working.

Because for CNN, I get to go into red states and red counties, talk to Trump voters all the time. The way we're talking past each other is just heartbreaking.

Rascoff: That seems sort of — I have a hard time convincing myself that will ever change. That seems sort of inevitable, given the fragmentation of media and the echo chamber that we put ourselves into, and the way that digital advertising and Facebook personalization propagates that ideology bubble that we all live in. We seem to inevitably be on this course towards more and more polarization.

Jones: And thank you very much.

Rascoff: How do we fix it? Come on, Van, what's the solution?

Jones: Hey look, I don't know what to do. I think I know how to be in the face of it. Less arrogant, less insistent that I'm right about everything, less committed to treating the red states the way that colonizers treat Third World countries.

It's very tough to lead a country you don't love. It's very hard to win people over when you don't respect them at all. And the one thing I know we need to stop doing is having this attitude, “You are an idiot and a bigot and a fool and a chump. Vote for me." That's less persuasive than you might think if you listen to NPR and CNN and MSNBC.

I think trying to insult people into joining our cause is ill-considered. I think that the idea that we're supposed to have empathy for everybody except Trump voters, that as liberals and progressives and — not putting you in that mix, but I'm just saying for myself — as liberals and progressives, we're supposed to have these big, open arms and big, open hearts, except for half the country?

That is not gonna work.

Rascoff: I strongly agree with one thing you said, which is that regardless of whether you're a Republican or Democrat, dismissing people on the other side of the aisle, if you — that is a recipe for disaster. We have to be respectful of people of all different walks of life and all different political persuasions.

Jones:Basic human rights and human dignity should be a threshold. We shouldn't attack people because of where they're born and their sexuality, their race, their gender, all that kind of stuff. In kindergarten, you can't do that. So, I think it's perfectly fine to decide to fight for that.

But to then extend that and dismiss half the country as, to make up a word, deplorable because they disagree with you, that is also — you gotta throw a flag on that as well. And also, let me just say this, we need each other. People forget that. We need each other. I'm a liberal. I think you need me in society. I got a big heart, I care about people who don't have big PACs and don't have lobbyists and can't give you any money, but I'll fight for 'em anyway.

I think you need me. But you don't want me writing a budget by myself. You don't because a conservative will say, “Van, I appreciate your bleeding heart, but how much does this cost, and who's gonna pay for it?" And I never think about that. I just say, “Feed the babies!" I'm not that worried about that.

It's in that back and forth —

Rascoff: Again, the importance of diversity, political and otherwise.

Van, you're a do-good machine, spawning all these different organizations, and thank you for talking with us. Thanks a lot for sharing thoughts about the future of media and just explaining your perspective and the impact that you're making. Thanks a lot, congratulations. You have the last word, please.

Jones:Look, I just want to say, you weren't born to do normal stuff. It's not a normal time. It's not business as usual. And you can have a much bigger impact than you usually let yourself believe. And the fact that you're here in New York City, you're working for a major tech company — look, my kids live in LA. The first thing they do is Zillow each other's houses to figure out the pecking order.

Till a year ago we were renting, so we didn't get a chance to play. But true story — but that's a big deal. The fact that you work for a company that every kid in America has heard of, or a lot of them have heard of, gives you standing. It gives you a legitimacy. It gives you a credibility.

And you might feel confused, and you might feel frustrated, and you might feel a bunch of things, but when you walk out of this door, you mean something to people. You mean something to people you went to school with, you mean something to your families, you mean something to your communities.

And you don't have to have all the answers. You just have to have some of the right questions like, “How can I help? What's going on? Maybe I know somebody; let me see if I can be of some use." You got people behind you in line who look like you or who don't — who don't have one mentor, not one person who's willing to tell them one thing.

And you can change that person's life without a raise, without changing a single other thing — you can change that person's life. Somebody did it for you, so I wish that people in national media and national politics could come here and say, “Here's how we're gonna fix everything and pass every bill and pass every program." We're a long way from that.

That is going to be the outcome of something else, and the something else is ordinary people giving a damn. Ordinary people reaching out to each other. Ordinary people doing one more thing than they would have done, and that begins to create an accumulation that can get us out of this thing.

There's something in this room, there's something in this company, there's something that could be very powerful, very beautiful, very impactful for ordinary people. I just encourage you to keep seeking for it because it can be really, really special. So, thank you.

Rascoff: Thank you.

The post CNN's Van Jones: Genius is Everywhere appeared first on Office Hours.

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California Passes Landmark AI Law as Russell Westbrook Backs Eazewell

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Good Morning Los Angeles,

What do a new California law and Russell Westbrook’s latest startup have in common? AI at its most powerful and most personal.

California has officially passed the nation’s first AI safety law (SB 53). Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, the measure requires companies developing large scale AI models to disclose risk assessments and safety testing. On the surface, it sounds procedural. But in practice, it is a potential reset on how quickly AI companies ship new products. For years, the narrative has been “innovation first, oversight later.” With this law, California is betting that transparency can move in tandem with progress. Whether it becomes a model for federal policy or a cautionary tale depends on how the industry responds.

Meanwhile, Eazewell, a newly launched startup co-founded by NBA All Star Russell Westbrook, is tackling one of the most difficult spaces in tech: end of life planning. The company offers an AI platform designed to guide families through complex care transitions. It is not the kind of space most founders rush into. It is emotional, often uncomfortable, and full of fragmented systems. But precisely because of that, the potential impact is significant. By blending AI with healthcare navigation, Eazewell is aiming to make one of life’s hardest processes less overwhelming. Westbrook’s involvement draws attention, but the real story is a startup willing to bring technology into conversations many people would rather avoid.

Taken together, these stories capture the stretch of AI right now. On one end, lawmakers are moving to contain its risks. On the other, founders are pushing it into the most intimate corners of our lives. It is not often that state legislation and end of life care land in the same conversation, but that is the reality of AI in 2025.

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      • Powerhouse Capital led a growth funding round for Five Iron Golf UAE’s franchisees, backed by a network of investors and professional athletes. The capital is targeted to fuel expansion, new venues, and enhanced operations across the UAE market. This investment reflects confidence in pairing tech-driven sports entertainment with scalable hospitality models. - learn more
      • MTech Capital remains a backer as CyberCube announces a fresh infusion of more than $180M led by Spectrum Equity. The cyber risk analytics firm is using the capital to accelerate product innovation, expand globally, and deepen its presence across insurance, reinsurance, and broking markets. The investment will help CyberCube scale solutions that quantify cyber risk at portfolio levels and power smarter underwriting decisions. - learn more
      • Helena participated in Phaidra’s $50M Series B round, joining lead investor Collaborative Fund and backers like Index Ventures and NVIDIA. Phaidra builds AI systems to optimize energy, cooling, and operational efficiency in data centers, striving to help infrastructure run smarter. The new funding will be used to scale its platform, deepen customer deployments, and expand its reach in facility control and AI automation. - learn more
      • Lasagna joined DeepWork Capital, Florida Opportunity Fund, and Lookout Ventures in backing Circuitry.ai’s seed financing round. Circuitry.ai offers a Decision Intelligence platform that powers “Autonomous Service Journeys” for manufacturers, layering AI advisors, agents, and analytics to optimize service operations. The funding will help scale engineering and go-to-market teams, deepen integrations with service platforms, and expand the solution across industries like automotive, industrial systems, and medical devices. - learn more
      • B Capital led a $64M seed round in Axiom Math, the startup founded by a Stanford dropout aiming to build an AI system that not only solves the hardest math problems, but also invents new ones. Axiom has pulled talent from top places like Meta to push toward next-gen mathematical reasoning. The funds will support scaling research, expanding the team, and accelerating their vision of AI that thinks deeper in pure and applied math. - learn more
      • Alexandria Venture Investments and Wedbush Healthcare Partners joined the $205M capital raise for Crystalys Therapeutics, which emerged from stealth mode to fund late-stage trials of its gout treatment. The San Diego based biotech is pushing forward dotinurad, a once-daily oral drug being tested across U.S. and European trials for patients who don’t respond to first-line therapies. With this backing, Crystalys aims to fast-track clinical development and bring a needed second-line gout treatment to market. - learn more
      • GordonMD Global Investments joined new and existing backers in Star Therapeutics’ oversubscribed $125M Series D financing round. The biotech, co-led by Sanofi Ventures and Viking Global, is deploying the capital to push forward its lead program VGA039, a monoclonal antibody targeting bleeding disorders. The funds will help accelerate its clinical trials and advance its pipeline toward commercialization. - learn more
      • Hawke Ventures joined a funding round in Tie, which raised $10M in Series A to support its AI identity platform for e-commerce brands. Tie helps retailers reclaim hidden website visitors by identifying and enriching anonymous traffic to build better marketing audiences. The capital will go toward scaling the team, deepening integrations with commerce and marketing stacks, and expanding reach among D2C brands. - learn more
      • Foxhog Ventures led a ₹44.37 crore (~$5.3M USD) seed investment in Assessli, a Kolkata deep-tech startup developing what it calls “Large Behavioural Models” (LBMs) that combine genomics, psychology, and digital life data into highly personalized AI twins. The funding will support Assessli’s expansion into the U.S. and U.K., accelerate product commercialization, and increase its technical hiring to scale out its platform. - learn more
      • Bonfire Ventures participated in Alvys’ $40M Series B round, alongside RTP Global, Alpha Square Group, Titanium Ventures, Picus Capital, and others. Alvys offers an AI powered transportation management system (TMS) that streamlines freight operations including dispatch, load management, billing and analytics by automating workflows and integrating across platforms. The funding will help the company build out enterprise features, scale engineering, deepen integrations, and accelerate growth in the logistics and freight sector. - learn more
      • M13 participated in an $11M Series A round for Anything, an AI platform that turns natural-language prompts into production-ready mobile and web applications. Rather than just generating prototypes, Anything’s backend includes infrastructure like authentication, payments, and storage under the hood. With this funding, the company will scale development, expand its user base (now over 700,000), and deepen its platform capabilities to support full app deployment. - learn more
      • Halogen Ventures closed a $30M Fund III and has committed to invest in early stage startups in Alabama, becoming the first out of state VC to partner with Innovate Alabama’s InvestAL program. They have already begun deploying capital into the state, backing startups like Moxi, Auditocity and Croux, and are actively running pitch events to build a local pipeline. - learn more

      LA Exits

      • Griffin Club has been acquired by Bay Club, deepening Bay Club’s footprint in Los Angeles. Griffin Club is a legacy athletic, aquatic, and social club in West LA, known for features like tennis and pickleball courts, pools, wellness classes, and high-end amenities. Bay Club intends to bring Griffin into its LA campus and integrate it into its broader network of fitness and lifestyle clubs. - learn more
      • Beverly Hills Rejuvenation Center has been acquired by Motivant, with Sarah Gabriel installed as its new CEO. The deal brings the med spa franchise into Motivant’s portfolio, aligning it with a growth-focused investment platform. Gabriel’s appointment signals a strategic push to leverage new leadership and scale operations under Motivant’s guidance. - learn more

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            Salt AI Secures $10M to Untangle Healthcare’s Toughest Workflows

            🔦 Spotlight

            Hello Los Angeles,

            Not every startup raise deserves the spotlight, but this week’s news from Salt AI is worth paying attention to. The LA based company just closed a $10 million round led by Morpheus Ventures with participation from Struck Capital, Marbruck Investments and CoreWeave. The goal is to expand what it calls “contextual AI,” and if it works, it could quietly change how some of the most complex corners of healthcare get untangled.

            Healthcare is notorious for slow, clunky systems. Even the smallest workflow, like drug trial data, clinical documentation, or compliance reviews, can drag on for weeks because the tools were never built for speed. Salt AI is betting that the fix is not flashy consumer apps or billion parameter models, but something more practical: AI that slots directly into the day to day grind of life sciences. Their platform lets non technical teams visually build and deploy workflows that would normally take months of coding. Drag, drop, done.

            It sounds simple, but the implications are not. Imagine a biopharma team testing a new drug, able to cut through compliance hurdles in days instead of months. Or clinical researchers spinning up experiments and seeing usable results in real time. Salt AI’s pitch is not about replacing scientists, it is about giving them back time in an industry where time can literally mean lives.

            The new capital will help scale engineering, grow its customer footprint, and push further into healthcare and biopharma. But more importantly, it gives Salt AI the chance to prove that “contextual AI” is more than a buzzword. If they succeed, the company will not just chip away at bottlenecks, it could reshape how innovation itself moves through one of the world’s most heavily regulated and mission critical industries.

            🤝 Venture Deals

                LA Companies

                • Bonsai Health raised $7M in a seed round led by Bonfire Ventures and Wonder Ventures. The Santa Monica based company builds an agentic AI platform that automates front office healthcare workflows, things like patient outreach, scheduling and clinical follow-ups, working behind the scenes to keep patients connected to care and reduce administrative burden. It plans to use the funding to accelerate its specialty AI agents, expand into new medical specialties, and scale its commercialization nationwide. - learn more
                • Genstore raised a $10M Seed round led by Weimob, with participation from Lighthouse Founders’ Fund. The Los Angeles based startup is building an AI-native e-commerce platform that lets merchants launch and run online stores using conversational prompts, automating everything from product listings and copywriting to customer service. The funds will go toward accelerating product development, expanding into new markets, and refining features that simplify online commerce for small and midsized sellers. - learn more
                • TransAstra secured a $5M investment to scale its asteroid capture technology in partnership with NASA. The company aims to advance systems that can snag and repurpose small bodies in space, contributing to sustainable space infrastructure and debris mitigation. With this funding, TransAstra will expand development, deepen its relationship with NASA, and accelerate deployment of its capture hardware. - learn more

                LA Venture Funds

                • Fika Ventures led a seed round investing in MaxHome, joining BBG Ventures, Four Acres and 1Sharpe Ventures. MaxHome is building an AI-native platform focused on automating real estate transaction coordination, the messy, manual work that slows deals. Fika backed the team because it sees a huge opportunity in streamlining broker workflows, reducing errors, and improving the experience for agents and homebuyers alike. - learn more
                • MANTIS Ventures joined NEA, Sequoia, NVIDIA, J.P. Morgan and others in leading a $50M Series B for Factory, valuing the AI coding company at $300 million. Factory builds “droids,” AI agents that automate software development tasks across environments, and claims their platform now tops the Terminal Bench benchmark. With this capital, Factory aims to expand enterprise adoption, deepen integrations, and scale its engineering team globally. - learn more
                • SafeHill (formerly Tacticly) announced a $2.6M pre-seed round led by Mucker Capital, with participation from Chingona Ventures, Techstars, Chicago Early Growth Ventures, The Source Groups, and others. The Chicago-based cybersecurity startup is launching from stealth with SecureIQ, a continuous Threat Exposure Management platform that blends AI-driven testing with human validation to help organizations find and shore up attack paths. The funding will be used to expand engineering, enhance AI-assisted ethical hacking, deepen enterprise partnerships, and broaden compliance and monitoring capabilities. - learn more
                • Prototype Capital was among the investors in Nilo Technologies’ $4M seed round, alongside backers like Supercell, a16z Speedrun, KFund, and Flex Capital. Nilo is building an AI native 3D creation platform that makes game development more accessible, letting creators build interactive worlds in their browser without complex tooling. The funding will help accelerate product development, bring in more users as “Founding Builders,” and expand the platform’s capabilities for real time, multiplayer creation. - learn more
                • Rebel Fund participated in a $7.5M funding round for Indian fintech Gold Firm Gullak backed by Y Combinator. Gullak offers digital gold savings and lending solutions targeted at underbanked consumers in India. Rebel Fund’s investment will help Gullak scale operations, deepen financial inclusion, and expand its product offerings. - learn more
                • B Capital joined Wellington Management, General Catalyst and others in a $400M funding round for Capital Rx, which is rebranding as Judi Health. The company, which operates a pharmacy benefits management platform, will use the capital to expand into full-spectrum health benefits, integrating medical, dental and vision claims processing with its existing PBM capabilities. The move positions Judi Health as a unified tech backbone for benefits administration across employer and plan clients. - learn more
                • Supply Change Capital joined a seed funding round that raised $4.7M for Helios AI, a startup building the first AI co-pilot for food and agriculture supply chains. Helios’ platform combines climate modeling, commodity forecasting, and real-time data to help buyers and suppliers make smarter decisions in volatile markets. The funding will be used to scale the product, expand data coverage globally, and bring its AI tools to more players across the agri-food sector. - learn more

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                    ServiceTitan Ups the AI Stakes

                    🔦 Spotlight

                    Hello Los Angeles,

                    ServiceTitan is making it clear: the trades are getting a tech glow up. At its annual Pantheon conference in Glendale, the home services software giant rolled out a bold AI vision and topped it off with a fresh acquisition that could change the way HVAC contractors do business.

                    First, the AI. ServiceTitan unveiled what it calls the “next evolution” of its platform, and this is not just window dressing. Think automated call summaries so techs spend less time typing, predictive scheduling that knows when your AC is likely to fail before you do, and estimates that generate faster than a homeowner can ask, “So, how much is this going to cost me?” For small and mid sized contractors, these are the kinds of tools that level the playing field against the big chains and maybe even help them get home before dinner. It is AI built not for hype, but for the day to day grind of the trades, where minutes saved can mean jobs won and customers kept.

                    Then came the news that ServiceTitan is acquiring Conduit Tech, a Boston startup best known for its LiDAR powered HVAC design software. Instead of squinting at tape measures and crunching numbers in clunky spreadsheets, contractors can now scan a home, generate a 3D model, and deliver a polished, ACCA certified proposal on the spot. Translation: faster bids, more trust, and fewer “I will get back to you next week” moments.

                    Put together, the AI rollout and Conduit deal are more than product updates. They are a signal of where ServiceTitan wants to take the industry. This is not just software that keeps the books balanced or trucks dispatched. It is an attempt to make technology an advantage in a field where labor is scarce, expectations are high, and every interaction with a customer matters. In short, ServiceTitan is not just keeping the lights on, it is rewiring how the trades get work done.

                    🤝 Venture Deals

                        LA Companies

                        • Modern Animal has hit a $100M annual run rate and closed a new $46M funding round led by Addition, True Ventures and Upfront Ventures with participation from Founders Fund. The company delivers veterinary care both in clinics and virtually, and it is using the funds to expand services such as specialty care, 24/7 virtual access, integrated pharmacy and ecommerce, along with extended urgent care hours. The company also announced a board expansion with new leadership added to support scaling operations and enhancing its technology infrastructure. - learn more
                        • MarqVision raised a $48M Series B round led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from investors including Salesforce Ventures, HSG, Coral Capital, and returning backers like Y Combinator and Altos Ventures. Based in Los Angeles, MarqVision offers AI-powered brand protection tools—monitoring marketplaces, removing counterfeit listings, managing trademarks, and protecting brand reputation online. The new funds will go toward expanding its AI and engineering teams, accelerating automation, enabling enterprise-grade features, and growing its global presence in markets like Japan, Korea, China, Europe and beyond. - learn more
                        • Divergent Technologies raised $290M in a Series E round led by Rochefort Asset Management, with $250M in equity and $40M in debt, bringing its valuation to about $2.3 billion. Using its proprietary DAPS (Divergent Adaptive Production System) platform, the Torrance based company builds hardware for aerospace, defense and automotive sectors by combining rapid design, additive manufacturing and automated assembly. The new capital will help Divergent scale its manufacturing capacity, build out its team and develop new capabilities for upcoming product lines. - learn more
                        • Apex raised $200M in a Series D round led by Interlagos, giving the Los Angeles company a valuation above $1 billion. Apex builds configurable “satellite bus” platforms used by commercial and government clients, including for communications, sensing, and national security constellations. The capital will boost production capacity by 50 percent, expand its manufacturing footprint in Los Angeles, and strengthen vertical integration including acquiring propulsion technology and insourcing more subsystems. - learn more

                          LA Venture Funds

                          • Mantis Venture Capital joined Benchmark, Uncork, Y Combinator and Mayfield in backing Numeral’s $35M Series B, part of a $57M total funding haul. Numeral is an AI powered platform that automates everything around sales tax for e-commerce and SaaS brands including filing, remittance, exemption certificates, state registrations, nexus detection and more. The money will go to speeding up product innovation, building out its global compliance footprint, and adding smarter automation so finance teams can stop wrestling with tax rules and start scaling. - learn more
                          • Magnify Ventures participated in Series A for Seven Starling, contributing to an $8M funding round led by Rethink Impact. Seven Starling is a virtual women’s mental health company focused on maternal mental health, offering group therapy, medication management, patient advocates, and digital tools. The new capital will fuel its expansion into more U.S. states (aiming for over 30 by the end of 2026), deepen partnerships with healthcare providers, and scale its model to help more mothers. - learn more
                          • Calibrate Ventures led Vibranium Labs’ $4.6M seed round, joined by Mirae Asset and investors including a16z and Franklin Templeton. Vibranium Labs’ flagship product, “Vibe AI,” acts as a full-time AI incident engineer, monitoring, triaging, and resolving IT incidents automatically. The funds will be used to expand the engineering team, accelerate product development, and deepen integrations so Vibe AI can be embedded into more incident response systems across industries. - learn more
                          • B Capital led a $20M financing round in Extend, with additional participation by March Capital, Point72 Ventures, FinTech Collective, and Commerce Ventures. Extend, a spend-and-expense management platform, allows businesses to use virtual cards with their existing bank or card programs while offering workflow tools like receipt capture, approvals, and automated reconciliation. The new capital will help Extend scale issuer partnerships, launch new expense management services, accelerate its path to profitability, and the company also added Francois Horikawa as CFO to help guide the financial strategy forward. - learn more
                          • Alexandria Venture Investments joined Versant Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners USA in a $65M Series A for Dualitas Therapeutics, a South San Francisco company developing bispecific antibodies through its DualScreen discovery engine. Dualitas is advancing two lead programs, DTX-103 for allergic disease and DTX-102 for autoimmune conditions, both showing strong preclinical results. The funding will support these programs and expand the company’s platform to discover new bispecific candidates in immunology, inflammation and beyond. - learn more
                          • Oversubscribed Ventures joined a syndicate that invested in Noble Mobile’s $10 million seed round. Noble Mobile, founded by Andrew Yang, is a telecom startup offering unlimited data plans while giving customers cash back when they use less data. The funds will be used to launch operations, roll out its mobile virtual network service, and build features that encourage better digital wellness. - learn more
                          • Mantis Venture Capital participated in Doctronic’s $20M Series A round, which was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and also backed by Union Square Ventures, Tusk Ventures, Seven Stars, and others. Doctronic is a healthcare AI startup building a platform for fast, personalized medical advice and virtual visits with licensed physicians, aiming to reduce wait times and costs. The new funds will help the company scale its operations across the U.S., expand partnerships with insurers and health systems, and extend its reach to more patients. - learn more
                          • Strong Ventures led a Series A round investing about ₩1 billion in Ares3, with Seoul National University Technology Holdings also participating. Ares3 runs florist subscription service “Honest Flower” for consumers and “FlowerGo,” a B2B platform for floral suppliers, with steady growth thanks to brand partnerships and solid demand. The new capital will help Ares3 extend its reach via offline experience locations and campaigns to shift public perception of flowers from luxury to everyday goods. - learn more
                          • Gold House Ventures participated in MedSetGo’s oversubscribed $2.4M seed round led by TurboStart. MedSetGo is an AI-driven healthcare company based in San Francisco that is working to streamline patient care transitions by helping people find and schedule the right care after discharge. The funding will go toward accelerating product development and hiring, especially expanding the engineering, data science, and commercialization teams. - learn more
                          • March Capital was among the investors in Lila Sciences’ $235M Series A round, which was co-led by Braidwell and Collective Global. Lila builds an autonomous science platform combining AI, robotics and software to automate the scientific method - generating hypotheses, designing experiments, running them, learning from results. The funds will be used to scale Lila’s “AI Science Factories,” expand globally in cities like Boston, San Francisco and London, and accelerate its ability to explore materials, chemistry, life sciences and diagnostics more quickly. - learn more

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