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🔦 SpotlightHappy Friday, Los Angeles.In a startup market obsessed with AI copilots and productivity promises, Steno just raised $49M for something far less glamorous and probably far more durable: the machinery behind depositions, transcripts, and high-stakes litigation. It is the kind of business that sounds boring right up until you realize how much money, urgency, and operational chaos moves through it every day.The LA legal tech company, which positions itself as both a court reporting service and a software platform, said the Series C was led by Savano Capital Partners, with continued backing from First Round Capital, The Legal Tech Fund, and other strategic investors. Steno plans to use the funding to expand geographically, deepen its reach into the AmLaw 200, and roll out the next evolution of its AI-powered Transcript Genius product.Steno’s bet is not that lawyers want another standalone AI tool dropped into an already messy workflow. It is betting that the real opportunity is owning more of the process itself, from court reporting and remote depositions to transcript analysis and financing, then using software to make the whole machine run faster.That is what makes this story interesting: Steno is building around legal work that is already happening, already expensive, and already painful. In a market full of companies trying to invent new behavior, there is something compelling about one focused on making an old, high-friction system work better.Now, onto this week’s LA venture deals, fund announcements and acquisitions.🤝 Venture DealsLA CompaniesSIGMAS raised a $1M seed round co-led by Mucker Capital and HongShan Capital as the performancewear brand expands from marketplace incubation into a broader direct-to-consumer push. The company, which was incubated through SHEIN’s Supply Chain as a Service program, said it has already launched more than 600 men’s activewear SKUs and plans to use SHOPLINE to support its owned-channel and international growth. - learn moreSolace received an initial $50,000 investment from Audos as part of the launch of the Audos Publishing House, a new platform aimed at helping everyday entrepreneurs build AI-native businesses. The Santa Monica startup, created by founder Sarah Gwilliam after losing her father, is building an AI-powered grief coaching platform focused on active coaching, guided journaling, and memory preservation, with Audos also offering up to $100,000 in non-dilutive funding through a 15% revenue-share model. - learn moreTriangle Health emerged with $4M in pre-seed funding after cofounder Arun Verma turned his own brain cancer diagnosis into the inspiration for the company’s AI-powered health navigation platform. The Pasadena startup says its product helps patients gather complete medical records, surface treatment options and clinical trials, and review findings with a licensed physician, with backing from investors including Kevin Mahaffey, Hannah Grey, Antler Criticality Fund, John Hering, Marty Tenenbaum, and Kestrin Pantera. - learn morePrimestor secured a $10M equity investment from New Jersey Community Capital for The Walk, its mixed-use development in Norwalk, marking NJCC’s expansion into Southern California. The 8.2-acre project is planned to include 374 homes, 56 of them affordable, along with about 94,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space as Primestor advances a broader community-focused development effort in the region. - learn moreSift raised a $42M Series B led by StepStone Group, with GV as its largest investor, bringing total funding to $67M as it builds what it calls an observability layer for hardware engineering. The El Segundo company said the funding will help scale its platform for turning fragmented telemetry from spacecraft, defense systems, autonomous vehicles, and factories into real-time, AI-ready data. - learn moreLA Venture FundsEmmeline Ventures participated in Prickly Pear Health’s follow-on pre-seed round, helping bring the company’s total funding to more than $600,000 alongside existing backers Bayless Ventures and AZ Venture Capital Inc. Prickly Pear said it will use the new capital to accelerate user growth and expand deployments of its AI-powered women’s brain health platform with mental health practices, beginning in Arizona, after surpassing 2,000 active users since launching in 2024. - learn moreRiot Ventures participated in Shield AI’s new financing round, which values the defense tech company at $12.7B and accompanies its planned acquisition of software simulation company Aechelon. Shield AI said the capital will support growth across its autonomy software and broader defense platform, while the Aechelon deal is meant to strengthen its simulation and training capabilities as it scales AI-powered systems for military customers. - learn moreStarshot Capital participated in Rumin8’s latest funding round, which added a new $3M commitment from AgriZeroNZ as the company pushes toward commercializing its methane-reducing livestock feed additives in New Zealand. Rumin8 said the new backing will help support pivotal trials and move it toward final registration, with first commercial sales in New Zealand targeted for 2027. - learn moreCompa Capital participated in Kairos Labs’ $2.4M seed round, which was led by 6th Man Ventures and also included Lattice and Advancit Capital. The company said the funding follows a beta that generated more than $300M in notional swap volume and will help support the launch of its permissionless, non-custodial interest rate swap protocol on Ethereum mainnet and Base in the coming weeks. - learn moreMorpheus Ventures co-led Applied Atomics’ oversubscribed $8.3M seed round, backing the company alongside Transition as it works to deploy full-stack nuclear power plants for industrial infrastructure customers. Applied Atomics said the funding will help bring test and integration stands online, strengthen its supply chain, and move toward deployment, with plans over the next 12 months to secure first host sites and customer agreements, advance NRC Part 50 licensing engagement, and push toward first commercial construction. - learn moreUpfront Ventures participated in Neon’s financing round, which brought in more than $25M in combined equity and credit from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Upper90, and other investors. The company said the new capital brings total funding to nearly $27M following a $1.5M pre-seed led by Upfront, as Neon scales its platform for paying users for anonymized conversation data and supplying that audio and video data to AI labs. - learn moreHelios&Partners participated in WhatIsMyAEO.com’s strategic investment round, backing the platform as it builds free AI-driven brand visibility diagnostics for answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The company said the funding will help scale its open-source efforts and expand access to tools that measure brand citations, sentiment, trust signals, and technical AI-readiness as zero-click search becomes more common. - learn moreWndrCo participated in Moda’s $7.5M seed round, which was led by General Catalyst and also included Pear VC, as the company publicly launched its AI design platform. Moda said its product gives professionals a brand-aware design agent that can generate fully editable presentations, social posts, and other visual assets, and that thousands of beta users are already using it for materials like investor decks and marketing collateral. - learn moreClocktower Technology Ventures participated in Bliss’s R$ 57 million, or about $11M USD, Series A round, which was co-led by Kfund and Grupo Bradesco and also included Actyus. Bliss said the funding will help expand its AI-powered platform for health insurance brokers beyond São Paulo into cities including Rio de Janeiro and Brasília, while adding to its product and technology teams as it works to modernize health-plan sales for SMEs in Brazil. - learn moreMAGIC Fund participated in Guangzhou Weixiao Technology’s new strategic financing round, joining IDG Capital, 37 Interactive Entertainment, and miHoYo in the investment. The company said the new capital will be used to accelerate product development and market expansion, though it did not disclose the size of the round. - learn moreMantis Venture Capital participated in Doctronic’s $40M Series B, which was co-led by Abstract and Lightspeed Venture Partners and also included Union Square Ventures, Seven Stars, and Tusk Ventures. The company said the new funding follows rapid growth to more than 300,000 weekly users and eight-figure annualized revenue, and will help it expand its AI-powered care platform after becoming the first AI-native system authorized to autonomously renew prescriptions under Utah’s AI Learning Lab. - learn moreLA ExitsRezyFi is being acquired by ECGI Holdings in a $25M transaction that would bring a 29-state licensed mortgage origination platform and about $140M in annual mortgage funding onto ECGI’s platform. ECGI said the deal is meant to pair RezyFi’s lending infrastructure with its mortgage tokenization strategy, following a pilot program to tokenize up to $10M of residential mortgage loans and as it prepares to launch an investor portal. - learn moreSalt & Stone is being acquired by Advent, which signed a deal to buy a majority stake in the Los Angeles premium body care brand. The company said the partnership will help fuel its next phase of global growth after surpassing $165M in revenue in 2025, with founder and CEO Nima Jalali staying on as an equity holder and remaining in leadership alongside President Meagan Rosson and CMO Abby Tellam. - learn moreVictory Holdings signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dunn & Groux Beverage Holdings, marking its move into the functional beverage market. The company said the deal will make DGBH a wholly owned subsidiary and give it a platform to build and scale multiple beverage products around patented fulvic acid formulations and a distribution-first model, with initial expansion focused on California, Arizona, and Texas. - learn moreDownload the dot.LA App
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 DealsLA Venture Funds
LA Exits
| # | Наименование новости | Тональность | Информативность | Дата публикации |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Heaviside Raises $28M for Autonomous Precision Munitions | 0 | 9.6 | 15-05-2026 |
| 2 | Arc’s $50M Push Into Commercial Maritime | 0 | 8.82 | 20-03-2026 |
| 3 | Revel’s Afterburner Round: $150M for Hard Tech Infrastructure | 0 | 16.58 | 27-02-2026 |
| 4 | Match Goes Niche With $100M Move | 0 | 8.55 | 01-05-2026 |
| 5 | A $26M Push Into Power in LA | 0 | 9.98 | 18-04-2026 |
| 6 | Hermeus Moves In. Uber Lines Up. LA Wins. | 0 | 11.48 | 10-04-2026 |
| 7 | LA’s New Defense Startup Comes Out Swinging | 0 | 8.42 | 17-07-2026 |
| 8 | Montgomery Summit Is Back at the Fairmont Miramar | 0 | 8.98 | 06-03-2026 |
| 9 | From Rocket Motors to Consumer AI | 0 | 6.79 | 22-05-2026 |
| 10 | Netflix Doubles Down on LA | 0 | 7.3 | 24-04-2026 |