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The LA Startup Taking on One of Parenting’s Most Frustrating Problems

Дата публикации: 08-05-2026 16:33:48


🔦 SpotlightHello Los Angeles,Every parent knows the feeling of becoming an overnight expert in something they never wanted to learn.For families navigating developmental delays, behavioral health needs, autism, speech therapy, occupational therapy or pediatric mental health support, that learning curve can become a full-time job. Finding the right specialist is hard enough. Getting those specialists, pediatricians, insurers and families to actually coordinate with each other? That’s often where the system breaks.That’s the problem Los Angeles-based Village is trying to solve.The specialty pediatrics startup raised $9.5 million in seed funding this week, led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Bling Capital, GTMFund and Perceptive Ventures.Its AI-powered platform is designed to bring families, providers, pediatricians and payers into one coordinated care system for children with developmental, behavioral and mental health needs.The company was born out of co-founder Brandon Terry’s personal experience navigating care for his daughter after she was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition. Like many parents, his family faced long waitlists, high out-of-pocket costs and a fragmented web of specialists who were not necessarily working from the same playbook.The pitch is not simply “find a provider faster.” Village wants to coordinate the entire team around a child, including occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, behavioral therapists and pediatricians. Its AI agent, Vera, is designed to help with the administrative drag that often slows pediatric practices down: scheduling, documentation, billing and care coordination.The company’s raise also points to a less flashy, but deeply consequential corner of health tech: making complex care easier to navigate. In specialty pediatrics, the pain point is not always the quality of care itself. It is the space between appointments, referrals, insurance approvals and provider communication where families are often left to connect the dots themselves.So far, Village says it has built a network of more than 400 independent pediatric specialty providers in Southern California and has contracts with major commercial insurers including Blue Cross & Blue Shield, Cigna and UnitedHealthcare. The new funding will help the company expand across Southern California, into other parts of California and eventually into new states.In other words, the next wave of healthcare infrastructure may not look like one giant hospital system. It may look more like a connected network built around the people who have been holding the system together all along: families.And yes, in this case, it really does take a Village.Venture deals follow below.👇🤝 Venture DealsLA CompaniesMOSH, the brain health nutrition brand co-founded by Maria Shriver and Patrick Schwarzenegger, raised a $13M Series A led by Main Street Advisors to expand nationally across grocery retailers and accelerate product innovation. The Los Angeles-based company plans to use the funding to grow its retail footprint, including an upcoming Target launch, while expanding its lineup of brain-focused nutrition products with new high-protein bars designed to support both cognitive and physical performance. - learn moreSpring Labs raised $5M to expand its AI-native compliance platform for banks and fintechs, with the funding led by BankTech Ventures and Haymaker Ventures. The Marina del Rey-based company is building AI agents that automate complaint handling, dispute resolution, and other compliance workflows, helping regulated financial institutions scale operations more efficiently while maintaining oversight and auditability. - learn moreFlowPrompt.ai secured a strategic seed investment from ART Fund SP, part of ChainBLX SPC, as the company expands its AI orchestration platform designed to help developers build and manage complex AI workflows through a visual interface. Alongside the investment, the companies also launched a global AI hackathon and builder program that will give selected founders access to funding opportunities, platform tools, and a live investor pitch event in Los Angeles later this summer. - learn moreChance Studios raised $3.2M to build a unified platform for trading card game collectors, aiming to bring inventory management, marketplace activity, and community features into a single ecosystem. The round was co-led by Makers Fund and Hashed, with participation from Arbitrum Gaming Ventures, GAM3GIRL VC, and others, as the company looks to modernize how collectors buy, track, and interact around physical and digital TCG assets. - learn moreLA Venture FundsRebel Fund participated in Moritz’s $9M seed round, backing the AI-native law firm as it looks to automate large portions of routine corporate legal work. The company combines software with experienced attorneys to speed up contract drafting and review, and says it has already handled more than $2 billion worth of contracts across over 100 companies since launching earlier this year. - learn moreRebel Fund participated in Corvera’s $4.2M seed round, backing the AI-native supply chain platform as it automates back-office operations for consumer packaged goods brands. The Y Combinator-backed startup is building AI agents that can handle workflows like order processing, invoicing, and demand planning across fragmented enterprise systems, helping brands scale operations without significantly increasing headcount. - learn moreChaac Ventures participated in Astrocade’s $5.6M funding round, backing the gaming startup as it builds a social gaming platform centered around community-created interactive experiences. The company is focused on blending gaming, streaming, and creator tools into a more collaborative entertainment platform, and plans to use the funding to expand development and grow its creator ecosystem. - learn moreFusion VC participated in MSICS Pharma’s $3.6M funding round, backing the biotech company as it advances psilocybin-based treatments for PTSD, depression, and OCD. The company is developing medical-grade psychedelic compounds and plans to use the funding to expand production, accelerate clinical trials, and prepare for broader commercialization as interest in psychedelic therapies continues to grow. - learn moreJAM Fund participated in Fun’s $72M Series A, backing the payments infrastructure startup as it scales its platform for moving money across fintech and digital asset applications. The round was co-led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire, and the company plans to use the funding to expand internationally, pursue acquisitions, and deepen its infrastructure stack as demand grows for faster global payment systems. - learn moreLA ExitsTapin2 was acquired by Greater Sum Ventures, joining MyVenue as part of GSV’s expanded point-of-sale technology platform for stadiums, arenas and live entertainment venues. Tapin2 provides self-service, suite catering and mobile ordering technology for high-volume sports and entertainment venues, while MyVenue offers cloud-native POS software across concessions, premium seating, retail, in-seat ordering and other venue operations. Together, the companies say their technology is used in more than 70% of MLB and NFL stadiums. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. - learn moreMotiv Space Systems signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Rocket Lab, bringing its space robotics, motion control systems and precision spacecraft mechanisms into Rocket Lab’s growing space systems business. Motiv’s technology has supported major missions including NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover and lunar rover programs, and the company will be rebranded as Rocket Lab Robotics after the deal closes, which is expected in the second quarter of 2026. - learn moreRobyn was acquired by Los Angeles-based Tot Squad, bringing its AI-powered doula tool into Tot Squad’s broader support platform for expecting and new moms. Robyn’s AI was trained on more than 70,000 de-identified messages between parents and doulas, and the acquisition will help Tot Squad offer free, around-the-clock pregnancy and early motherhood guidance alongside access to human experts like doulas, lactation consultants and sleep coaches. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. - learn moreDownload the dot.LA App

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🔦 Spotlight

Happy Friday, LA.

The largest checks in tech are increasingly going toward companies trying to build their way out of America’s biggest physical constraints.

This week, two Los Angeles startups raised a combined $2.37 billion in equity to tackle two particularly urgent ones: how the country manufactures critical hardware and where it will find enough electricity to power the AI era.

Torrance-based Hadrian is building highly automated factories for defense and aerospace. El Segundo’s Valar Atomics wants to manufacture nuclear reactors at scale. Different industries, same underlying bet: the next generation of technology will depend on our ability to produce physical infrastructure much faster than we do today.

Hadrian raised $1.37 billion in Series D funding, bringing its valuation to $7.87 billion. The company plans to use the capital to open new factories, expand research and development, and increase its capacity to produce critical defense, aerospace and industrial systems.

Hadrian’s pitch is straightforward, if wildly ambitious: America needs to relearn how to build things and build them quickly.

Its factories combine skilled workers with AI, robotics and proprietary software to manufacture precision components and, increasingly, complete mission-critical systems. Its customers include defense giants such as Lockheed Martin and RTX, along with newer players like Anduril.

The company has come a long way from simply making aerospace parts. Hadrian is positioning itself as a piece of America’s industrial infrastructure, offering manufacturers a way to rapidly scale domestic production at a time when wars abroad, strained supply chains and growing defense demands have made the country’s manufacturing gaps increasingly difficult to ignore.

Investors are clearly buying the argument. The new round comes just over a year after Hadrian raised $260 million, suggesting that “reindustrialization” has officially graduated from venture capital buzzword to billion-dollar investment thesis.

Meanwhile, roughly 15 miles away in El Segundo, Valar Atomics is moving even faster than its enormous ambitions suggested.

When we last wrote about Valar, the company was reportedly raising $450 million at a $2 billion valuation and racing to prove that nuclear energy could move on AI’s timetable. Now, it has closed a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia Capital, secured an additional $200 million credit facility and reportedly reached a $6 billion valuation.

Valar is developing standardized, factory-built nuclear power plants designed to avoid the enormous costs and decades-long construction timelines associated with traditional nuclear projects. Its goal is not merely to build a working reactor, but to eventually manufacture fleets of them.

That ambition also sounds considerably less theoretical than it did when we first covered the company. In June, Valar’s Ward 250 reactor achieved a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Just one week later, the company demonstrated the reactor generating electricity to power an Nvidia Blackwell system. Valar now says the new funding will help it move from proving its technology works to producing reactors at scale.

The timing is no coincidence. AI’s enormous appetite for electricity is forcing the tech industry to confront a basic reality: the cloud still has to plug into something. Training models and operating massive data centers will require far more reliable power, and nuclear energy is rapidly becoming one of Silicon Valley’s favorite answers.

Hadrian and Valar may be solving different problems, but their unusually large rounds point to the same shift. AI can design, predict and automate, but it cannot manufacture a missile component or generate a megawatt of electricity on its own. That requires factories, energy systems, supply chains and a great deal of capital.

For years, venture-backed companies competed to build the software layer. Now, some of the biggest bets are being placed on the infrastructure underneath it.

The future may run on AI. But first, someone has to build what keeps it running.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

🤝 Venture Deals
  • Endeavor Optical Networks emerged from stealth with $10.75M in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz to develop a satellite network that uses lasers to move data between continents. The startup plans to use the capital to build an optics lab, hire engineers and conduct ground testing ahead of a demonstration satellite launch targeted for late 2027. - learn more
  • Actualyze AI emerged from stealth with a $7M seed round backed by Storm Ventures, Canaan Partners, Morado Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures. Its platform gives enterprises a central control layer for managing AI usage across teams and applications, helping them enforce security policies, track spending, route requests between models and maintain audit trails. - learn more
  • Blaze.tech raised $8.5M in pre-seed funding led by Friale, a healthcare-focused venture firm founded by the family behind HCA Healthcare. The company helps digital health startups, providers and payers turn AI-generated prototypes into HIPAA-compliant software for uses including e-prescribing, EHR integrations, telehealth and auditing. - learn more

LA Venture Funds

  • Canon Capital participated in Oligo Security’s $60M funding round alongside Ballistic Ventures, Greenfield Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Red Dot Capital Partners, TLV Partners and other investors, bringing the cybersecurity company’s total funding to $140M. Oligo will use the capital to accelerate product development and expand its global go-to-market operations as it helps organizations detect and block software exploits in real time. - learn more
  • Matter Venture Partners participated in Volta’s seed and Series A financing alongside Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, NVIDIA and Michael Dell’s family office, valuing the AI infrastructure startup at $2.4B. Emerging from stealth, Volta plans to use the backing to develop and operate large-scale AI data centers, supported by a $5B infrastructure financing program with Azora and a $10B European compute partnership. - learn more
  • Cedars-Sinai participated in Cirrus Therapeutics’ expanded seed financing through its Intellectual Property Company, bringing the ocular immunology biotech’s total funding to $14.7M. Cirrus will use the backing to advance its gene and cell therapy pipeline, including a lead treatment for geographic atrophy, while a new collaboration with Singapore Eye Research Institute and Duke-NUS will support research, clinical development and expansion across Asia-Pacific. - learn more
  • Strong Ventures made a follow-on investment in Ready Robust Machine’s ₩13.4B Series B, which was led by Quantum Ventures Korea and brought the heavy-equipment technology company’s total funding to ₩22.9B. The company develops energy-recovery systems for hydraulic machinery and will use the capital to build out mass production, expand its data services and enter the Japanese market. - learn more

LA Exits

  • Artium has been acquired by global consulting firm AlixPartners, bringing its expertise in building enterprise-grade AI agents for clients including BNY Mellon, Mayo Clinic and eBay to a broader global platform. The company will continue operating as a distinct team under the name Artium by AlixPartners, retaining its founders, employees, methodology and research relationships. - learn more

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