The AI Arms Race Hits College Campuses

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Hello, Hello.

This week, one of LA’s most recognizable consumer brands packed its biggest bag yet.

Samsonite Group has agreed to acquire an 85% stake in BÉIS for $178.5M, valuing the Los Angeles-based travel and lifestyle brand at approximately $210M. The deal is expected to close in Q4, pending regulatory approval.

Founded by actress and entrepreneur Shay Mitchell and incubated by LA-based Beach House Group in 2018, BÉIS has grown from a digitally native luggage startup into a profitable business that generated approximately $210M in sales last year. Along the way, it built the kind of fiercely loyal online following that legacy brands spend years and considerable marketing budgets trying to manufacture.

Image Source: BÉIS

That may be the most interesting part of this deal. Samsonite is not simply acquiring another luggage line. It is buying access to a younger, predominantly female customer base, a sophisticated direct-to-consumer operation and a brand that knows how to turn social media attention into actual sales. The suitcases are useful; the cultural relevance is the real carry-on.

BÉIS will continue operating as a standalone brand under CEO Adeela Hussain Johnson and its existing management team. Mitchell will retain a 15% ownership stake and continue guiding the company’s creative and product vision, while Samsonite brings the global distribution, sourcing and logistics infrastructure needed to take the brand further.

For LA’s startup community, the acquisition is another reminder that valuable technology companies do not always look like software companies. BÉIS built its advantage through digital distribution, community and an unusually sharp understanding of its customer. Now, one of the world’s largest luggage companies wants what it created.

Sometimes the strongest exit starts with knowing exactly what people want to pack.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

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Happy Friday, LA.

The largest checks in tech are increasingly going toward companies trying to build their way out of America’s biggest physical constraints.

This week, two Los Angeles startups raised a combined $2.37 billion in equity to tackle two particularly urgent ones: how the country manufactures critical hardware and where it will find enough electricity to power the AI era.

Torrance-based Hadrian is building highly automated factories for defense and aerospace. El Segundo’s Valar Atomics wants to manufacture nuclear reactors at scale. Different industries, same underlying bet: the next generation of technology will depend on our ability to produce physical infrastructure much faster than we do today.

Hadrian raised $1.37 billion in Series D funding, bringing its valuation to $7.87 billion. The company plans to use the capital to open new factories, expand research and development, and increase its capacity to produce critical defense, aerospace and industrial systems.

Hadrian’s pitch is straightforward, if wildly ambitious: America needs to relearn how to build things and build them quickly.

Its factories combine skilled workers with AI, robotics and proprietary software to manufacture precision components and, increasingly, complete mission-critical systems. Its customers include defense giants such as Lockheed Martin and RTX, along with newer players like Anduril.

The company has come a long way from simply making aerospace parts. Hadrian is positioning itself as a piece of America’s industrial infrastructure, offering manufacturers a way to rapidly scale domestic production at a time when wars abroad, strained supply chains and growing defense demands have made the country’s manufacturing gaps increasingly difficult to ignore.

Investors are clearly buying the argument. The new round comes just over a year after Hadrian raised $260 million, suggesting that “reindustrialization” has officially graduated from venture capital buzzword to billion-dollar investment thesis.

Meanwhile, roughly 15 miles away in El Segundo, Valar Atomics is moving even faster than its enormous ambitions suggested.

When we last wrote about Valar, the company was reportedly raising $450 million at a $2 billion valuation and racing to prove that nuclear energy could move on AI’s timetable. Now, it has closed a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia Capital, secured an additional $200 million credit facility and reportedly reached a $6 billion valuation.

Valar is developing standardized, factory-built nuclear power plants designed to avoid the enormous costs and decades-long construction timelines associated with traditional nuclear projects. Its goal is not merely to build a working reactor, but to eventually manufacture fleets of them.

That ambition also sounds considerably less theoretical than it did when we first covered the company. In June, Valar’s Ward 250 reactor achieved a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Just one week later, the company demonstrated the reactor generating electricity to power an Nvidia Blackwell system. Valar now says the new funding will help it move from proving its technology works to producing reactors at scale.

The timing is no coincidence. AI’s enormous appetite for electricity is forcing the tech industry to confront a basic reality: the cloud still has to plug into something. Training models and operating massive data centers will require far more reliable power, and nuclear energy is rapidly becoming one of Silicon Valley’s favorite answers.

Hadrian and Valar may be solving different problems, but their unusually large rounds point to the same shift. AI can design, predict and automate, but it cannot manufacture a missile component or generate a megawatt of electricity on its own. That requires factories, energy systems, supply chains and a great deal of capital.

For years, venture-backed companies competed to build the software layer. Now, some of the biggest bets are being placed on the infrastructure underneath it.

The future may run on AI. But first, someone has to build what keeps it running.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

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Hello LA,

This week’s startup story began three years ago with an AI assistant built for almost any small business. It ended, or perhaps graduated, with an acquisition by one of the fitness industry’s largest technology providers.

ABC Fitness has acquired Replify, an AI platform that manages customer communication for gyms and wellness businesses across phone, text, email and chat. Its virtual agents can answer questions, qualify leads, schedule tours and classes, follow up on missed calls and run outbound campaigns. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Before Replify found its footing in fitness, it was HeyLibby, a general-purpose AI assistant founded in 2023 by former Zillow colleagues Spencer Rascoff, Tony Small and Anna Rodriguez. The company was incubated inside Rascoff’s 75 & Sunny Labs and initially set out to help small businesses turn incoming messages into qualified leads.

That broad vision gave HeyLibby a large potential customer base, from real estate agents and contractors to hairstylists and event planners. But as the team searched for product-market fit, one industry’s problem stood out. Gym and wellness employees were often too busy helping customers in person to answer every call, text or email, leaving prospective members waiting and potential revenue on the table.

That insight reshaped the company. HeyLibby narrowed its focus to fitness and wellness, raised a $4.5M seed round in 2025 and later rebranded as Replify. It went on to work with brands including Gold’s Gym and UFC Gym, proving that its AI agents could do more than answer routine questions. According to the company, customers have captured up to 10 times more leads and shortened sales cycles from roughly 30 days to as little as three to five days.

ABC Fitness became a natural next step. The company provides software to more than 30,000 fitness businesses serving over 40 million members worldwide. By adding Replify to its platform, ABC can offer gyms an always-available AI front desk while bringing Replify’s technology to a much larger global customer base.

Replify’s journey offers a useful lesson amid the rush to build AI products for everyone. The company began with a broad promise, identified a customer with a specific and expensive problem, and built deeply around that need. Gym owners did not need another flashy chatbot. They needed someone to answer the phone when the front desk could not.

Sometimes the smartest AI strategy is simply picking up the call.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

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