Image Source: Blackbird
Under the hood, Blackbird has been building a national network and says it is live at more than 1,000 restaurants. The company raised fresh capital earlier this year to expand markets and roll out cross-restaurant rewards, positioning LA as a key beachhead for growth. If you dine out a lot, the appeal is that the app collapses discovery, payment, and loyalty into one flow. If you run a dining room, the promise is cleaner data on guests you actually see, instead of a generic points program that lives somewhere else.
For LA specifically, the draw is that this model fits how the city eats. We spread across neighborhoods, follow chefs, and rotate between a small set of favorites and a long list of next-ups. A networked loyalty layer that recognizes that pattern could move real dollars, particularly for independents that want to keep the relationship direct. We’ll be watching how quickly the footprint moves east from the coast and which operators lean into memberships and targeted rewards first.
Scroll for this week’s LA venture deals, funds, and acquisitions.
🤝 Venture Deals
LA Companies
- GammaTime, a Los Angeles based premium micro drama platform founded by former Miramax CEO Bill Block, raised $14M seed led by vgames and Pitango, with participation from Alexis Ohanian, Kris Jenner, Kim Kardashian, and Traverse Ventures. The app is live on iOS and Android, features more than 20 vertical phone native originals, and plans new series from “CSI” creator Anthony E. Zuiker as it scales a freemium model for U.S. audiences. - learn more
- Wolf Games, a generative-AI gaming startup backed by Dick Wolf, raised a $9M Series A led by Main Street Advisors. The company also inked a partnership with NBCUniversal to develop interactive games using NBCU IP, built on Wolf Games’ platform for creating “living, cinematic” game worlds. Notable participants include Maverick Carter, Tom Werner, and Rashid Johnson, alongside returning investors Jimmy Iovine, Paul Wachter, and Dick Wolf. - learn more
- Quantum Elements, a Los Angeles based startup, launched Constellation, an AI native platform that helps teams build quantum software and co design hardware using agentic AI, natural language prompts, and a large noisy qubit simulator. The company emerged from stealth with funding from QDNL Participations and support from USC Viterbi, and says Constellation can speed code generation, debugging, and testing for applications in pharma, energy, and finance. - learn more
- Arbor Energy raised a $55M Series A co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Voyager Ventures, with Gigascale Capital and Marathon Petroleum Corporation participating, to accelerate deployment of its zero-emission, fuel-flexible turbines. The funding completes a 1 MW pilot called ATLAS and advances HALCYON, a 25 MW modular turbine that uses oxy-combustion with supercritical CO₂ for efficient, carbon-neutral baseload power aimed at data centers, utilities, and industrial customers. - learn more
- Dialogue AI raised a $6M seed led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to scale its AI-native research platform, which uses a live conversational AI interviewer to run real-time customer interviews and deliver insights faster. Participants include Seven Stars, Uncommon Projects, the Tornante Company, and notable angels, and the funds will accelerate product and go-to-market efforts with early customers such as Wayfair, Square, Nextdoor, and Suno. - learn more
LA Venture Funds
- March Capital participated in Uniphore’s $260M Series F, joining strategic investors NVIDIA, AMD, Snowflake, and Databricks. The funding will accelerate development and adoption of Uniphore’s Business AI Cloud and expand its partner ecosystem, alongside investors like NEA, BNF Capital, National Grid Partners, and Prosperity7 Ventures. - learn more
- Beast Ventures participated in Nutropy’s latest funding round to scale precision-fermented casein for next-gen dairy ingredients. The France-based startup will use the capital to ramp production and deliver larger samples of its “cheeseable milk” powder to food manufacturers as it targets a 2027 launch. - learn more
- Patron participated in Notch’s $8M seed financing round, alongside investors such as Wing, Samsung, and Balaji, to scale the company’s AI platform for generating performance ads. Notch has since launched a “URL-to-animated-ads” feature that turns a product link into ready-to-run animated creatives within minutes, supporting a faster workflow for marketers rolling out motion ads. - learn more
- B Capital participated in CurbWaste’s $28M Series B, which was led by Socium Ventures with Flourish Ventures, TTV Capital, and Squarepoint Capital also joining. The funding brings total capital to $50M and will accelerate product and go-to-market work on CurbWaste’s operating system for independent waste haulers, including AI-driven dispatch, reporting, and payments. - learn more
- Thin Line Capital participated in SenseNet’s $14M Series A to scale its AI wildfire-detection network in the United States. The round was led by Stormbreaker with Fusion Fund, Plaza Ventures, FOLD36 Capital, and B Current also joining; funds go toward new offices and installations as SenseNet fuses gas sensors, AI cameras, satellites, and weather data to spot fires before they are visible. The company says it already monitors about 130 million acres and can flag ignitions within minutes. - learn more
- MANTIS Venture Capital participated in Keycard’s $38M financing for its identity and access platform for AI agents. The combined seed and Series A were led by Andreessen Horowitz, Acrew Capital, and Boldstart Ventures, and coincide with Keycard’s early-access launch. Keycard says its system issues short-lived, auditable identity tokens to help developers govern agent actions and data across apps. - learn more
- WndrCo participated in Defakto’s $30.75M Series B, a round led by XYZ Venture Capital with The General Partnership and Bloomberg Beta also joining. Defakto, formerly SPIRL, builds a Non-Human Identity and Access Management platform that replaces static credentials with dynamic, auditable identities for services, pipelines, workloads, and AI agents across multi-cloud environments. The company will use the capital to accelerate product development and expand go-to-market efforts. - learn more
- CIV co led 1001’s $9M round alongside General Catalyst and Lux Capital to build an AI native operating system for decision making in critical industries. 1001 combines live data ingestion, operational mapping, AI driven decisioning, and governance to help operators act in real time, with early pilots in aviation, logistics, and large infrastructure projects. The raise also includes backers like Chris Ré and Amjad Masad and will fund early deployments and hiring in Dubai, London, and beyond. - learn more
- Brentwood Associates led Throne Labs’ $15M Series B initial close to expand the company’s smart restroom infrastructure across new and existing U.S. markets. Existing investors including Uncorrelated Ventures, DiPalo Ventures, Rabil Ventures, and Arpiné Capital participated as Throne scales its network of sensor-equipped, ADA-compliant restrooms and city partnerships. - learn more
- M13 led Estuary’s $17M Series A, with participation from FirstMark and Operator Partners, to scale the company’s “right-time data” platform. Estuary unifies change data capture, streaming, and batch into one managed system with BYOC deployment so enterprises can control latency and feed AI applications more reliably; funds will support product and go-to-market expansion. - learn more
- Strong Ventures provided follow-on funding in Unjeonseonsaeng’s ₩2.8B (~$2.0M) Series A, backing the driving-school comparison and booking platform as it scales nationwide. New investors Fast Ventures and Korea Credit Guarantee Fund joined the round, with proceeds going to expand the company’s SaaS tools for driving schools and enhance data-driven features like AI recommendations and advertising. The startup reports monthly GMV above ₩1B and its first profitable quarter in 2025. - learn more
- Interlagos led Adaptyx Biosciences’ $14M seed, with Hyperlink Ventures participating alongside Overwater Ventures, Starbloom Capital, Stanford University, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, and others. Adaptyx is developing a biowearable for continuous, multi-analyte molecular monitoring; the raise brings total funding to about $23M and supports R&D, clinical progress toward FDA clearance, and platform scaling. - learn more
- B Capital participated in Faeth Therapeutics’ new $25M financing, which brings the company’s total funding to $92M and supports a randomized Phase 2 trial of its PIKTOR regimen in endometrial cancer with the GOG Foundation. The raise, led by S2G Ventures with additional new and existing backers, follows Phase 1b data showing an 80% overall response rate and 11-month median PFS when PIKTOR was combined with paclitaxel. - learn more
- Btech Consortium participated in PortX’s strategic growth round, joining renewed backers alongside new investors Allied Solutions and the American Bankers Association. The funding extends PortX’s Series B and underscores industry support for its AI-powered data integration platform for banks and credit unions. - learn more
LA Exits
- Breez was acquired by JumpCloud to bolster JumpCloud’s identity threat detection and response capabilities and accelerate its security roadmap. The deal brings Breez’s ITDR technology and team into JumpCloud’s platform; terms were not disclosed. The Breez group is led by former Adobe executive Abhinav Srivastava. - learn more
Ambercycle co-founders Shay Sethi and Moby Ahmed are scientists and former UC Davis college roommates. The two see themselves as different from traditional fashion or manufacturing founders – and other research-based innovators.
“Traditionally, people have always thought, ‘here's an interesting technology, how do we craft a story around it?’” Instead, Sethi says, Ambercycle “start[s] with the products that we would really like to see and then work backwards into the technology. We develop, do research and engineering that way instead of starting in the lab.”
Ambercycle CEO and co-founder Shay Sethi
Their technology is able to break down the components of clothing to its basic polyester materials, separating its natural fibers and dyes, and creating a new material in the process, which they call cycora.
“We imagined a technology that could take an old t-shirt and turn it back into the yarns required to make that green t-shirt again,” he adds. “Anything that's in your closet today – like yoga pants or dress shirts – that's traditionally made of polyester can be made with cycora.”
Sethi and Ahmed started their company in San Francisco in 2015, then moved it to Los Angeles’ garment district two years later, looking for a manufacturing hub close to a center of innovation.
“We felt like this is a really good nexus for innovation, fashion – as well as material sciences,” Sethi says. “There is a very strong industry and a very strong familiarity with manufacturing so we felt it was a perfect blend. Also we grew up in California and didn't want to leave.”
We chatted with Ambercycle co-founder Shay Sethi about his company’s journey, its new funding and how it plans to get beyond buzzwords in planning a sustainable future for fashion.
What are the biggest challenges to the fashion industry?
When we consider the future of humanity, there's a couple key things that need to change. The big one is – given that consumption will not decrease – the reliance on natural resources will put a strain on the way in which we can live on this planet. So in order to change that, we need to take advantage of these traditionally viewed as waste streams and turn them back into new resources. So the future upstream will be all of these textile materials that are in our closet. But it's not really easy today to throw away or recycle our old garments.
We need to be able to have a low-friction way to throw away our garments and have them go back into a circular system. If we can tell a transparent and traceable story to a person, then brands and retailers will start to care.
Why is it so hard to recycle clothing currently?
So let's talk about our clothing. They are mixtures of different fibers – polyester and cotton, as well as dyes, additives, zippers, tags and stains – when they're at their end of life. We can't really recycle those materials, because they're these complex, intimate blends. Recycling has really struggled as a business, and also as a solution to waste, because you can't create a high quality product from those materials once they are at their end of life.
How is Ambercycle different from other recycling processes?
Most recycling processes are shredding or very simple mechanical processes. You can turn a t-shirt into pillow stuffing in a similar way that you can turn paper into a sort of grey newspaper and then downcycle it; The same thing happens with textiles.
The Holy Grail is really being able to turn an old t-shirt into a new t-shirt. So over the past five years, we’ve developed technology that takes these mixtures of materials that have dyes and additives, put them through a process, and make the base raw materials needed to make those same yarns. This goes in line with what's traditionally known today as circular economy where you can reuse materials, again and again.
Will Ambercycle always be focused on apparel?
Right now our focus is on apparel.
We have a couple of luxury clients that are really interested in transitioning to circular systems. Over the next couple of years, we're going to be able to talk about those, but the major message we want to help shed light on is that every year, over 120 billion garments go to landfill. We need to, as a fashion industry, transition to a circular system. It's [not] just one or two companies that can do things; Everyone as a whole needs to adopt a new ecosystem, where things are being reused in supply chains over and over again. It's very important for this transition to involve all verticals in the power supply chain. The demand for these materials is already so high. So people already care. I think we're just trying to figure out the logistics of the society right now.
There's a lot of possibilities when you think about it. You can imagine this being transformed into a system that can take other materials as well. I think we're excited about the possibilities in the future but I’m really focused on the textile-to-textile stories today.
What do you plan to do with your recent funding?
We’re trying to scale up the number of projects we're doing with different companies across the apparel industry that will require a lot of manpower or womanpower. That's a key gap we need to fill. A technology like ours that uses sort of molecular separation technologies, that advanced material science requires a sort of scale before you can really start to see the fulfillment of these contracts.
It's very easy to make a couple of t-shirts, but it's very hard to make millions and millions and millions of kilograms of stuff. We're going to be scaling up production of one of our main materials today, cycora. Demands are already way through the roof. I felt like right now was the right time to raise external capital to accelerate that plan.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
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