Southern California's
Startup Directory
Series B$84.3MRebuilding healthcare with AI at the core
Pre-Seed$250KBetter, faster tech vendor research
Series D$833.1MWe provide efficient in-space mobility that moves payloads from low Earth orbit to any destination. Our vehicles deliver rapid, reliable access, reducing costs and timelines to make space operations feasible for commercial, government, and scientific missions.
Series C$80.1MOutpace AI-driven attacks. Unify Digital Risk Protection, Human Risk Management, and Email Security to stop digital threats before they scale, empower your teams to lead your defense, and scale your SOC with agentic AI.
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.
Seed$300KARwall redefines XR filmmaking with proprietary tools that simplify LED stage management, virtual production, and creative control.
Seed$300KAI phone agents that call, qualify, and route your leads in under a minute. Built-in CRM integrations for insurance, legal, financial, and medical businesses.
Seed$300KSan Diego-based SuperMem was founded by Yu Lu and has received funding including from the National Science Foundation and Techlink Ventures.
Seed$300KBe Afraid Media is a horror-first media company building brands across digital, audio, film and television, licensing, and commerce. Home of Dread Central, Be Afraid TV, and the Be Afraid Podcast Network.
Seed$275KFounded by CEO Sucheta Godbole Deshpande, who in 2025/2026 appointed Theresa M. Brady to the company's board of directors as it builds out its AI-driven lifestyle health platform.
Seed$275KFounded and led by CEO James Valle, a Newport Beach entrepreneur with a background running a CPA firm; the company built GAILL, an AI-powered leak-detection tool for water utilities.
Seed$270KFounded by Jennifer Azar Burnham-Grubbs, who drew on 20+ years in risk management to build ionava as a combined health-and-wealth platform that rewards healthy behavior financially.