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XSnapchat Users Flood Social Media With Login Complaints
Steve Huff
Steve Huff is an Editor and Reporter at dot.LA. Steve was previously managing editor for The Metaverse Post and before that deputy digital editor for Maxim magazine. He has written for Inside Hook, Observer and New York Mag. Steve is the author of two official tie-ins books for AMC’s hit “Breaking Bad” prequel, “Better Call Saul.” He’s also a classically-trained tenor and has performed with opera companies and orchestras all over the Eastern U.S. He lives in the greater Boston metro area with his wife, educator Dr. Dana Huff.
Snapchatters frustrated with login issues began flooding social media with complaints early Tuesday.
Users were tweeting about the issue around 6 am PT, noting that Snapchat was freezing for some while others were automatically logged out — if they could access the app at all. The problems were reflected on uptime monitoring sites like Down Detector and Services Down. Both sites showed significant spikes in outage complaints beginning in the early morning and lasting past noon Pacific Time.
The majority of reports focused on logging in. Santa Monica-based Snap’s support account tweeted about 90 minutes after the problems first surfaced that they were “aware of an issue preventing some Snapchatters from logging in” and asked users to “Hang tight, we are looking into it and working on a fix!”
The outage, unusual for the relatively reliable service, was prolonged and widespread enough to get traction on Twitter. In a survey released by ToolTester.com in September 2021, Snapchat was no. 10 among the top 30 most outage-prone sites, according to data from DownDetector.com — and problems were usually related to sending and receiving messages. The social site most often flagged by Down Detector was Discord, Instagram was no.3.
About four hours after acknowledging the login issues, Snapchat Support tweeted that the problem had been fixed.
dot.LA reached out to Snapchat for more information about the outage and will update if the company responds.
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Steve Huff
Steve Huff is an Editor and Reporter at dot.LA. Steve was previously managing editor for The Metaverse Post and before that deputy digital editor for Maxim magazine. He has written for Inside Hook, Observer and New York Mag. Steve is the author of two official tie-ins books for AMC’s hit “Breaking Bad” prequel, “Better Call Saul.” He’s also a classically-trained tenor and has performed with opera companies and orchestras all over the Eastern U.S. He lives in the greater Boston metro area with his wife, educator Dr. Dana Huff.
steve@dot.la
Inside Tinder’s 380-Matches-Per-Second Sunday
09:26 AM | January 09, 2026
🔦 Spotlight
Happy New Year, Los Angeles. 💘
If you want a clear read on how people actually behave when the calendar flips, you do not need a survey. You need Tinder’s Dating Sunday data. The numbers below are from January 2025, compared with 2024, and they show a pattern the app sees every year when millions of people log in and take their love life off pause.
🔥 Tinder’s Annual Traffic Spike, By The Numbers
On Dating Sunday, the first Sunday of the year, Tinder hit its biggest activity spike on the calendar. Compared with the app’s typical daily averages for that year, and trends versus the prior year:
📈 Swipes were nearly 13% higher
💬 Messages were nearly 10% higher
❤️ Likes were over 10% higher
🗣️ Users had almost 7% more conversations
🤝 Matches climbed to about 380 matches per second, roughly a 10% lift compared to the rest of the year
Across Peak Season, from January 1 through February 14, Tinder saw on the order of 10 million more messages per day and roughly 40 million additional likes than its non peak baseline.
The figures are from last January, but the shape of this curve is remarkably consistent year after year, which is why they are a solid proxy for what is happening again at the start of 2026.
⚡ Not Just More Use, Different Use
What makes the Dating Sunday data more interesting than a simple “usage went up” story is how behavior shifted compared with the same day the year before.
Users replied about 2 hours and 25 minutes faster on average while also sending more messages, more likes and starting more conversations. That looks less like background swiping and more like a concentrated intent spike, people coming back to the app with a clear goal and actually engaging.
From a product and infrastructure perspective, that turns this one Sunday into a full stack exercise. Ranking, recommendations, notifications, trust and safety and core scale all get hammered at once, with high signal data flooding the system over a short window. Most apps only see that kind of behavior during a one off viral moment or a big launch. Tinder sees it every January.
📊 What The Surge Actually Signals
There is plenty of talk about people being tired of apps. The behavior here tells a more nuanced story.
When the calendar flipped last year, people reopened Tinder, used it more, started more conversations and replied faster than they had the year before. That does not look like a category that has lost its grip on users. It looks like a mature consumer network that can still generate predictable, measurable spikes of attention and intent on cue.
If those patterns hold, the first few weeks of 2026 once again look less like a slow reset and more like a live load test for an LA built product at global scale.
Now keep scrolling for this week’s LA venture deals, fund announcements and acquisitions.
🤝 Venture Deals
LA Companies
- Cambium, an El Segundo based advanced materials startup, raised a $100M Series B led by 8VC. The company uses AI, chemical informatics and high-performance computing to design new polymers and composites for defense, aerospace and other high-performance sectors, and will use the funding to accelerate its product pipeline and scale manufacturing capacity across the U.S. and Europe following its acquisition of SHD. - learn more
LA Venture Funds
- Plus Capital joined Pomelo Care’s $92M Series C, backing the New York based virtual care company at a $1.7B valuation alongside lead investor Stripes, Andreessen Horowitz, Atomico, BoxGroup and SV Angel. Pomelo, which already covers about 25 million lives and nearly 7% of U.S. births, will use the funding to take its proven, outcomes-driven maternity model and expand it across women’s and children’s health more broadly, from reproductive care and pediatrics through hormonal health, perimenopause and menopause. - learn more
- Kittyhawk Frontier is leading a $2M seed round in Denver based encoord, joining new and existing investors to back the company’s grid-planning software platform. encoord’s flagship product, SAInt, is designed to give utilities, developers, data centers and grid operators an integrated financial and operational view of the power system, helping cut interconnection timelines by up to five years and optimize capital planning. The new capital will go toward expanding the team, advancing the platform and scaling into key markets as demand for smarter, electrification-ready grid planning tools accelerates. - learn more
- Alexandria Real Estate Equities participated in Mediar Therapeutics’ oversubscribed $76M Series B, joining new investors like Longwood Fund and Asahi Kasei Pharma Ventures in a round co-led by Amplitude Ventures and ICG. The Boston-based biotech will use the funding to advance its first-in-class fibrosis portfolio, including MTX-474, now in a global Phase 2a trial for systemic sclerosis, and MTX-439, which is moving into Phase 1 studies for fibrosis associated with chronic kidney disease, alongside its partnered MTX-463 program with Eli Lilly. - learn more
- GordonMD Global Investments joined Soley Therapeutics’ $200M Series C, backing the South San Francisco based biotech as it advances its AI-enabled cell stress sensing platform and oncology pipeline. The round, led by Surveyor Capital with participation from new and existing investors, will fund IND-enabling work and early clinical trials for Soley’s lead acute myeloid leukemia (AML) program and a second solid-tumor asset, while also expanding non-oncology programs in neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases and scaling the platform. - learn more
LA Exits
- CareRev is being acquired by IntelyCare, which is combining its post-acute healthcare staffing platform with CareRev’s on-demand workforce marketplace for acute care. The deal creates one of the more comprehensive clinical labor platforms in the market, spanning clinician-facing job boards, internal resource pool tools, contingent labor and recruiter solutions to help health systems manage permanent and flexible staff in one place. Both brands will continue operating under their existing names while integrating offerings for hospitals, health systems and clinicians. - learn more
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Brex’s $5.15B Deal With Capital One Marks A New Era For Fintech
11:18 AM | January 23, 2026
🔦 Spotlight
Happy Friday, Los Angeles. 💳
The first big fintech plot twist of 2026 is here. Capital One is buying Brex in a cash and stock deal valued at about $5.15 billion, in what the companies are calling the largest bank - fintech deal in history.
From college dropouts to a multibillion exit
Brex launched in 2017, when Brazilian founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, then in their early 20s after dropping out of Stanford, set out to fix the “startup card” problem. That project turned into an AI-native finance platform that now serves tens of thousands of companies, from early-stage startups to hundreds of public enterprises.
A few years into that journey, both founders moved to Los Angeles and continued running Brex from here as the company embraced a fully remote model. Now that same LA-based duo is steering a multibillion-dollar acquisition that will plug their software directly into one of the biggest banks in the country. Pedro will stay on as CEO of Brex inside Capital One, with the brand and product continuing rather than disappearing into a rebrand.
Why this looks like a win
“Big bank buys fintech” can sound like the end of the startup story, but here it reads more like an expansion pack. Capital One gets Brex’s cloud-based spend stack, AI-powered controls and roughly $13 billion in commercial deposits. Brex gets a massive balance sheet, a regulated rails partner and access to the mainstream business market it has been edging toward for years.
For founders and operators here, it is also quiet validation that building hard fintech infrastructure still pays off. Brex spent years doing the unglamorous work of licenses, compliance, underwriting and integrations. The outcome isn’t a hype cycle spike; it is a classic, real-money exit for a very modern stack.
What it signals for LA’s ecosystem
LA is not getting a new headquarters out of this. Brex has embraced a “no HQ” model. What the city does have is a pair of founders who chose to build their lives here and just proved that you can run a global finance platform from Los Angeles and end up selling it to a top-six U.S. bank.
It also fits a broader pattern our ecosystem is leaning into. Whether it is fintech, defense tech or climate, the most interesting LA stories right now are not about front-end apps. They are about deep, regulated infrastructure that incumbents eventually need more than startups need them.
For Brex, this is the start of a new chapter inside Capital One. For LA, it is one more data point that the city’s founders can build products the rest of the financial system has to buy.
Scroll on for the latest LA venture rounds, fund news and acquisitions.
🤝 Venture Deals
LA Companies
- L-Nutra secured a new $36.5M investment from Mubadala, bringing its total Series D proceeds to $83.5M. The company, which develops longevity-focused and medical nutrition therapies, plans to use the funding to accelerate global expansion, advance clinical research, and scale adoption of its nutrition programs across healthcare providers and consumers. - learn more
- RiskFront AI raised $3.3M in pre-seed funding to make financial crime and compliance work far less manual. The US-based startup uses “agentic AI” to automate time-consuming tasks like research, data analysis and documentation, with its Airos platform handling much of the day-to-day workload so human analysts can focus on higher-value judgment calls. The new capital will help expand engineering and product teams and deepen integrations with banks and fintechs already piloting the system. - learn more
- Balance Homes relaunched with a $30M investment led by Falco Group to scale its equity-sharing model for homeowners who are “house rich but cash and credit constrained.” The company buys a co-ownership stake in a home to free up trapped equity so owners can pay down mortgages and high-interest debt while staying in their homes, instead of being forced to sell. After stabilizing its existing portfolio following EasyKnock’s shutdown, Balance Homes is now resuming originations in six states, with plans to expand as affordability and household debt pressures intensify. - learn more
LA Venture Funds
- Distributed Global co-led Superstate’s $82.5M Series B, backing the Robert Leshner - founded tokenization platform as it builds regulated, on-chain capital markets infrastructure. The round, alongside Bain Capital Crypto and other institutional investors, will help Superstate expand beyond its existing tokenized U.S. Treasury funds to a full issuance layer for SEC-registered equities on Ethereum and Solana. The company, which already manages over $1.1B in tokenized assets, plans to scale its Opening Bell platform and transfer agent stack so public companies can issue and manage compliant on-chain shares directly. - learn more
- Krew Capital participated in GIGR (Playad.ai)’s $5.4M pre-seed round, backing the San Francisco based startup as it builds multi-agent AI workflows for marketing teams. GIGR’s Playad platform starts with interactive ads, using AI agents to help marketers create, test and iterate on playable and other ad formats much faster while turning performance data into continuous creative improvement. The new funding will support product development, expansion of its AI-native creative workflow and scaling to more customers looking to cut production costs and tighten the loop between ad performance and creative decisions. - learn more
- Trousdale Ventures participated in AheadComputing’s additional $30M Seed2 round, backing the Portland-based chip startup as it reimagines CPU architecture for the AI era. AheadComputing is developing high-performance RISC-V based CPUs and breakthrough microarchitecture aimed at handling the growing wave of AI data center, workstation and embedded workloads where CPU performance has become a bottleneck. The new funding, which brings total capital raised to $53M, will support R&D, software innovation and test chip development as the company races to deliver next-generation general purpose processors. - learn more
- Untapped Ventures participated in Nexxa.ai’s $9M seed round, backing the Sunnyvale-based startup as it scales specialized AI agents for heavy-industry workflows. Nexxa’s Nitro platform layers multi-agent automation on top of existing tools used in sectors like rail, construction, manufacturing and critical infrastructure, helping engineers plan and execute complex projects without ripping out legacy systems. The new funding brings Nexxa.ai’s total capital raised to $14M and will go toward expanding deployments, forward-deployed engineering teams and support for more industrial customers. - learn more
- UP.Partners participated in Zanskar’s $115M Series C, backing the Salt Lake City based geothermal startup as it uses AI to uncover overlooked conventional geothermal resources across the Western U.S. The company has already validated several high-potential sites and plans to use the funding to expand its discovery platform and begin developing multiple greenfield power plants, with a goal of bringing significant new clean baseload capacity to the grid before 2030. - learn more
- Smash Capital participated in Stream’s $90M Series D, backing the UK based workplace finance startup as it ramps expansion into the U.S. market. Formerly known as Wagestream, Stream partners with employers to offer workers tools like earned wage access, savings, budgeting and pensions in a single app, targeting financial stress for lower and middle income employees. The new funding, led by Sofina, brings total capital raised to about $228M and will help Stream scale its multi-product platform across more brands and workers globally. - learn more
- Fika Ventures participated in Ivo’s $55M funding round, backing the San Francisco based legal AI startup alongside lead investor Blackbird and others. Ivo builds contract intelligence tools for in-house legal teams and enterprises, using a highly structured approach that breaks reviews into hundreds of smaller AI tasks to boost accuracy and reduce hallucinations. The new capital, which reportedly values the company at around $355M, will go toward accelerating product development and hiring more sales and go-to-market talent to meet growing demand. - learn more
- Amplify.LA participated in Overworld’s latest funding round, backing the AI startup as it unveils a real-time diffusion world model for playable, AI-native worlds. Overworld’s system runs locally and generates persistent, interactive environments on the fly, aiming to become core infrastructure for next-generation games, simulations and creative tools built around world models rather than static assets. The new capital will support further development of its Waypoint 1 research preview and help the team expand its platform for researchers, engineers and builders working on interactive AI experiences. - learn more
- Dangerous Ventures participated in Carbogenics’ $3M investment and grant funding round, backing the Edinburgh-based bio-carbon startup as it scales its carbon removal technology. Carbogenics turns difficult-to-recycle organic waste into CreChar, a biochar product that boosts biogas production, supports wastewater treatment and locks away carbon. The new funding will help the company expand manufacturing in the US, grow its centralized UK operations and deploy its biocarbon products across the UK, Europe and North America. - learn more
LA Exits
- Farcaster is being acquired by Neynar, the infrastructure company that already powers much of the Farcaster ecosystem, in a full-stack handoff from Merkle Manufactory. Neynar will assume control of the decentralized social protocol’s smart contracts, code repositories, official app and Clanker client, while Farcaster co-founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan step back from day-to-day operations after five years. The deal keeps the network running without disruption and sets Neynar up to roll out a new, builder-focused roadmap for on-chain social. - learn more
- ScribbleVet has been acquired by Instinct Science, which is folding the veterinary AI-scribing startup into its Instinct EMR platform to create what it calls an “intelligent-native” practice management system. The combined offering aims to move traditional PIMS beyond record-keeping by embedding AI scribing, workflow automation and clinical decision support in one system, reducing documentation burden and helping veterinary teams focus more on patient care. ScribbleVet’s team is joining Instinct, with founder and CEO Rohan Relan taking on a key role leading product strategy for intelligence features across the platform. - learn more
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