Southern California's
Tech
Startup Directory
Showcasing Southern California's innovation, one startup at a time. Every funded and bootstrapped company, from seed round to first dollar of revenue, tracked as it happens.
Includes SEC Form D filings from the last 3 years, plus all-time totals for companies sourced from YC and news coverage.
Artificial Intelligence
The region's largest single cluster by company count — AI and machine learning threaded through nearly every other industry here, from defense to biotech to entertainment.
Aerospace & Defense
Home to SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and a new wave of hypersonics and space-infrastructure startups.
Entertainment & Gaming Tech
Hollywood's production infrastructure, live events, and a growing games and creator-tools scene.
Semiconductor Hardware
Qualcomm and Broadcom anchor a chip-design cluster spanning the region.
Medical Technology
A deep biotech research base and a growing bench of medical device and diagnostics startups.
B2B
Business software and services sold to other companies. The largest single category of startup across Southern California, spanning sales tools, vertical operating systems, and everything in between.
Industrials
Manufacturing, hardware, and physical-world operations. Overlaps heavily with the region's decades-old aerospace and defense manufacturing base, now extending into robotics and automated production.
Consumer
Products and apps built directly for individual consumers, drawing on Southern California's media and entertainment base.
Healthcare
Health tech, medical devices, and healthcare services, backed by a decades-old biotech research base and a deep bench of clinical and diagnostics startups.
Fintech
Financial technology: payments, banking, investing, and financial infrastructure.
Education
Education technology and learning platforms built across Southern California.
Real Estate & Construction
Property technology, construction tech, and real estate services.
Co-founded by Kevin Marciano along with Scott Ulliman and Nate Reese; the small studio builds games on Epic's Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) and was reportedly down to its last few months of runway before its GDC 2023 breakthrough.
Seed$4.9MCo-founded by Brian Wong, who previously founded Kiip, a mobile rewards-platform startup he built starting at age 19 that made him one of Silicon Valley's youngest venture-backed CEOs.
Seed$4.8M
Seed$4.7MGemist.io offers innovative jewelry design and visualization technology to boost sales, engagement, and customer loyalty for fine jewelry brands.
Seed$4.6MTurn your bread into dough. The Simply Bread Oven and app help bakers at every stage bake more, sell more, and grow a thriving micro-bakery.
Seed$4.6MPludo. For a balanced body and mind.
Seed$4.5MFounded by Dr. Faith H. Barnett, the San Diego biotech has received investment from NuFund Venture Group.
Founded in 2016 by CEO Matt Lashey, who created the chemoWave cancer-treatment tracking app; investors include Plug and Play Tech Center.