How Dollar Shave Club, eSalon Built a 'Billion Dollar Brand'

Lawrence Ingrassia

Lawrence Ingrassia is an award-wining journalist and the author of " Billion Dollar Brand Club."

How Dollar Shave Club, eSalon Built a 'Billion Dollar Brand'
  • Relying on analytics, the founders of eSalon who knew nothing about hair dye, built a trendsetting personalized hair color brand that did $30 million in sales
  • The e-commerce brand uses individual data, machine-learning algorithms and predictive analytics to create formulas that keeps customers coming back
  • The Takeaway: Retail is being upended by direct-to-consumer companies that can acquire key metrics to customize products and retain shoppers

In recent years, you no doubt have seen a growing number of new brands pop up everywhere you go online – and you've probably bought some. Where did they come from? Who are the entrepreneurs behind them? Why did they think they could take on long-dominant brands?

This is an excerpt from " Billion Dollar Brand Club," authored by award-wining journalist Lawrence Ingrassia and published on January 28 by Henry Holt and Company.

The book explores how an unlikely band of entrepreneurs launched a business revolution in the way new brands are created and sold online. One of the most successful direct-to-consumer brands, Dollar Shave Club, was founded in Los Angeles and got its initial seed funding from Science Inc. in Santa Monica. This excerpt from Chapter 6, "The Algorithm is Always Right," tells the story behind eSalon, based in El Segundo, and how it tapped data analytics to create customized hair coloring.

The customer, a woman in her mid-to-late forties, knows what she wants when she logs onto eSalon.com to order its customized hair coloring for the first time: dye to match her natural blonde color – and cover up her grays – with the lightest blonde shade it offers. As she clicks through a series of about a dozen questions, the algorithm inside eSalon's computers starts churning away. Without anyone from the company having met or even talked to her, it will understand her hair coloring better than she does by the time she finishes answering the questionnaire.

How long is your hair? it asks. How much gray do you have? How straight or curly is your hair? How thick is your hair? What is your ethnicity? What color are your eyes? What is your natural hair color? What is the closest shade to your natural color? Would you like to maintain your current color?


To help her, the questionnaire shows thirty-one photos of different shades of blonde, with very small gradations from lighter to darker colors. At the end, she selects the lightest blonde color eSalon offers, just as she intended. But that's not exactly what she will receive.

eSalon has collected data from more than five million people. Based on this woman's answers, it knows the best color formulation to achieve the blonde look she wants, regardless of what she thinks. eSalon's computers have learned from crunching the data that many first-time customers who fit her profile and order the lightest blonde dye have been disappointed; they felt their hair came out looking too blonde – too "hot" in hair coloring jargon. The numbers show that eSalon has a higher reorder rate from customers who asked for a slightly darker color for their next order, so that their hair wouldn't come out looking quite so light.

Knowing all of this, eSalon automatically sends the customer – without telling her – a formulation that has 98 percent of its lightest blonde share with 2 percent blue added to soften the color, or cool it, rather than 100 percent blonde. "After seeing this data, we adjusted our algorithm so that new customers who are a natural pure blonde and want to keep that look automatically get that little bit of blue added," explains Tom MacNeil, eSalon's chief technology officer. "They're happier with the result, even though they're asking for the blondest of blonde that we have."

For eSalon, and almost all direct-to-consumer brands, data is the coin of the realm. The data they collect directly from each customer provides a significant advantage over bigger, long-established brands. Clairol doesn't have this data, because the customers they deal with directly are retailers. The people who use the product are largely anonymous to Clairol; they walk into a drugstore, pick a box of hair coloring off the shelf, pay for it, and walk out.

eSalon's shelf is its website, and it collects information about each customer who walks through its digital door and answers its questionnaire. The longer a woman remains a customer, the more eSalon knows about her – and not just her. eSalon aggregates all of that individual data and uses machine-learning algorithms and predictive analysis to inform virtually everything it does: from adjusting its product formulations to introducing new products (like color for highlighting hair) to testing seemingly insignificant word changes on its web pages. "In the end, we're a tech company selling a beauty product," says Tamim Mourad, one of eSalon's co-founders.

Data mining is critical to the biggest challenges facing all direct-to-consumer brands: holding down the cost of attracting customers and keeping them after a purchase or two. Using the data it has gathered, eSalon has improved its retention rate from below 50 percent to about 70 percent on its customers' initial orders. One of the key metrics, especially for subscription companies, like eSalon, Dollar Shave Club, and Hubble, is a customer's lifetime value, or how much she will spend over time. The cost of acquiring customers can be offset only if a lot of them become repeat customers who buy month after month or, even better, year after year. "It's all about retention, because nobody makes money on the first order," explains Francisco Gimenez, another co-founder.

Businesses have used predictive analytics for the past couple of decades, but the growing power of computers, along with the ability of online brands to gather huge amounts of data, has made machine learning central to their success.

Tamim Mourad and several of his colleagues at eSalon discovered from experience the importance of technology to a startup. In 1998, before the direct-to-consumer brand revolution began (indeed, before many of the entrepreneurs behind many of these startups had graduated from college or even high school), they started an internet company, while they were in their twenties. The company, PriceGrabber, was one of the original online price comparison sites. In 2005, Experian bought the company for $485 million – yielding a huge gain on the founders' total investment of $1.5 million.

After taking a couple of years off, the PriceGrabber founders began brainstorming about starting another business.

In the fall of 2008, Mourad and his wife were having dinner with a couple who owned a beauty salon in Beverly Hills. The other woman, who was a hair colorist, tossed out a business idea. "She said that women who color their hair at home don't do it well, because there is a dearth of information," Mourad says. What about starting a web site that explained how to dye your own hair? He didn't see a way to make money from that. But he asked her, "Is it possible to formulate color for someone sight unseen, and mail them something they apply at home? If that works well, then you're delivering a product that is better than the standard hair coloring in a box at drugstore, that would approximate what someone could get at a hair salon. If you could do that, you could charge a price that was a premium. There's a business model."

He went back to his former PriceGrabber colleagues, all men who knew nothing about hair coloring. But the more they thought about the idea, the more they liked it.

It was a business ready for disruption, they decided. Off-the-shelf packaged brands were fine, but most offered only around fifty pre-mixed shades. "Many people who color their own hair at home in general are not happy, because the results are mixed," Francisco Gimenez notes. "But it is affordable, which is why they do it. At the high end, salons charge on average around $60 for base color, though it can go as low as $45 in some cities and is more like $100 or $150 in bigger metro areas."

The PriceGrabber guys concluded there could be an opening for a new brand priced about $25. In today's global marketplace, it would be easy to find suppliers to sell them professional-grade ingredients that go into hair coloring formulations – dyes, modifiers (to stabilize color tones), vitamins (to moisturize the hair), antioxidants, hydrogen peroxide (to remove the old color and activate the new dye), among others. The biggest challenge would be to figure out how to combine all these ingredients to mimic what a stylist does in customizing color for each woman who comes into a salon. "Can you formulate hair coloring for someone sight unseen?" Mourad says. "We had to figure out how to test that idea."

They first did a proof-of-concept test to see if women might be interested in buying customized color online. They created a rudimentary web site and then hand-mixed colors for about fifty women who had signed up, submitted a photo, and said what color they wanted. Then the women were asked if they liked the color better than the results they got with a do-it-yourself kit at a drug store. "We recruited people who were willing to put this product on their hair, with no idea who we really are. The results were positive enough for us to say we have something," he recalls.

The next step: tapping their knowledge of tech and data science to figure out how to replicate color customization on sale, for fifty thousand women, not just fifty. "We wanted to do something that was really innovative, not bullshit innovative," Mourad says.

Omar Mourad, Tamim's younger brother and another of PriceGrabber's co-founders, read everything he could about dyeing hair. "I didn't have any tangible color experience applying it on any person's hair. But I became a theoretical expert," Omar says.

Over the next several months, he and Gimenez took the lead in translating the rules of hair coloring into software that would determine the right customized mix to get the desired color. That can depend on a numerous variables: a woman's natural color, her current dyed color, how recently she dyed her hair, how much gray hair needs to be covered up, the texture and length of her hair. "You basically look at all of the combinations, and then build out a matrix for how to formulate," Omar explains. Using that knowledge, the team developed a questionnaire that included queries a stylist would ask a first-time customer. The questions themselves aren't rocket science. The rocket science happens when hundreds of thousands or millions of people answer the questionnaires, enabling you to gather more and more data to analyze.

The final step was to automate the formulation. In September 2010, the product was launched. As with an apprentice stylist, eSalon's formulations improved over time as the company got more customers and was able to gather more information. As of 2018, eSalon had dispensed 165,000 different formulations. That's out of a total, it calculates, of 2.2 octooctogintillion pigment variations (that would be 22 followed by 266 zeroes).

In 2019, rival L'Oreal introduced a new brand, Color&Co, that copied key features of eSalon, including an online quiz or a consultation with a colorist to help determine the "a unique custom-blend [color] made only for you." With competition ratcheting up, eSalon – with sales still a modest $30 million a year – agreed to sell a 51 percent stake to the German multinational Henkel. It cited the growing trend toward personalization and eSalon's "valuable customer insights" as reasons for its investment.

Lawrence Ingrassia's "Billion Dollar Brand Club" goes on sale January 28. He is a former business editor of the New York Times and managing editor of The Los Angeles Times.

Mars, Money, and Makeovers : LA’s Big Week

🔦 Spotlight

Happy Friday, LA!

This week has been full of energy in LA’s tech world, with some big moves that are hard to ignore. From a local company going public to bold partnerships and exciting projects, here’s a look at the stories driving conversations and shaping what’s happening right now.

ServiceTitan's IPO Ambitions

Image Source: ServiceTitan - Cofounders Ara Mahdessian & Vahe Kuzoyan

ServiceTitan, a Glendale-based software leader for tradespeople like plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians, is gearing up for a major step forward: its initial public offering. The company plans to offer 8.8 million shares priced between $52 and $57, targeting a valuation of up to $5.16 billion. Trading under the ticker “TTAN” on the Nasdaq, ServiceTitan’s IPO is backed by financial heavyweights Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. ServiceTitan’s software simplifies essential tasks such as scheduling and payments for trades professionals, providing much-needed solutions in an industry frequently underserved by technology. The IPO reflects both the company’s rapid growth and a broader trend of integrating advanced tools into foundational industries.

SpaceX: Shooting for the Stars (and $350 Billion)

Image Source: SpaceX

SpaceX is on the verge of solidifying its place as the world’s most valuable startup, with insiders estimating a valuation of $350 billion, according to Forbes. It’s not just about rockets anymore; this company has its sights on global internet domination with Starlink and a future where Mars isn’t just science fiction. Investors are clearly betting big on SpaceX’s ability to pull off the impossible—time and time again. The company’s achievements not only redefine the limits of private enterprise but also establish SpaceX as a key player in reshaping humanity’s relationship with space. For the LA tech scene, SpaceX’s valuation is more than a number; it’s a reminder of what’s possible when ambition meets execution. The question isn’t “what’s next?”—it’s “what’s not?”

Anduril x OpenAI: The Future of AI Defense

Image Source: Anduril

In a move that underscores the rapid convergence of defense and cutting-edge AI, Costa Mesa-based Anduril Industries announced a partnership with OpenAI. This collaboration aims to bolster U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence while enhancing national security capabilities. Anduril, known for its autonomous defense technologies, is leveraging OpenAI’s advanced AI systems to supercharge its offerings. The implications? Think faster decision-making and smarter tech on the battlefield. This partnership not only signals Anduril’s commitment to innovation but also highlights the growing importance of AI in reshaping defense.

The Rose Bowl Legacy: Preserving an Icon

Image Source: VisitPasadena

The Rose Bowl, Pasadena’s iconic stadium and a symbol of Southern California’s rich history, is gearing up for an $80 million transformation as part of its "Lasting Legacy Campaign." This effort isn’t just about preparing for the 2028 Olympics—it’s about enhancing the fan experience while staying true to the venue’s historic roots. From new field-level club seats to a cutting-edge videoboard, upgraded Wi-Fi, and even a refurbished marquee sign, this project balances nostalgia with modern innovation. The Rose Bowl has always been more than just a stadium—it’s a cultural landmark that represents LA’s ability to honor its past while embracing the future. If there’s a place that embodies where history meets progress, it’s here.

2024 Wrapped: Your Year in Music

Image Source: Spotify

As the year winds down, music lovers are diving into Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay 2024. These features don’t just highlight our favorite tracks; they showcase how deeply music integrates into our daily lives and memories. For anyone in the tech or startup world, these features are a masterclass in how data-driven personalization can deepen user loyalty and turn casual interactions into powerful engagement.

Whether it’s setting the stage for the next space frontier, advancing national security with AI, or revitalizing a cultural landmark, this week’s stories remind us that progress is as much about preserving what matters as it is about reaching for what’s next.


🤝 Venture Deals

LA Companies

  • Nectir, an educational technology company that allows educators to design customized AI teaching assistants providing students with 24/7 personalized support, has raised a $4M Seed funding round led by Long Journey Ventures to develop new features and expand its team. - learn more
  • Talus Network, a blockchain platform merging AI and decentralized tech to create smart agents, has raised a $6M Strategic funding round led by Polychain Capital at a $150M valuation to advance its ecosystem, including Protochain, Nexus, and an AI dating app. - learn more
LA Venture Funds
  • Plus Capital participated in a $35M Series B funding round for Sage, a New York-based company specializing in senior living operations, to enhance its technology platform and expand its services across the U.S. and internationally - learn more
  • Supply Chain Capital led a $4.5M Seed funding round for Celleste Bio, a cocoa tech company specializing in cell-cultured cocoa production, to scale its manufacturing capabilities and accelerate sustainable cocoa innovation. - learn more
  • Village Global co-led a $5.75M Seed funding round for Across AI, a San Francisco-based startup developing AI-driven enterprise solutions, to accelerate product development and expand its team. - learn more
  • M13 led a $5.4M Seed funding round for Cat Labs, an Austin-based startup focused on combating crypto and AI-enabled crime, with the funds being used to develop tools and services that address digital asset security threats. - learn more
  • Chapter One Ventures participated in a $4M Seed funding round for Fiamma, a Singapore-based startup focused on decentralized finance infrastructure, with the funds being used to develop innovative tools for secure and efficient on-chain lending. - learn more
  • The Games Fund participated in a $3M funding round for Playgama, a gaming platform that simplifies the distribution and monetization of HTML5 games across various platforms; the investment will be used to enhance their Platform-as-a-Service ecosystem, including monetization, quality assurance, and management tools. - learn more
  • Fika Ventures led a $6M Seed funding round for StretchDollar, a Pittsburgh and San Francisco-based fintech startup that simplifies health benefits for small businesses through a self-service platform; the funds will be used to enhance their platform and expand their team. - learn more
  • OCV participated in a $27.6M funding round for OSSIO, a Woburn, Massachusetts-based medical device company specializing in bio-integrative orthopedic implants; the funds will accelerate commercial efforts, including new product development and establishing a manufacturing and training center in Florida. - learn more
  • Avalaunch participated in a $6.5M Seed funding round for Avant, a Palo Alto-based decentralized finance protocol that issues a "stable-value" token called avUSD, to scale its crypto yield products. - learn more
  • Rebel Fund participated in a $2.5M Seed funding round for Circleback, a San Francisco startup that uses AI to generate meeting notes and action items, integrating with platforms like HubSpot and Notion; the funding will support expansion and development. - learn more

LA Exits

  • Of Kos, formerly VMed, a healthcare marketing agency specializing in digital and creative solutions, has been acquired by ONAR, a global network of marketing agencies, as part of its expansion into the healthcare marketing sector. - learn more
  • Rhapsody Voices, a boutique podcast network representing leading content creators and offering tailored solutions for revenue growth through sponsorship representation, content creation, strategy, and marketing, has been acquired by Evergreen Podcasts. - learn more
  • TEDIVO, a Long Beach-based software provider specializing in container supply chain tools like BAPLIE Viewer Online, has been acquired by Lynxis to enhance its port orchestration products and improve cargo management efficiency. - learn more

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🚀 Inversion Secures $44 Million to Pioneer On-Demand Delivery from Space

🔦 Spotlight

Happy Friday, LA!

This week, Southern California's thriving space tech scene celebrated another milestone as Inversion, an El Segundo-based startup, announced a $44 million Series A funding round. The investment, co-led by Spark Capital and Adjacent, with participation from Kindred Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures and Y Combinator, underscores the growing appetite for innovative solutions in aerospace, logistics, and beyond. To date, they’ve raised $54 million, including a $10 million seed round in 2021. In September, they also secured a $71 million STRATFI agreement with the Space Force’s SpaceWERX to develop reentry vehicles for military applications, funded through a mix of government and private investment.

Image Source: Inversion

Inversion is pioneering a new frontier: reusable vehicles capable of rapidly returning payloads from orbit to Earth. Their "Earth Return Capsules" are designed to deliver within as little as an hour, enabling everything from rapid-turnaround experiments in microgravity to the delivery of critical medical supplies across the globe.

Building on this vision, a key focus for Inversion, as noted by SpaceNews, is the development of Arc, a reentry vehicle designed to provide "precision delivery on-demand" from space to Earth. With its first flight planned for 2026, the company is using the Series A funding to move Arc through its full product cycle, including design and development. This funding will also support Inversion's growth from its current 25 employees to a team of around 70, as well as their move into a new facility. Co-founder and CEO Justin Fiaschetti emphasized that the funding is sufficient to bring Arc through its inaugural flight.

Adding to the excitement, Inversion recently achieved a critical regulatory milestone in October by receiving a re-entry license from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This license is a pivotal step in their journey, allowing the company to safely and legally return payloads from orbit to Earth. It positions Inversion among a select group of companies capable of operating in this emerging sector and demonstrates their readiness to bring the concept of space-based logistics into reality.

This isn’t just a win for Inversion—it’s a win for the Los Angeles aerospace ecosystem, which continues to attract top-tier talent and funding. With giants like SpaceX and Relativity Space already calling the region home, Inversion is further cementing LA’s status as the nation’s space tech hub.

As Southern California continues to lead the way in space innovation, Inversion is one to watch. Their vision for merging cutting-edge aerospace technology with real-world logistics solutions may not just change how we view space—it might transform how we interact with it.

Stay tuned for more updates from LA’s tech and startup scene. For now, keep your eyes on the skies—Inversion is bringing them closer to Earth.


🤝 Venture Deals

LA Companies

  • Seen Health, a company enhancing healthcare for seniors, has raised a $22M Series A funding round led by 8VC to support the opening of its first center in California and drive the development of the company’s technology. - learn more
LA Venture Funds
  • Theory Forge Ventures participated in a $30M Seed funding round for San Francisco-based Wordware, a startup developing a full-stack operating system for AI development that enables users to create sophisticated AI agents using natural language; the funds will be used to expand their platform and accelerate growth. - learn more
  • Clocktower Ventures participated in the most recent funding round for OpenYield, a New York-based company revolutionizing bond trading with its automated, equity-like marketplace, bringing the company's total funding to $7M to date. - learn more
  • Bonfire Ventures led a $4.25M Seed funding round for KeySavvy, a Seattle-based platform that simplifies and secures private-party car transactions; the funds will be used to expand their operations and engineering team, support new partnerships, enhance platform automation, and launch a fast-financing product for buyers. - learn more
  • Aliment Capital led a $42M Series C funding round for OneRail, an Orlando-based company specializing in last-mile delivery logistics software; the funds will be used to enhance their platform's capabilities and expand market reach. - learn more
  • UP.Partners led a $7M second-extension Series A funding round for Teleo, a Palo Alto-based company specializing in autonomous construction equipment; the funds will be used to expand their product offerings and accelerate market adoption. - learn more
  • Alexandria Venture Investments participated in a $30M Seed funding round for Valora Therapeutics, a San Diego-based biotechnology company developing novel immunotherapies using their proprietary AbLec platform; the funds will be used to advance their research and development efforts, optimize the platform, and progress AbLec therapeutics toward clinical trials. - learn more
  • Progression Fund participated in a $1.5M Pre-Seed funding round for GetMyHome, a Redondo Beach-based real estate service provider that offers a full rebate of seller-paid agent commission fees, charging clients a flat fee for the services they need, and employs agents who receive flat-fee compensation to help clients secure their dream homes without the incentive to push for overbidding. - learn more
  • Hyperlink Ventures participated in a $33M Series B funding round for Selector, a Santa Clara-based company specializing in AI-driven solutions that provide comprehensive visibility and intelligence for complex networks, infrastructure, and applications; the funds will be used to accelerate the development of their AIOps, Large Language Model (LLM), and Digital Twin technologies, as well as to expand their global presence. - learn more
  • Bonfire Ventures and Impulsum Venture Colab participated in a $5.25M Seed funding round for CalmWave, a Seattle-based health-tech startup specializing in reducing non-actionable ICU alarms to alleviate clinician fatigue; the funds will be used to boost market growth and expand partnerships with GPO channels like Premier, Inc. and Partners Coop. - learn more
  • Wavemaker 360 participated in a $14.5M Seed funding round for Citizen Health, a San Mateo, CA-based company with an AI-powered consumer health platform designed to support individuals managing rare and complex conditions; the funds will be used to enhance their platform and advance research in rare disease drug development. - learn more
  • B Capital led a $25M Series A funding round for Synapticure, a Chicago-based virtual care company specializing in neurodegenerative diseases; the funds will be used to expand partnerships, invest in technology, accelerate clinical research, and scale their medical group to enhance care for patients and caregivers nationwide. - learn more
  • Amboy Street Ventures and Emmeline Ventures participated in a $16M Series A funding round for Alloy, a New York-based menopause care startup that offers personalized treatments, including hormone therapy and symptom management, through telemedicine consultations and home delivery of medications. - learn more
  • Morpheus Ventures participated in a $28M Series A funding round for Goodstack, a SaaS and fintech platform that helps businesses integrate charitable giving, and the funds will be used to expand services for corporates, build technology for nonprofits, and hire across the team in 2025. - learn more
  • Trousdale Ventures participated in a Series B funding round for Anello Photonics, a Santa Clara, CA-based company specializing in silicon photonic optical gyroscopes (SiPhOG™); the funds will be used to improve navigation and positioning in GPS-denied environments for industrial and defense uses. - learn more
  • Cultivate Next participated in a $30M Series B funding round for Plantible Foods, a San Diego-based biotechnology company that creates sustainable, plant-based protein ingredients, starting with Rubi Protein™ from the aquatic plant Lemna, will use its investment to expand manufacturing at its first commercial plant, "The Ranchito," a 100-acre facility in West Texas. - learn more
  • Bonfire Ventures led a $4M Seed funding round for Mithrl, a San Francisco-based company providing an AI-powered platform to accelerate scientific research; the funds will be used to expand their go-to-market team and further develop the platform. - learn more
  • Upfront Ventures led a $15M Seed funding round for BrightAI, a San Francisco-based company specializing in AI-powered sensor technology for real-time monitoring across various industries; the funds will be used to enhance their technology and meet growing customer demand. - learn more

      LA Exits

      • Brainjolt, a Pasadena-based digital media company that creates and curates engaging content across various platforms and reaches millions of users monthly, has been acquired by Centerfield. - learn more

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              What’s New from Waymo 🚗 and Snapchat 👻

              🔦 Spotlight

              Happy Friday, LA!

              Image Source: Waymo

              In case you’ve been cooped up indoors or haven’t had a chance to leave the office this week, you might have missed the latest buzz—Waymo’s self-driving cars are now cruising all over LA! That’s right—Waymo One, the autonomous ride-hailing service, has officially expanded citywide, now covering nearly 80 square miles of Los Angeles. After months of testing and a waitlist, Angelenos can now book rides 24/7 in areas stretching from Santa Monica to Hollywood to the USC neighborhood. Early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with passengers rating the service 4.7/5. Riders are praising the smooth, safe experience—making it a game-changer for getting around the city, whether it’s for work, errands, or leisure.

              Image Source: Snap

              Meanwhile, Snapchat is stepping up its game with new features in its Family Center designed to boost family safety and connectivity. Parents can now request their teens' live location on Snap Map, stay informed about their location-sharing settings, and set travel notifications to get alerts when family members arrive or depart from key locations like home or school. These updates give families more control and peace of mind in managing their digital interactions.


              🤝 Venture Deals

              LA Companies

              • Camouflet, an AI-driven platform specializing in real-time pricing optimization, has raised a $3M Seed funding round from private investors to enhance its services. - learn more
              • Chaos Industries, a defense tech company specializing in advanced detection and monitoring systems, raised a $145M Series B funding round led by Accel to accelerate its development of critical national security technologies. - learn more
              • Radiant, a company specializing in advanced nuclear microreactors, raised a $100M Series C funding round led by DCVC. The funds will be used to complete the Kaleidos Development Unit and conduct testing at Idaho National Laboratory's DOME facility, aiming to bring factory-built microreactors to market. - learn more
              • Mundial Media, a company focused on contextual marketing for multicultural audiences, raised a $1.5M Pre-Seed extension round led by new and existing investors, with the funds aimed at advancing their Cadmus AI technology and expanding digital advertising offerings. - learn more

              LA Venture Funds
              • Joyful Ventures participated in a seed funding round for Meatly, a UK-based company specializing in lab-grown pet food, though the exact amount raised has not been disclosed. - learn more
              • B Capital participated in a $200M Series C funding round for Writer, a full-stack generative AI platform that helps enterprises deploy secure and reliable AI solutions to address critical business challenges. - learn more
              • LFX Venture Partners participated in a US$30M Series C2 funding round for UniUni, a company transforming last-mile delivery for e-commerce through technology, and plans to use the capital to improve its platform and rapidly grow its operations. - learn more
              • Composition Capital participated in a $20M Series B funding round for Arbolus, an expert insights platform that connects investors and consultants with subject matter experts, to support Arbolus's expansion into the U.S. market - learn more
              • Type One Ventures co-led a Series A funding round for Lunar Outpost, a company specializing in lunar surface mobility, commercial space robotics, and space resources; the funds will support their active programs. - learn more
              • Trousdale Ventures participated in a $29M funding round for Starfish Space, a Seattle-based satellite servicing company that will use the funds to develop and launch its Otter spacecraft, designed to extend the operational life of satellites in geostationary orbit. - learn more
              • Plus Capital participated in a $20M Series A funding round for OneSkin, a San Francisco-based biotech company specializing in skin health treatments, with the funds aimed at expanding research, developing new formulas, and growing its presence in the anti-aging skincare industry. The company will also invest in its team and explore new sales channels. - learn more
              • Starshot Capital participated in a $10.5M Series A funding round for Ecolectro, a New York City-based green hydrogen company, to support the development of its scalable electrolyzer technology and make green hydrogen more accessible. - learn more
              • Navitas Capital participated in a $37M Series B funding round for SwiftConnect, a company that provides connected access solutions for buildings and spaces, to expand its network, scale operations, and support new product initiatives. - learn more
              • Griffin Gaming Partners led a €17M Seed funding round for BIT ODD, a Finnish gaming studio focused on creating mobile games that prioritize creativity and emotional depth over finance-driven metrics. - learn more
              • The K Fund participated in a $20M funding round for Homethrive, a caregiving solutions platform, and the funds will be used to help expand its AI-driven care navigation, improve personalized support, and enhance digital tools to increase engagement across various payer populations. - learn more

                    LA Exits

                    • Farm Dog, a Los Angeles-based company that provides a platform with tools to help agronomists streamline their work—offering features for field scouting, document management, and data integration to enhance productivity in agriculture—has been acquired by FarmQA. - learn more

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