Evan Xie
LA’s Hottest Startups for 2023
Los Angeles, like the rest of the startup world, saw a dip in global venture funding. As of November 2022, funding reached $22 billion, which is 69% lower than the previous year.
Despite the massive downturn in funding due to the decline in technology stocks at the end of 2021 combined with concerns about rising inflation, it did not stop the startups on this list from raising funding. We asked more than 30 leading L.A.-based investors for their take on the hottest firms in the region. (We also asked VCs not to pick any of their own portfolio companies, and vetted the list to ensure they stuck to that rule.)
They selected a few live-shopping platforms, space startups and payment software companies and we've organized the list based on the amount of capital raised as of January, according to data from PitchBook.
Here are the eight L.A. startups VCs have their eyes on as they look ahead to 2023.
Anduril ($2.32B raised)
Anduril Industries Is Getting Hundreds of Millions to Build Border Surveillance Tech
Image by Ian Hurley
Given how much the company has raised to date, it was no surprise that Costa Mesa-based defense technology startup and U.S. military contractor Anduril was the name that most often came up among L.A. venture investors.
Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens, ex-Palantir executives Matt Grimm and Brian Schimpf founded Anduril in 2017. The startup is most known for its core software product, an operating system called Lattice, which is used to detect potential security threats.
To date, the startup has received investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners and venture capitalist Elad Gil.
ServiceTitan ($1.1B raised)
Earlier this year, the Glendale-based firm filed for an initial public offering. Since its founding in 2012, the company’s co-founders, Ara Mahdessian and Vahe Kuzoyan built its software for a wide range of service industries, from plumbing and landscaping to pest control and HVAC.
The company’s growth is largely driven by its ability to acquire other businesses, including landscaping software provider Aspire and pest control-focused platforms ServicePro and, earlier this month, FieldRoutes.
Whatnot ($484.41M raised)
The Marina del Rey-based livestream shopping platform makes the ‘Hottest Startups’ list for a second year in a row. The online marketplace was founded by former GOAT product manager Logan Head and ex-Googler Grant LaFontaine and made its name by providing a live auction platform for buying and selling collectables like rare Pokémon cards, and has since expanded into sports memorabilia, sneakers and apparel.
It’s no secret that its success is in part, due to the partnerships Whatnot inked this year, like UFC fighter Jorge Masdival to sell sports collectibles on the platform. Along with science fiction/fantasy comics publisher Heavy Metal to bring out original content for the Whatnot community.
Boulevard ($110.35M raised)
Los Angeles-based salon booking app Boulevard attracted backers including Santa Monica-based early-stage VC firm Bonfire Ventures, which focuses on B2B software startups. The startup builds booking and payment software for salons and spas and now it now serves 25,000 professionals across 2,000 salons. Boulevard has also worked with prominent brands such as Toni & Guy and HeyDay.
Varda Space ($53M raised)
Space manufacturing startup Varda focuses on designing, developing, and manufacturing products that benefit from low gravity. The products that the El segundo-based company manufactures in space are intended to be brought back down with the hope that it will improve life on earth. The forward-thinking company was founded by Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov and former SpaceX officer Will Bruey.
Papaya (65.2 million)
Sherman Oaks-based Papaya was founded by Patrick Kann and Jason Metzler. The company was built to make it easier for consumers to pay “any” bills — whether it's a hospital bill or a parking ticket — all on the mobile app. To pay, users take a picture of their bill and type in the amount they want to send as long as the end user has a mailing address or an online payment portal. Papaya utilizes optical character recognition, a software that enables the app to look at every bill — no matter what the format is — and recognize each piece of information.
Impulse Space ($30 million raised)
Based in El Segundo, Impulse Space creates orbital maneuvering vehicles capable of delivering multiple payloads to unique orbits from a single launch. Founded in 2021 by former SpaceX exec Tom Mueller built his company as a last-mile delivery partner for future inter-space missions, like servicing space stations. In July, the space startup inked a deal with Long Beach-based reusable rocket maker Relativity Space to accelerate the entry of its rover into Mars.
Popshop Live (24.5 million raised)
Whatnot competitor Popshop Live is betting that live-shopping is the future of ecommerce. The West Hollywood-based company primarily focuses on selling collectables such as trading cards and anime merchandise.
In the summer of 2021, the company bolstered its team by hiring former Instagram and Instacart executive Bangaly Kaba to lead platform growth and former head of Uber Eats Jason Droege to lead expansion.
From Your Site Articles
- Here Are the dot.LA/PitchBook 50 Hottest Los Angeles Startups for Q2 ›
- Here Are the LA Seed Startups Top VCs Wish They'd Invested In ›
- LA is the Third-Largest Startup Ecosystem in the US ›
- What Are LA’s Hottest Startups of 2022? See Who VCs Picked in dot.LA’s Annual Survey ›
- How To Startup: Part 1: Ideation ›
- What Are LA’s Hottest Startups of 2021? We Asked Top VCs to Rank Them ›
- Nobody Studios Plans to Build 100 Startups in Five Years - dot.LA ›
- From GameTree to Sota — Ukrainian Founders Call LA Home - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Image Source: Los Angeles World Airports
🤝 Venture Deals
LA Companies
- Pearl, a startup that makes AI-powered software that assists dentists in identifying cavities, gum disease, and other dental conditions, raised a $58M Series B funding led by Left Lane Capital with Smash Capital, and others also participating. - learn more
LA Venture Funds
- Fulcrum Venture Group participated in a prior $3.5M Pre-Seed Round for Code Metal, a developer tools startup. - learn more
- B Capital co-led a $12.5M Seed Round for Star Catcher, a startup that aims to develop a space-based grid that captures solar energy in space and distributes it to satellites and other space assets. - learn more
- Mantis VC and Amplify participated in a $140M Series C for Chainguard, an open source security startup. - learn more
- Prominent LA venture capitalist, Carter Reum and wife, Paris Hilton, participated in a $14M Seed/Series A for W, the men’s personal care brand from Jake Paul. - learn more
LA Exits
- Warner Bros. Games acquired Player First Games, developer of the recently launched MultiVersus free-to-play platform fighter videogame. - learn more
Courtesy of Pearl
To develop Second Opinion, Pearl gathered over 100 million dental x-rays from dental practices and academic institutions. The AI platform points out discrepancies found in an x-ray and also serves as a patient communication tool, allowing dentists to show different models of a patient’s teeth and point out problem areas.
“I do think that this is going to become very fundamental to the category [of dentistry] very quickly, and therefore will actually serve as a model for the rest of medicine—for how to infuse and deploy a AI widely at scale, with the ultimate benefit and potential of really elevating the standard of care in a provable way,” Pearl founder and CEO Ophir Tanz told dot.LA.
Pearl’s AI program examine teeth.Courtesy of Pearl
The FDA’s clearance comes amid ongoing skepticism from some within the medical community about the effectiveness of AI applications. A presentation made by the American College of Radiology to the FDA in 2020 reported that 95% of clinicians thought AI was too inconsistent or inaccurate to be used by medical practices. Though the FDA is the largest regulatory body in health care, it has no consistent framework for signing off on a piece of AI that can guide diagnostics, such as the number of reference images used, the diversity of its dataset or its accuracy rate. This has slowed down the clinical adoption rate of such technologies—and while the FDA has proposed a framework to address some of these challenges, nothing has been implemented yet.
Second Opinion’s journey to receiving FDA clearance involved a multi-year process to test every single use case that the platform is trained to do—such as identifying tooth decay, plaque, bone lesions around a tooth and a handful of other discrepancies in otherwise-healthy teeth. Receiving FDA clearance entails a separate and different process than receiving FDA approval; while the former indicates that a product is as good as existing alternatives already on the market, the latter requires a different set of processes for more novel or riskier products to prove that their benefits outweigh potential drawbacks. Tanz noted that the FDA sought only clearance for Second Opinion, and neither required nor asked for approval to allow the product to be marketed in the U.S.
A patient goes under the lights in the dentist’s office.Courtesy of Pearl
Though some critics claim that AI can’t pick up on certain nuances that a human dentist might, Pearl contends that those critics often fail to account for the counter-argument of human error. Through the nonprofit Dental AI Council, the startup commissioned a study that found when presenting a panel of 136 dentists with an X-ray to review, roughly half of them found a cavity, while the other half found none.
Tanz said he is not interested in expanding Pearl’s services into radiology at large, and acknowledged that bottlenecks in the FDA process make it harder to develop, clear and adopt similar technology. Already, the startup has received regulatory approvals from Canada, Australia, the U.K., the European Union and the United Arab Emirates, and is working with roughly 4,000 dental organizations and radiograph manufacturers.
“We think of this as a utility, kind of like water or power,” Tanz said. “You're not going to have any dental practice where this is not going to be powering the radiographic side of things… We really do believe that this will be integrated into every practice in the world in a relatively short period of time.”
Update, March 10: This article has been updated to clarify the difference between FDA clearance and FDA approval, and to specify that Pearl's Second Opinion product did not require FDA approval to be marketed in the U.S.
https://twitter.com/KeerthiVedantam
keerthi@dot.la