![Yohana, a Concierge Service for Families, Launches in LA](https://dot.la/media-library/families-can-create-tasks-in-the-yohana-app-for-their-team-to-review-and-complete.jpg?id=29944072&width=1200&height=400&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C747%2C0%2C747)
![dot.LA](https://dot.la/media-library/dot-la-logo.png?id=28274272&width=166&height=100)
Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
X
Courtesy of Yohana
Yohana, a Concierge Service for Families, Launches in LA
Keerthi Vedantam
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
Who do you call when three simultaneous Zoom meetings have throttled your internet connection for the fifth time this week and your child has a last-minute project that needs to be completed?
Yohana—a company positioning itself as a household concierge service that helps families address the various issues and tasks that crop up in day-to-day life—wants to be that call. And after initially piloting in Seattle last year, the Palo Alto-based company is now making Los Angeles its second core market, officially launching in the city on Tuesday.
Deploying a membership model that costs $249 per month, Yohana promises to help its customers with everything from finding a plumber to planning a birthday party to buying baby food. The company partners with local piano teachers, handymen, flower shops and other service providers to provide such tasks. It also teams each family subscribed to its platform with a guide and researchers who help manage both short-term tasks like home repairs and long-term goals like travel itineraries.
Yohana is the brainchild of founder and CEO Yoky Matsouka, a former Google and Apple executive who served as chief technology officer of Google’s Nest smart home division from 2017 to 2019. After leaving Google, Matsouka started Yohana in 2020 with the goal of creating family-centric technology. She opted to eschew Silicon Valley’s traditional venture capital-backed startup model and instead partner with an old-school tech company: Panasonic, the Japanese consumer electronics conglomerate, which backs Yohana as a fully-funded independent subsidiary.
“[At Nest] it felt that it was very linear no matter how fast we moved; it was a startup with a brand that nobody knew about, and then it takes a long time to build that up,” Matsouka said of her time at Nest prior to its $3.2 billion acquisition by Google in 2014. With the Panasonic partnership, she told dot.LA, “I have the ability with a larger company to utilize their brands to springboard much faster.”
Yohana first launched in Seattle in 2021 via a pilot program involving more than 1,000 households, who it claims were able to save some 8 to 10 hours per week in household tasks by using the service. Through the pilot, Matsouka said the company was able to further refine its product in advance of forays into new markets like L.A. For instance, it built new security and encryption applications to help families manage their credit cards and other sensitive files.
“Initially before we launched in Seattle, we thought that people would not give us really personal tasks like passport renewal,” Matsouka said. “It turns out people felt the need to have a lot of personal data passed on to us so that we can do more tasks.”
In the future, according to Matsouka, the company will be able to leverage its hordes of data through the power of AI and machine learning to make life easier for customers and vendors alike—so that if multiple families are requesting the same service or experience, for example, Yohana’s technology can help streamline the planning.
Yohana’s tech-enabled platform nestles alongside more established ventures like TaskRabbit and Instacart in what’s called the family-tech space, an emerging subsector that collected $1.4 billion in venture capital money in 2021, according to Pitchbook
From Your Site Articles
- WeeCare Raises $17 Million As Childcare Startups Boom - dot.LA ›
- Playa Vista Childcare Center Brella Raises $5 Million, Eyes New LA ... ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Keerthi Vedantam
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
https://twitter.com/KeerthiVedantam
keerthi@dot.la
LA’s Upgrade in Travel and NBA Viewing
08:41 AM | July 26, 2024
Image Source: Los Angeles World Airports
🔦 Spotlight
Exciting developments are underway for Los Angeles as the city prepares for major upgrades in both travel and entertainment. The Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners has approved an additional $400 million for the Automated People Mover (APM) at LAX, increasing its total budget to $3.34 billion. This boost ensures the elevated train’s completion by December 8, 2025, with service starting in January 2026. For Angelenos, this means a significant improvement in travel convenience. The APM will streamline connections between parking, rental car facilities, and the new Metro transit station, drastically cutting traffic congestion around the airport. Imagine a future without the dreaded 30-minute traffic delays at LAX! The APM will operate 24/7, reducing airport traffic by 42 million vehicle miles annually and carrying 30 million passengers each year, while also creating thousands of local jobs and supporting small businesses.
Meanwhile, the NBA is also making waves with its new broadcasting deals. The league has signed multi-year agreements with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon Prime Video, marking a notable shift in media partnerships. ESPN will maintain its long-standing role, NBC returns as a network broadcaster after years away, and Amazon Prime Video will provide NBA games through its streaming platform. Starting with the 2025-2026 season, these deals will enhance the league's reach and revenue, aligning with the NBA's goal to expand its audience and adapt to evolving viewing habits. Whether you're catching the action on TV or streaming online, these changes promise to elevate the fan experience and bring more basketball excitement to Los Angeles.
🤝 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
Read moreShow less
Dental Startup Pearl Gets FDA Clearance for AI-Powered X-Ray Platform
04:57 PM | March 08, 2022
Courtesy of Pearl
Sign up for dot.LA’s daily newsletter for the latest news on Southern California’s tech, startup and venture capital scene.
A West Hollywood-based startup has received Food and Drug Administration clearance for what it calls the first artificial intelligence-enabled product that can read dental x-rays and identify cavities, plaque and other dental conditions.
Second Opinion is an AI detection platform created by Pearl, a dentistry startup founded in 2019 to leverage machine learning and AI to help dentists detect problems in otherwise healthy teeth. The startup raised $11 million in Series A funding in 2019 from Craft Ventures and Santa Monica-based Crosscut Ventures.
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.
Read moreShow less
Keerthi Vedantam
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
https://twitter.com/KeerthiVedantam
keerthi@dot.la
RELATEDTRENDING
LA TECH JOBS