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.
EXPLORE BY CITY
WHAT SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA BUILDS
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$4.5MFounded by Dr. Faith H. Barnett, the San Diego biotech has received investment from NuFund Venture Group.
Series A$4.5MDiscover Balboa Geolocation's cutting-edge geolocation solutions for defense and commercial markets, ensuring accuracy in challenging environments.
Nasdaq-listed (QLGN); received a $41 million strategic PIPE investment from Faraday Future, whose founder is Chinese entrepreneur YT Jia (Jia Yueting).
Founded in 2016 by CEO Matt Lashey, who created the chemoWave cancer-treatment tracking app; investors include Plug and Play Tech Center.
$4.5MNorwegian medical device company Photocure ASA announced in 2026 it is acquiring Vesica Health, whose bladder-cancer diagnostic AssureMDx has received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation.
Co-founded by physicists Dr. Massimiliano Di Ventra and Dr. Fabio Traversa alongside serial entrepreneur John Beane, previously a founder of ecoATM; investors include DARPA and Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.
Seed$4.4MFounded in 2007 by cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Edward Boyle and Paul Molloy to develop anti-occlusion surgical drainage devices; the Anaheim-based company's PleuraFlow system was later distributed exclusively in the US by Maquet Medical Systems.
Seed$4.3MCo-founded by Shane Shahrestani, incubated through Caltech's OTTCP startup program; the company closed an oversubscribed $5M Series Seed Prime round in 2024 backed by investors including Freeflow Ventures and DigiTx Partners.