These Are LA's Top Venture Capitalists of 2023, According to Their Fellow VCs

Kristin Snyder

Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.

These Are LA's Top Venture Capitalists of 2023, According to Their Fellow VCs

2022 was a tough year for venture capital. Venture deals fell throughoutthe year as the economic environment became uncertain.

But despite the economic downturn, VCs still flocked to LA’s growing tech and startup scene.

We asked more than 30 investors to share which VCs are the best Los Angeles has to offer. The following list reflects those who received two or more votes.

A few familiar faces popped up, such as Bonfire Ventures’ Mark Mullen and TenOneTen’s Minnie Ingersoll, who both received the most votes in previousyears. This year, Mullen topped the list with six votes, while Ingersoll and M13’s Anna Barber both came in second with three votes.

The below results are listed according to the number of votes received. In the case of a tie, the names are listed alphabetically by last name.

Here are LA’s top VCs of 2022 according to their peers:


Mark Mullen

Mark Mullen, Bonfire Ventures

Mark Mullen is the co-founder and managing director of Bonfire Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in B2B software companies at seed stage. In 2022, Bonfire raised over $230 million across two new funds. Mullen previously founded Double M Partners and Mull Capital. (Disclosure: Mullen is an investor in dot.LA.)

Anna Barber, M13

Anna Barber is a partner at M13, which invests in early-stage consumer tech. M13 raised $400 million last year for its third fund and intends to target Web3. She was previously the managing director of Techstars LA and is currently on the Advisory Board of PledgeLA, which is a coalition of tech companies and venture capital firms. (Disclosure: M13 is an investor in dot.LA)

Minnie Ingersoll, TenOneTen

Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at TenOneTen Ventures, which invests in early-stage tech companies. Having started her career at Google, she went on to co-found the online used car marketplace Shift Technologies. She currently hosts dot.LA’s LA Venture podcast.

Dana Settle, Greycroft

Dana Settle is the co-founder of Greycroft, where she is also a managing partner. The venture capital firm primarily invests in Internet and mobile markets, such as the savings app Acorns and the banking company Narmi. She is currently a Board Director of the National Venture Capital Association. (Disclosure: Greycroft is an investor in dot.LA.)

Raj Ganguly

Raj Ganguly, B Capital Group

Raj Ganguly is a co-founder and anaging General Partner of the multi-stage global investment firm B Capital. In 2022, B Capital raised $250 million to launch its first early-stage fund. Ganguly is a Senior Advisor at the Boston Consulting Group.

Eva Ho, Fika Ventures

Eva Ho is a general partner at the boutique seed fund Fika Ventures, which invests in enterprise software, fintech, marketplaces, and digital health. In 2022, Fika invested in companies ranging from BuildOps, a software program for contractors, to HeyRenee, a healthtech company. Ho previously served as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence for City of Los Angeles and worked for Google and YouTube.

Rick Smith, Crosscut

Rick Smith co-founded the seed-stage venture capital firm Crosscut in 2008 and serves as a Managing Director. Since then, the firm has invested in companies ranging from Fabletics to Buzzfeed. Smith previously worked as a managing director at Palomar Ventures and SunAmerica.

Michael Tam, Craft Ventures

Michael Tam is a partner at Craft Ventures, an early-stage and growth fund. Last last year, Craft led the funding round for meez, a restaurant management app for chefs. Prior to joining Craft, Tam was a Senior Associate at Crosscut Ventures and oversaw business operations for Uber.

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“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

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How Token and Tixr Plan To Take on Ticketmaster in L.A.

Andria Moore

Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.

How Token and Tixr Plan To Take on Ticketmaster in L.A.
Evan Xie

When Taylor Swift announced her ‘Eras’ tour back in November, all hell broke loose.

Hundreds of thousands of dedicated Swifties — many of whom were verified for the presale — were disappointed when Ticketmaster failed to secure them tickets, or even allow them to peruse ticketing options.

But the Taylor Swift fiasco is just one of the latest in a long line of complaints against the ticketing behemoth. Ticketmaster has dominated the event and concert space since its merger with Live Nation in 2010 with very few challengers — until now.

Adam Jones, founder and CEO of Token, a fan-first commerce platform for events, said he has the platform and the tech ready to take it on. First and foremost, with Token, Jones is creating a system where there are no queues. In other words, fans know immediately which events are sold out and where.

“We come in very fortunate to have a modern, scalable tech stack that's not going to have all these outages or things being down,” Jones said. “That's step one. The other thing is we’re being aggressively transparent about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. So with the Taylor Swift thing…you would know in real time if you actually have a chance of getting the tickets.”

Here’s how it works: Users register for Token’s app and then purchase tickets to either an in-person event, or an event in the metaverse through Animal Concerts. The purchased ticket automatically shows up in the form of a mintable NFT, which can then be used toward merchandise purchases, other ticketed events or, Adams’s hope for the future — external rewards like airline travel. The more active a user is on the site, the more valuable their NFT becomes.

Ticketmaster has dominated the music industry for so long because of its association with big name artists. To compete, Token is working on gaining access to their own slew of popular artists. They recently entered into a partnership with Animal Concerts, a live and non-live event experiences platform that houses artists like Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Robin Thicke.

“You'll see they do all the metaverse side of the house,” Jones said. “And we're going to be the [real-life] web3 sides of the house.”

In addition, Token prides itself on working with the artists selling on their platform to set up the best system for their fanbase, devoid of hefty prices and additional fees — something Ticketmaster users have often complained about. Jones believes where Ticketmaster fails, Token thrives. The app incentivizes users to share more data about their interests, venues and artists by operating on a kind of points system in the form of mintable NFTs.

“We can actually take the dataset and say there’s 100 million people in the globe that love Taylor Swift, so imagine she’s going on tour and we ask [the user], ‘Would you go to see her in Detroit?’ And imagine this place has 30,000 seats, but 100,000 people clicked ‘yes,’” he explained. “So you can actually inform the user before anything even happens, right? About what their options are and where to get it.”

Tixr, a Santa-Monica based ticketing app, was founded on the idea that modern ticketing platforms were “living in the legacy of the past.” They plan to attract users by offering them exclusive access to ticketed events that aren’t in Ticketmaster’s registry.

“It melts commerce that's beyond ticketing…to allow fans to experience and purchase things that don't necessarily have to do with tickets,” said Tixr CEO and Founder Robert Davari. “So merchandise, and experiences, and hospitality and stuff like that are all elegantly melded into this one, content driven interface.”

Tixr sells tickets to exclusive concerts like a Tyga performance at a night club in Arizona, general in-person festivals like ComplexCon, and partners with local vendors like The Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach to sell tickets to the races. Plus, Davari said it’s equipped to handle high-demand, so customers aren’t spending hours waiting in digital queues.

Like Token, Tixr has also found success with a rewards program — in the form of fan marketing.

“There's nothing more powerful in the core of any event, brand, any live entertainment, [than] the community behind it,” Davari said. “So we build technology to empower those fans and to reward them for bringing their friends and spreading the word.”

Basically, if a user gets a friend to purchase tickets to an event, then the original user gets rewarded in the form of discounts or upgrades.

Coupled with their platforms’ ability to handle high-demand events, both Jones and Davari believe their platforms have what it takes to take on Ticketmaster. Expansion into the metaverse, they think, will also help even the playing field.

“So imagine you can't go to Taylor Swift,” Jones said. “What if you could purchase an exclusive to actually go to that exact same show over the metaverse? An artist’s whole world can expand past the stage itself.”

With the way ticketing for events works now, obviously not everyone always gets the exact price, venue or date they want. There are “winners and losers.” Jones’s hope is that by expanding beyond in-person events, there can be more winners.

“If there’s 100,000 people who want to go to one show and there's 37,000 seats, 70,000 are out,” he said. “You can't fight that. But what we can do is start to give them other opportunities to do things in a different way and actually still participate.”

Jones and Davari both teased that their platforms have some exciting developments in the works, but for now both Token and Tixr are set on making their own space within the industry.

“We simply want to advance this industry and make it more efficient and more pleasurable for fans to buy,” Davari said. “That's it.”

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