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.
$6.7MAutopilot was built by the team behind the viral 'Pelosi Tracker' and lets users copy politicians' and top traders' stock trades; co-founder Brian Schardt has said the app manages roughly $1.8B in tracked assets.
Series A$6.7MCellibre, a San Diego biotech founded by CEO Ben Chiarelli in 2019, closed an $11.5M Series A led by Merida Capital Holdings to commercialize lab-cultured (fermentation-based) cannabinoids.
$6.7MTechnology purpose-built for libraries, archives, and museums for improving Access, Searching, Resource Sharing (interlibrary loan) & Digital Preservation.
$6.7MLearning Explorer, founded by Jim Hurley in 1999, has raised about $18.1M in total funding, including a recent $2.5M investment from Founderpath.
Series A$6.7MQureator provides integrated human disease model and AI platform to evaluate treatment efficacy in complex disease models.
Seed$6.6MChannel Robotics was co-founded in 2023 by physician-scientist Dr. Philip Weissbrod and UC San Diego roboticist Dr. Michael Yip, and raised a $4.6M seed+ round led by True Ventures for its handheld endoscopic robotics platform.
Series A$6.6MPetalfast was founded by cannabis industry veterans Jason Vegotsky and Arun Kurichety and has raised funding from Merida Capital Holdings and family offices to build a sales/distribution network for California cannabis brands.
Series A$6.6MSnail Inc. (video game publisher behind ARK: Survival Evolved) is led by founder and Chairman/CEO Hai Shi and trades publicly on Nasdaq under ticker SNAL.