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.

Rain's Latest Funding Fuels the Future of Financial Wellness

🔦 Spotlight

Happy Friday,

This week, the LA tech scene buzzed with news that Rain, a leader in financial wellness, hassecured $75 million in Series B equity funding, spearheaded by Prosus. This isn't just another funding round; it's a pivotal chapter in Rain's mission to transform how American workers interact with their earnings.

Since its inception, Rain has been at the forefront of innovation in financial technology, particularly with its earned wage access solutions. The concept was simple yet revolutionary: allow workers to access their earned wages instantly, mitigating financial stress and dependency on high-interest payday loans. This vision quickly gained traction, propelling Rain from a promising startup to a key player in the fintech space.

What makes this Series B funding particularly noteworthy is what it represents on a larger scale. It's not just an influx of capital but a strong endorsement of Rain's potential to expand even further. With previous rounds fueling their initial growth and strategic partnerships, such as their notablecollaboration with Marqeta to enhance payment technologies, Rain has steadily built a foundation not just for success but for significant impact.

As Rain secures this significant new funding, their initiative to reshape financial wellness is set to expand dramatically, showcasing the profound impact tech can have on everyday financial challenges.

Looking forward to seeing how their innovations will drive change in the financial landscape.

🤝 Venture Deals

LA Companies

  • Dosen, a Los Angeles-based HRtech startup founded by Ronan Wall, Victor Burke, and Cian McCarthy, has secured $2.3M in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round led by Affinity Ventures. The company offers an AI-powered platform that aligns employee-led learning with business goals through personalized, gamified development programs. The funds will be used to scale the platform, enhance AI-driven personalized learning, and improve employee engagement and productivity. - learn more
  • Plug, a Santa Monica-based company operating an EV-exclusive wholesale online auction platform, has secured $6.7M in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by Floodgate, Autotech Ventures, and A*. The company has also launched Plug Trade Desk™, the first EV-focused service designed to help dealers confidently price, move, and monetize trade-ins. The newly acquired funds will be used to enhance Plug's technology and expand its services, aiming to support dealers in navigating the growing used EV market. - learn more
  • Gallatin AI, a defense tech startup, has raised $15M in seed funding led by 8VC to scale its AI-powered logistics platform, Navigator. The tool helps military logisticians predict, plan, and execute operations more efficiently in contested environments. Funds will be used to expand the team and deploy the platform across military services. - learn more
  • BLNG AI, a generative AI platform based in Los Angeles and Paris, raised $3M in seed funding led by Speedinvest to streamline jewelry design by turning sketches into photorealistic renderings and animations. The funding will support commercialization, team expansion in Europe and the U.S., and the launch of a subscription-based app for luxury brands and independent jewelers. - learn more
  • Amca, a newly launched aerospace company focused on modernizing the industrial supply chain, has raised $76M in funding from investors including Caffeinated Capital, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. The company plans to acquire specialized suppliers and develop new aerospace products, aiming to strengthen and future-proof the sector’s manufacturing and innovation capabilities. - learn more
  • Turbine Finance Corp., a Santa Monica, California-based data science-driven liquidity platform, has raised a total of $21.75M in equity funding, comprising a $13M Series A round co-led by Alpha Edison and TTV Capital, and a previously unannounced $8.75M seed round with participation from Fin Capital, B Capital, and Sozo Ventures. Additionally, the company secured up to a $100M warehouse facility from Silicon Valley Bank to provide credit facilities to venture investors. The combined funding of $121.75M will be used to deploy the warehouse line and expand Turbine's data science team. Turbine's platform enables private equity and venture firms to offer limited partners access to the value of their portfolio investments without reducing exposure, leveraging machine learning to expedite underwriting processes. - learn more
  • Gente Beauty, an innovative Brazilian body care brand, has received a lead investment from Webster Capital, a private equity firm specializing in consumer and healthcare sectors. This partnership aims to support Gente Beauty's growth and expansion in the beauty industry. - learn more
            LA Venture Funds
            • Alexandria Investment Partners participated in a $41M Series A round for Solu Therapeutics, a Boston-based biotech company developing targeted protein degradation therapies. The funding will advance its lead candidate, STX-0712, which recently entered a Phase 1 clinical trial for CMML and other advanced blood cancers. - learn more
            • Calibrate Ventures participated in SigIQ.ai's $9.5M seed funding round. SigIQ.ai, based in Berkeley, California, is an AI tutoring startup focused on providing personalized education through advanced AI models. The funds will be used to hire top talent, enhance their AI models, and scale their platforms to educational systems worldwide. - learn more
            • Rusheen Capital Management participated in Zero Industrial's $10M Series A funding round, aiming to accelerate the development of thermal energy storage solutions in North America. Zero Industrial focuses on deploying large-scale thermal energy storage projects to enhance energy efficiency and support decarbonization efforts. The funding will be used to expand their project pipeline and advance the commercialization of their technology. - learn more

            LA Exits

            • Bread Beauty Supply has been acquired by Cost of Doing Business (CODB), a holding company founded in 2024 by Topicals founder and CEO Olamide Olowe and president Sochi Mbadugha. The acquisition aims to expand Bread's retail presence in the U.S., starting with an increased footprint in Sephora stores. Founder Maeva Heim will continue as Chief Creative Officer, focusing on the brand's creative direction, while CODB will manage strategic operations. This move reflects CODB's commitment to supporting Black-owned businesses and fostering diversity in the beauty industry. - learn more

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                          El Segundo Startup Turns Tax Credits into Big Business

                          🔦 Spotlight

                          Hello LA,

                          Step into the world of Incentify, the El Segundo-based innovator turning the headache of managing tax credits and incentives into a walk in the park. Founded in 2019, this trailblazing company is reshaping how businesses approach what was once a daunting bureaucratic challenge.

                          Incentify’s platform is revolutionizing the industry by helping businesses discover and effectively manage a share of the estimated $1.2 trillion in tax credits and incentives that often go unclaimed each year. This critical service not only simplifies the process but also ensures that companies can more easily access and leverage these financial opportunities to fuel their growth and sustainability initiatives.

                          Recently, Incentify reached a new milestone by securing $9.5 million Series A funding led by Innovent Capital Group. This significant investment underscores the market’s confidence in their innovative approach and supports their mission to expand their technological capabilities and market reach.

                          As Incentify gears up for this expansion, their efforts are set to make tax incentives more accessible to a broader spectrum of businesses. This is especially vital in today’s economy, where optimizing financial strategies is crucial for business resilience and growth.

                          Incentify's success story from El Segundo is not just about financial gains but also about empowering companies with the tools to turn complex financial engagements into strategic advantages.

                          Stay tuned for more from LA’s vibrant tech scene. Let’s continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

                          Enjoy your weekend, and keep innovating, LA!

                          🤝 Venture Deals

                          LA Companies

                          • TOGETHXR, a pioneering women's sports media and commerce brand co-founded by athletes Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel, and Sue Bird, has achieved profitability and significant growth, including tripling its year-over-year revenue and increasing its social media following by 17% year-to-date. The company has secured additional growth capital in a funding round led by Alex Morgan's Trybe Ventures. The funds will be used to expand TOGETHXR's presence in the women's sports marketplace. Additionally, media executive Nancy Dubuc has joined the company as Executive Chair, bringing her extensive experience to support TOGETHXR's mission of elevating women's sports and culture. - learn more
                          • Airvet, a Los Angeles-based pet telehealth platform, has secured $11M in an oversubscribed Series B-2 funding round led by HighlandX. This investment follows a year of significant growth, including a 4x increase in year-over-year revenue and a tripling of its client base. Airvet partners with leading employers across various industries, such as PepsiCo, Adobe, and Lyft, to provide employees with 24/7 access to veterinary care via video or chat. The platform's services include online pharmacy, e-prescriptions, discounted pet insurance, wellness programs, and specialty care, with recent expansions into Spanish and French language support. The funds will be used to further enhance Airvet's platform and expand its reach, aiming to make veterinary care more accessible and affordable for pet families globally. - learn more
                                  LA Venture Funds
                                  • Interlagos co-led a $50M Series A funding round for Aetherflux, a San Carlos, California-based startup developing satellites to collect and transmit solar energy from space to Earth. The funds will be used to expand Aetherflux's engineering team and advance the technology for its planned low Earth orbit demonstration mission in 2026. - learn more
                                  • Bungalow Capital Management co-led a $2M seed funding round for Juno, a Denver-based startup specializing in corporate guest travel management. Juno offers an integrated platform that streamlines booking, logistics, payments, reimbursements, and support for non-employee travelers such as job candidates, contractors, and customers. The funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand partnerships, including a collaboration with ALTOUR as their first travel management company partner. - learn more
                                  • Veridical Ventures co-led a $3.75M seed funding round for Flagship, a Sydney, Australia-based retail technology company specializing in visual merchandising solutions. Flagship's platform creates digital twins of retail stores, enabling data-driven optimization of product placement and store layouts to enhance sales performance. The funds will be used to expand Flagship's presence in the U.S. market and further develop its product offerings. - learn more
                                  • Miroma Ventures participated in a £6.5M Series A funding round for Limitless Travel, a Birmingham, UK-based company specializing in accessible holidays for individuals with disabilities. Founded in 2015 by Angus Drummond, who was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at 22, Limitless Travel offers curated group holidays with trained carers, ensuring accommodations and excursions meet specific accessibility needs. The investment will enable the company to enhance its technology, expand its range of destinations, and lay the groundwork for international growth, aiming to transform the lives of disabled individuals through travel. - learn more
                                  • B Capital participated in a $20M Series A funding round for Gable, a Seattle-based company specializing in data management solutions. Gable's platform focuses on "shifting left" in data management by enabling software and data developers to collaboratively build and manage high-quality data assets through API-based data contracts. The funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand Gable's team to meet the growing demand for data collaboration tools. - learn more
                                  • Rebel Fund participated in a $3.8M funding round for Sohar Health, a health technology company. Sohar Health is developing an AI-powered platform designed to streamline patient intake and triage, aiming to enhance access to healthcare services. The funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand the company's reach within the healthcare industry. - learn more

                                      LA Exits

                                      • Tixologi, a next-generation ticketing platform, has been acquired by Punchup Live, a New York-based comedy platform. This strategic move integrates Tixologi's advanced ticketing technology into Punchup Live's ecosystem, enabling seamless, direct-to-fan ticket sales for comedians and venues. The acquisition aims to enhance the ticket purchasing experience by providing features such as fast checkout, unified outreach tools, and advanced anti-scalping solutions, thereby empowering comedians to connect more effectively with their audiences. - learn more
                                      • InVisit, a Calabasas, California-based provider of cloud-based visitor management solutions, has been acquired by Motorola Solutions. InVisit's platform streamlines visitor registration, access, and host notifications across sectors such as commercial offices, education, and healthcare, enhancing security through features like blocklist screening and real-time guest activity insights. This acquisition aims to integrate InVisit's capabilities into Motorola Solutions' Avigilon Alta security suite, offering enterprise customers a unified, cloud-native approach to managing security threats and improving operational efficiency. - learn more

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                                                  $207M Later, Napster is Back and Ready for the Metaverse

                                                  🔦 Spotlight

                                                  Happy Friday, Los Angeles!

                                                  This week, we’re rewinding the clock and fast-forwarding into the future at the same time. Napster, yes, that Napster, just got acquired for $207 million byInfinite Reality, a metaverse and immersive tech company that’s aiming to bring the iconic music platform into the next generation.

                                                  For anyone who came of age in the early 2000s, Napster was either your musical awakening or the reason your dial-up connection crashed. Launched in 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, it was the face of peer-to-peer file sharing and a lightning rod in the music industry’s first wave of digital disruption. After its legal battles and shutdown in 2001, Napster bounced between owners like Roxio and Best Buy, before eventually merging with Rhapsody and evolving into a legitimate streaming service.

                                                  Now, Infinite Reality is giving Napster a fresh remix. The company says it plans to turn Napster into a social-first music platform that emphasizes artist-fan interaction over passive listening. We’re talking virtual 3D concert experiences, listening parties, fan communities, and merch drops… essentially, a metaverse-native platform built for music superfans.

                                                  According to Infinite Reality CEO John Acunto, this aligns with the company’s bigger vision: moving the internet away from “a flat 2D clickable web” into “a 3D conversational one.” They’re betting that a brand like Napster, which already carries cultural weight, can thrive in a world where fans want deeper connections and creators want modern monetization tools.

                                                  It’s a bold move, but maybe a smart one. Nostalgia is a powerful asset, and in an era where legacy brands keep getting digital reboots, Napster has a chance to go from early disruptor to comeback story.

                                                  Will today’s listeners hit play? We’ll see. But as far as tech comebacks go, we’re here for this remix.

                                                  🤝 Venture Deals

                                                  LA Companies

                                                  • Topanga, a Los Angeles-based company specializing in AI-driven waste reduction solutions for commercial kitchens, has raised an $8M Series A funding round led by Blue Bear Capital, with participation from Struck Capital, Amasia, and Wonder Ventures. This investment brings Topanga's total funding to $12.2M. The company plans to use the proceeds to expand its food waste tracking platform into the senior living, health care, and hospitality sectors, accelerate the growth of its ReusePass system beyond universities into enterprise food service, and enhance integration with major food-service platforms like Grubhub and Jamix. - learn more
                                                  • Flight Science, an aviation tech startup focused on AI-powered flight optimization, raised $1.5M in pre-seed funding led by Outsiders Fund. The company helps airlines reduce fuel costs, emissions, and turbulence impact, and will use the funds to grow its team and expand product rollout by summer 2025. - learn more
                                                        LA Venture Funds
                                                          • Second Sight Ventures participated in a $14.2M Series A1 funding round for Lucky Energy, an Austin, Texas-based energy drink company. Lucky Energy offers a line of zero-sugar, zero-calorie beverages in six flavors, formulated with ingredients like maca and beta-alanine. The company plans to use the funds to accelerate distribution, introduce new products, support strategic partnerships, and recruit in key business areas. - learn more
                                                          • M13 led a $5.5M funding round for Chord Commerce, with participation from Act One Ventures and others. The New York-based company provides an AI-powered customer data platform (CDP) that helps commerce brands unify customer data, generate real-time insights, and automate marketing decisions. The funding will be used to further develop the platform and support brands in scaling their data-driven marketing efforts. - learn more
                                                          • Upfront Ventures led a $4M Seed funding round for Arlo Health, a New York City-based AI-powered health insurance underwriter focused on small and mid-sized businesses. Arlo offers level-funded health plans designed to improve preventive care and cost transparency through value-based care and AI-driven underwriting. The funds will be used to expand its broker network, grow its engineering and sales teams, and scale operations. - learn more
                                                          • Bonfire Ventures co-led a $5M Seed funding round for VoiceOps, with participation from Village Global and others. Based in New York City, VoiceOps uses generative AI to analyze phone calls and surface insights that boost sales performance, ensure compliance, and optimize marketing. The funding will support product development, team expansion, and broader market adoption. - learn more
                                                          • MANTIS Venture Capital participated in a $17.2M Seed funding round for EDGE Markets, a fintech company building banking tools tailored to the gaming industry. EDGE’s flagship product, EDGE Boost, offers a debit card and bank account specifically designed for betting, with features like spending limits, financial transparency, and cash-back rewards. The funds will be used to further develop the platform and expand its presence within the gaming market. - learn more

                                                              LA Exits

                                                              • SmartDepo, a leading provider of AI-powered deposition summaries for the legal industry, has been acquired by Rev, a prominent speech-to-text technology company. Founded in 2023 by civil rights attorney Isaac Manoff, SmartDepo delivers comprehensive deposition summaries featuring 100% accurate page-line citations, hyperlinked tables of contents, key admissions analyses, and deposition memos highlighting essential themes. This strategic acquisition combines Rev's highly accurate transcription services with SmartDepo's advanced summarization capabilities, aiming to enhance productivity for attorneys and court reporters by reducing manual review time and improving client outcomes. - learn more
                                                              • Stem, a platform offering personalized distribution and digital strategy services for independent artists and labels, has been acquired by Concord, a leading independent music company. Stem will operate as a separate division within Concord Label Group, with CEO Milana Lewis and President Kristin Graziani continuing in their roles. This acquisition provides Stem with the capital and resources to invest in new technology, expand its suite of label services, and accelerate global growth, while maintaining its mission to empower independent artists with autonomy and support. - learn more

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