Techstars LA Class of 2020; What It's Like to Run an Accelerator During a Pandemic

🔦 Spotlight

Hey there, Los Angeles.

For the past decade, Alex Heath has made a career out of figuring out what the technology industry is doing before everyone else.

Now, he is going to invest in it.

Heath announced this week that he is joining Los Angeles-based Sound Ventures as a partner on its investing team. The veteran technology journalist will continue independently operating Sources, the newsletter and podcast business he launched after leaving The Verge last year.

It is an unusual career move, but perhaps not as unusual as it initially appears.

Journalists and venture capitalists spend much of their time doing surprisingly similar work. Both look for signals before they become obvious, build relationships with people who know what is coming next and attempt to distinguish a lasting shift from a convincing story.

The crucial difference is what happens after they find one.

A journalist publishes. An investor writes a check.

Heath has spent years reporting on some of the technology industry’s most powerful companies and executives. At The Verge, where he served as deputy editor, his work focused on the internal decisions shaping companies such as Meta. More recently, Sources has taken readers inside the AI race through reporting and interviews with executives including Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg.

That experience gives Sound something venture firms increasingly want: someone who already understands the founders, companies and narratives competing to define the next era of technology.

Sound Ventures is not exactly starting from scratch. Led in Los Angeles by Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein, the firm manages nearly $2B and has backed companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, World Labs, Brex, Affirm and GitLab. According to The Wall Street Journal, Sound deployed more than $800M into early positions in OpenAI, Anthropic and World Labs as it intensified its focus on artificial intelligence.

Heath is joining during an important transition for the firm. Ashton Kutcher, who co-founded Sound with Oseary in 2015, departed earlier this year to launch a new venture firm. Oseary and Epstein are continuing to lead Sound while raising its fifth flagship fund and sharpening its strategy around companies with the potential to reach meaningful commercial scale.

Adding Heath suggests that Sound’s next phase will not be defined by capital alone.

As AI makes it faster and less expensive to build software, technical capability may become less effective as a differentiator. More startups will be able to create credible products, and more of them will compete for the same finite supply of customers, talent and attention.

In that environment, knowing how to identify a compelling founder is only part of the job. Venture firms also need to understand how companies earn trust, communicate what makes them different and remain culturally relevant in an increasingly crowded market.

That is familiar territory for Sound. Oseary built his career managing artists including Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, where recognizing talent was inseparable from helping that talent connect with an audience. Heath brings a different version of the same instinct, developed through finding important stories and understanding why people should pay attention to them.

Heath will continue owning and operating Sources independently while expanding its podcast and interviewing prominent voices across the technology industry. That means he is not abandoning the platform or audience he built. He is adding a new vantage point.

The combination could prove especially valuable to Sound. Heath brings the instincts of a reporter, the reach of an independent media founder and years of relationships with the people shaping technology. Now, he can apply that experience to finding and supporting the next generation of founders.

It is a fitting evolution for someone who has spent his career identifying important technology stories early.

This time, he will have the opportunity to help write what happens next.

Venture firms once competed primarily through capital, networks and operating expertise. Now, access to attention is becoming an asset of its own. Founders need help reaching customers and shaping public understanding, while investors want better ways to recognize which people and ideas will command that attention next.

Sound Ventures hired someone who has spent a decade doing exactly that.

Heath used to decide which technology stories were worth following.

Now, he will help decide which ones get funded.

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

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🔦 Spotlight

Happy Friday, Los Angeles.

The newest employee in the office does not need a desk, a salary or a coffee order. But it may have access to your company’s emails, financial records, customer data and software systems.

That raises a fairly important question: Who decides what an AI agent is allowed to do?

El Segundo-based cybersecurity company Saviynt is building its next chapter around the answer.

Carrick Capital Partners announced this week that it closed a $600M continuation vehicle for Saviynt, including a new $255M investment in the company. The transaction allowed Carrick’s existing investors to either take liquidity or remain invested, while also providing liquidity to Saviynt employees through a tender offer.

Continuation vehicles are not exactly known for making gripping Friday reading. The company behind this one is considerably more interesting.

Saviynt develops identity security software that helps businesses determine who can access their applications, data and infrastructure. Increasingly, however, “who” does not refer exclusively to a person.

Companies are deploying AI agents that can retrieve information, write code, communicate with customers and complete multistep tasks with limited supervision. These digital workers need access to company systems to be useful, but every new permission also creates another opportunity for sensitive information to be exposed or an unintended action to be taken.

In other words, AI agents may be tireless employees. They are not necessarily trustworthy ones.

Saviynt is addressing that problem through Zuma, its platform for discovering, securing and governing AI agents, large language models and other nonhuman identities alongside a company’s human workforce. The goal is to give businesses one place to determine what every identity can access, whether it belongs to an employee, a contractor, a software application or an autonomous agent operating at machine speed.

The opportunity appears to be growing quickly. Saviynt has surpassed $300M in annual recurring revenue, up from approximately $10M when Carrick first invested. The company says bookings have increased by more than 80% this year while customer retention remains at 96%.

The new investment was completed as part of the final close of Saviynt’s previously announced $700M Series B, which valued the company at approximately $3B. Carrick’s continuation vehicle was led by Coller Capital and co-led by HSBC Asset Management, giving the investment firm more time and capital to remain behind one of its strongest-performing companies.

For Saviynt, the funding will support further development of its identity platform, deeper integrations with major cloud and software providers and its push to become a central security layer for the agentic workplace.

That ambition reflects a broader change taking place inside companies. The first wave of enterprise AI focused largely on what the technology could generate. The next phase is about what it can actually do, and whether businesses can maintain control once AI moves from answering questions to taking action.

Saviynt is betting that identity will become the gatekeeper.

AI agents are gaining access to the digital workplace, whether corporate security teams are ready for them or not.

Someone still has to hold the keys.

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

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🔦 Spotlight

Hello LA.

The entertainment industry has spent the past several years debating what generative AI could take from creators.

This week, some of its biggest companies put money behind an AI startup promising to build something for them instead.

Los Angeles-based Stability AI raised $76M in Series B funding from an investor group that includes Electronic Arts, Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. AMD Ventures and Pacific Alliance Ventures also joined the round, while LA-based MANTIS Capital and Sound Ventures are among the company’s existing backers.

The financing brings Stability AI’s total funding under CEO Prem Akkaraju to $232M, including two equity rounds and convertible notes. The company plans to use the new capital to expand its creative production tools, applied research and professional services across music, gaming and entertainment.

The amount is notable. The names attached to it are the bigger story.

Generative AI’s arrival in entertainment has been anything but quiet. Artists have questioned whether their work was used to train models without permission. Studios have faced pressure over how the technology could affect jobs. Record labels have pursued AI companies in court while simultaneously exploring how the same technology might fit into their businesses.

Now, several of the world’s largest entertainment companies are investing directly in one.

That does not mean the industry has resolved its concerns about AI. It means some of its biggest players would rather help shape the technology than wait to see what it becomes.

Stability AI is positioning itself for that opening. Rather than focusing solely on general-purpose models, the company is building tools specifically for professional creatives. Its recently launched Stable Audio 3.0 was trained on fully licensed music and lets artists generate, edit and arrange audio through a web platform or directly inside digital audio workstations.

Image Source: Stability AI

That licensed-data approach is central to the pitch. The next phase of creative AI will not be decided only by which company produces the most impressive model. It will also depend on which companies can earn the trust of the artists, studios and rights holders whose work gives those models value.

For its new strategic investors, the round offers more than financial upside. It creates a closer view into how generative AI may change production, a voice in how the tools develop and an opportunity to establish rules before those rules are established for them.

For Stability AI, the backing provides something equally important: credibility inside industries that have every reason to scrutinize what it is building.

The company now has capital and access to some of the largest catalogs, franchises and creative workforces in entertainment. What it does with that access will determine whether this becomes a meaningful alliance or simply an impressive collection of logos.

Either way, the industry is no longer watching from a safe distance.

It has entered the room.

LA’s Air-Taxi Plans Are Coming Downtown

While Stability AI is trying to change how entertainment gets made, Archer Aviation wants to change how people get to it.

AEG and Archer announced plans to develop downtown Los Angeles’ first vertiport at L.A. LIVE, creating a potential new stop in Archer’s proposed electric air-taxi network ahead of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Image Source: Archer

The planned site would sit beside Crypto.com Arena and allow passengers to travel to and from the entertainment district aboard Archer’s Midnight aircraft. The company says its network could turn drives that take an hour or longer into electric flights lasting approximately 10 to 20 minutes.

Archer has already identified SoFi Stadium, USC and Hollywood Burbank Airport as possible locations, with its recently acquired Hawthorne Airport expected to serve as the network’s central operating hub. As the official air-taxi provider of LA28 and Team USA, Archer has an unusually visible deadline for turning those plans into something tangible.

AEG and Archer have completed an initial feasibility study of the L.A. LIVE site, including reviews of land use, airspace, power availability and community impact. The next phase will examine operations and the passenger experience.

There is still a substantial distance between a proposed vertiport and a functioning air-taxi network. The infrastructure must be built, regulatory approvals must be secured and passengers must be persuaded that flying across the city is safer and more practical than staying on the ground.

Still, few locations could make that future feel more real than L.A. LIVE. Millions of people already pass through the district for concerts, games and major events. Placing a vertiport there would bring urban air mobility out of the concept stage and directly into public view.

Together, this week’s announcements show Los Angeles becoming a testing ground for two technologies still moving from promise toward everyday use.

One could reshape how entertainment is created. The other could reshape how Angelenos reach it.

In a city famous for both its creative industries and its traffic, that feels appropriately on brand.

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

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