
Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
XFive LA-Based Proptech Companies to Watch in 2022
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.

Real estate, like seemingly everything else in the COVID era, had a weird year. 2021 saw a continued shift to a sellers' market and an ever-increasing demand for short-term rentals. For proptech companies, there has been a lot of opportunity—and money—in high-value homes and assets.
In the Los Angeles area, several proptech companies had an impressive year amidst the turmoil. Here’s our end-of-year look at some of the big moves in the sector.
AvantStay
AvantStay offers short term rental options for luxury properties. Similar to Airbnb or Vrbo (but more upscale), the company enters into long-term leasing agreements with property owners in sought-after areas and then converts the properties into vacation rentals. In 2021, Avantstay expanded into new markets in Colorado, South Carolina, and Hawaii; in total, they have agreements in over 600 properties across 60 different U.S. cities. In addition to rental help, AvantStay also offers other premium services for homeowners, like filling a property’s refrigerator with food before a guest arrives, or offering an in-house design team to ensure the property is as chic and luxurious as possible. AvantStay has grown by over 1,000% in the last three years with no signs of slowing down in 2022: The company is aiming to have 2,500 properties listed by the time 2023 rolls around.
Crexi
Crexi has been one of the powerhouses of the Los Angeles proptech scene since it was founded in 2014, and 2022 was no different. The company allows users to buy, sell, and lease commercial real estate via their online portal. Led by CEO Mike Degiorgio, Crexi currently boasts over a half a million listings, and the Marina Del Rey-based company is hiring for a variety of positions as it continues to grow. 2021 saw the site close it’s largest ever deal when it sold a Las Vegas business park at auction for $205 million, setting a record for the largest single asset sale in an online transaction.
Endpoint
Founded in 2018, the El Segundo-based title and escrow company raised $150 million in October of 2022. As the name suggests, Endpoint offers tools for brokers, agents, and buyers to monitor the final stages of homebuying. The massive round of funding this fall was provided by First American Financial Corp. and brings Endpoint’s total funding to date northwards of $220 million. The company says its software has been used to close more than $2.5 billion of real estate transactions. The new funding will be used in part to hire 80 new jobs, bringing the company’s employee count close to 300.
RealtyMogul
RealtyMogul has been around since 2012, but the Los Angeles-based company has been picking up steam recently. RealtyMogul offers a crowdfunding real estate platform that lets ordinary people pool money and buy equity in properties across the United States. RealtyMogul has facilitated the investment of $3.5 billion on its platform, and in September, the company saw its users invest $10 million in less than 24 hours to fund the construction of a luxury high rise in Nashville, Tennessee. As the user count continues to grow beyond 200,000 investors, RealtyMogul is providing a way for individuals to pool their money and compete in markets that were once reserved for private equity giants.
Ylopo
Ylopo is a tool for real estate agents to win business with property owners looking to sell. The Santa Monica-based company helps agents generate, nurture and convert seller leads with a series of digital tools. Essentially a digital marketing assistant, the technology has thrived in the sellers market brought about by COVID. Ylopo–taken from the suffix of “monopoly” spelled backwards–has even attracted the attention of Facebook: In April of 2021, the social media giant named the digital marketing company part of its Top Providers Initiative, which essentially means that real estate agents using Ylopo will be given access to Facebook’s best marketing and ad partners.
- Ex-Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff jumps back into real estate ... ›
- The Future of Real Estate: Bigger Offices and Smaller Chains - dot.LA ›
- AvantStay CEO: Record Gas Prices Won't Keep Americans Home - dot.LA ›
- Health Tech Is Struggling to Navigate the FDA - dot.LA ›
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.
Inspectiv Raises $8.6M To Build a Better Cybersecurity Platform
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
What do education startups, maternal care platforms and Minecraft servers have in common? They’re all susceptible to hacking.
Also, businesses in each industry use software created by Manhattan Beach-based Inspectiv, which announced Thursday that it’s raised an $8.6 million Series A round to continue developing its artificial intelligence that detects and wipes out security threats.
The new funds bring the total Inspectiv has raised to $16.6 million since its 2018 launch. Founder and chairman Joseph Melika told dot.LA the company’s recent growth has largely been steered by the pandemic as companies put a higher value on data security.
The heightened need for better security, according to Melika, is due to recent changes in how people work. “Just people, frankly, getting distracted,” he said, has made some businesses more vulnerable to hackers.
“They’re working remotely, their laptops are from home [with] no firewall,” he said, adding that has left a lot of systems potentially exposed to hacks.
Inspectiv’s risk management platform runs autonomously 24/7 and is constantly scanning for threats, Melika said. The software isn’t just run on A.I., it's also combined with a network of security researchers. Melika said part of Inspectiv’s intelligence comes from the input of thousands of researchers.
Once it finds a threat, the software alerts Inspectiv, whose vulnerability spot-checkers verify it and identify it to the client. Then, Inspectiv scans its other clients for the same threat, or similar invasions that could be lurking. There’s also the potential for the software to review backup files, in case a company wants to make sure no older resolved threats spring back to life.
Melika pointed out several current Inspectiv clients using its software are local, including GoGuardian, maternal care company Mahmee and Minehut, a platform for people to host custom “Minecraft” servers.
The funding round was led by StepStone Group, among a suite of existing Inspectiv investors including Westwood-based Fika Ventures, San Francisco’s Freestyle Capital and Santa Monica-based Mucker Capital.
CEO Ryan Disraeli (left) and Founder and Chairman Joseph Melika (right)
Courtesy of Inspectiv
Inspectiv also announced a leadership transition this week alongside several new hires – former CEO and co-founder of fraud prevention service Telesign Ryan Disraeli will take the reins as CEO of Inspectiv, while Melika will remain on board as the company’s board chairman.
“Inspectiv is really helping secure the internet, and that was something that personally I could get passionate about,” Disraeli said. “To be able to work with a team of people that we brought in that also has that security background, but also experience scaling up organizations was a pretty exciting opportunity.”
The company also hired Karen Nguyen as chief revenue officer, Ray Espinoza as chief information security officer and Ross Hendrickson to be vice president of engineering. Disraeli said the Inspectiv team is currently 22 people but the company is “adding aggressively to that number” by expanding its product development team.
Disraeli wouldn’t disclose revenues but told dot.LA he’s confident he can grow Inspectiv quickly.
“There's a lot of companies raising money that don't have customers and don't have real growth,” Disraeli said. “This is a company that has real customers that are growing and growing with us.”
- Santa Barbara Cybersecurity Startups Raise Millions - dot.LA ›
- NVISIONx Cybersecurity Startup Raised $4.6M in Seed Funding ... ›
- Orca Security Lands $230M as it Looks to Grow in Los Angeles - dot ... ›
- Obsidian Cybersecurity Startup Raises $90 Million - dot.LA ›
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Buys Game Studio Proletariat To Expand ‘World of Warcraft’ Staff
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Blizzard intends to acquire Proletariat, a Boston-based game studio that developed the wizard-themed battle royale game “Spellbreak.”
VentureBeat first reported that the Santa Monica-based publisher was exploring a purchase, noting its ongoing mission to expand the staff working on Blizzard’s hit massively multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft,” which launched in 2004.
Proletariat’s team of roughly 100 people will be merged into Activision’s “World of Warcraft” team to work on its upcoming expansion game. Though there’s no release date as yet for the title, “World of Warcraft: Dragonflight” is expected to debut before the end of this year.
Activision did not immediately return a request for comment. Financial terms of the deal were not available.
This Proletariat deal is Activision's latest push to consolidate its family tree by folding its subsidiary companies in under the Blizzard banner. More than 15 years after it bought out New York-based game developer Vicarious Visions, Activision merged the business into its own last year, ensuring that the studio wouldn’t work on anything but Blizzard titles.
The deal could also have implications for workers at Activision who have looked to unionize. One subsidiary of Activision, Wisconsin-based Raven Software, cast a majority vote to establish its Game Workers Alliance—backed by the nationwide Communications Workers of America union—in May.
Until recently, Activision has remained largely anti-union in the face of its employees organizing—but it could soon not have much of a say in the matter once it finalizes its $69 billion sale to Microsoft, which said publicly it would maintain a “neutral approach” and wouldn’t stand in the way if more employees at Activision expressed interest in unionizing after the deal closes.
Each individual studio under the Activision umbrella would need to have a majority vote in favor of unionizing to join the GWA. Now, Proletariat’s workforce—which, somewhat ironically given its name, isn’t unionized—is another that could make such a decision leading up to the Microsoft deal’s expected closing in 2023.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Snap Officially Launching ‘Snapchat Plus’ Subscription Tier
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Snap is officially launching Snapchat Plus, a paid subscription plan on Santa Monica-based social media company’s flagship app.
Snap is now the latest media company to tack a “plus” to the end of its name—announcing Wednesday that the new service will provide users with “exclusive, experimental and pre-release features” for the price of $3.99 a month. The first features available to paying subscribers include the ability to customize the style of app’s icon, pin a “BFF” to the top of their chat history and see which users have rewatched a story, according to The Verge.
The new product arrives after Snap confirmed reports earlier this month that it was testing Snapchat Plus—though the version that it has rolled out does not incorporate the rumored feature that would allow subscribers to view a friend’s whereabouts over the previous 24 hours.
Snapchat Plus will initially be available to users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While certain features will remain exclusive to Plus users, others will eventually be released across Snapchat’s entire user base, Snap senior vice president of product Jacob Andreou told The Verge. (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)
The subscription tier introduces a new potential revenue stream for Snap, which experienced a “challenging” first quarter marked by disruptions to its core digital advertising market. However, Andreou told The Verge that the product is not expected to be a “material new revenue source” for the company. He also disputed that Snap was responding to its recent economic headwinds, noting that Snap had been exploring a paid offering since 2016.
Despite charging users, Snapchat Plus does not include the option to turn off ads. “Ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term,” Andreou said.
Snap is not the first popular social media platform to venture into subscriptions: Both Twitter and Tumblr rolled out paid tiers last year, albeit with mixedresults.Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.