TechCrunch LA

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Generative AI is suddenly everywhere. Over the past year, you’ve probably seen people showcasing impressive AI-generated artworks, thanks to progress in text-to-image algorithms introduced by groups like OpenAI and Stability AI. A proliferation of startups is now trying to devise applications for this new class of language model , where the machine is capable of creating new text, images and videos based on simple human input.

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TechCrunch LA

SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

America’s favorite reality star is leveling up her repertoire and levering up businesses. Kim Kardashian, who passed the “baby bar” exam in preparation to become a lawyer last year, just added another job title to her lineup — private equity investor. Kardashian is launching private equity firm SKKY Partners in conjunction with ex-Carlyle consumer head Jay Sammons to invest in business across consumer products, hospitality, luxury, digital commerce and media, the Wall Str

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TechCrunch LA

AUGUST 30, 2022

Digital avatar startup Genies , known its for high-profile partnerships with celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Migos and Cardi B, has just released its long-anticipated NFT storefront, “The Warehouse.” Genies last earned a $1 billion valuation from heavy-hitting tech investors including Silver Lake and Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital during its most recent raise, a $150 million Series C round announced in April.

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TechCrunch LA

AUGUST 30, 2022

In otherwise normal times, hospitals generate more than 5 million tons of waste each year, according to Greenhealth. Personal protective equipment (PPE) was in short supply over the past two years, and it was widely reported that some had to reuse what is typically a single-use item, like surgical gowns. MEDU , a Mexico-based startup, wants to reduce that waste and replace single-wear medical garments through the creation of a line of sustainable, virus-resistant reusable pieces, including surgi

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TechCrunch LA

AUGUST 18, 2022

Aero Technologies , which describes itself as a “next-generation air travel company” which currently operates on a limited number of routes in the U.S. and Europe, today announced that it has raised $65 million, with $50 million of those as a Series B funding round co-led by Albacore Capital Group and $15 million in convertible notes. Expa and Keyframe Capital, as well as new investor Capital One Ventures also participated in this route.

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TechCrunch LA

AUGUST 12, 2022

Positive Food Co., providing freshly packaged salads, heat-and-eat prepared meals and vegan overnight oats, raised $7 million in funding as it goes after the $34 billion fresh prepared foods market. In 2018, co-founders Schuyler Deerman and James Chan started selling healthy meals at WeWork offices around Los Angeles out of giant Yeti coolers, standing around the kitchens during lunch time.

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TechCrunch LA

AUGUST 9, 2022

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to getting ahold of an appointment for your hair or another treatment…that’s a different story: The bespoke nature of a lot of the work has meant that a large swathe of the professionals providing these services have stayed offline when it comes to interfacing with customers. But that is changing, and today, Boulevard — one of the wave of software companies that’s building a route to digitizing booking appointme

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TechCrunch LA

AUGUST 5, 2022

From Los Angeles to Silicon Valley , a trend emerged among social media influencers and startup founders alike: move into a mansion with 10 or so collaborators, work day and night together to build fame and wealth, and hope that your new roommates do their dishes. But across the country in Atlanta, a fast-growing tech hub , a cohort of Black creators reimagined that idea.

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TechCrunch LA

AUGUST 2, 2022

Shein has shown the world how combining social media marketing, data analytics, and China’s well-oiled supply chain has created a $100 billion fast fashion behemoth. Its success naturally spawns imitators and challengers. Among its fastest-growing challengers is Cider, which, like Shein, relies on China’s responsive clothing manufacturers to sell affordable, trend-led pieces to customers around the world.

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TechCrunch LA

JULY 26, 2022

Holey Grail Donuts started selling its hand-fried, made-to-order taro donuts on Sunday mornings out of a little red burger trailer in Kauai in 2018. Four years and hundreds of long lines later, the truck is still there, but the company is taking on what co-founder Nile Dreiling calls “a stale $40 billion donut industry ” by expanding its presence into brick-and-mortar locations in Los Angeles after raising $9 million in financing.

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TechCrunch LA

JULY 19, 2022

The process for retailers and brands to liquidate excess inventory hasn’t changed very much, if at all, and while some retailers were able to build operational infrastructure to service the off-price channels, it continues to be a constant pain point. Brands overproduce more than $500 billion of goods annually, and all of that excess inventory leads to retailers needing to do markdowns, which is what we recently saw both Walmart and Target have to do.

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TechCrunch LA

JUNE 18, 2022

Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we talked about layoffs and the Winklevoss rock gods. This week, we’re looking at a new layer of crypto doom and gloom. Get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday by subscribing on TechCrunch’s newsletter page. crash redux. We’ve talked crypto crashes a couple times already in the short life of this newsletter but the sell off this week has spooked crypto insiders in a very different way.

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TechCrunch LA

JUNE 3, 2022

On Lafayette Street in SoHo, young, fashionable women lined up around the block to enter a minimalist, millennial oasis, the most perfect Instagram feed brought to life. Staff members glided around the store in pastel pink suits, each embodying the kind of girl that Glossier made us all want to be: beautiful, yet effortless. “We want to inspire, but we also want to be realistic and show beauty in real life,” Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss said in a 2017 interview with Inc, just as th

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TechCrunch LA

MAY 24, 2022

Since the launch of Pokémon Go in 2016, players have been coordinating meetups, in-game raids and battles on platforms like Reddit and Discord. This summer, parent company Niantic is unveiling Campfire, a social app designed to help mobile augmented reality (AR) gamers connect. Niantic’s games incentivize people to use their technology to go outside and meet others — that’s why it calls its AR development the “real-world metaverse.” Campfire wants to make that even

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TechCrunch LA

MAY 15, 2022

Uber Eats is launching two autonomous delivery pilots in Los Angeles on Monday with Serve Robotics, a robotic sidewalk delivery startup, and Motional, an autonomous vehicle technology company. The new programs are a part of a range of new products Uber is launching across its ride-hail and delivery platforms, which are being announced on Monday at the company’s Global Product Event.

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TechCrunch LA

MAY 3, 2022

One of Britney Winters’ goals is to “live a less tangled life.” She grew up in Houston and went on to attend Stanford and major in engineering. She worked on Wall Street as an investment banker for a few years in New York before returning to Houston with a job in energy. The company Winters was working for sponsored her MBA to Harvard Business School, and it was there that she came up with the idea for Upgrade.

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TechCrunch LA

APRIL 26, 2022

Many grocery delivery startups begin small, in one city, building up locations to cater to a certain neighborhood. Food Rocket has taken an unconventional route, striking a funding deal with Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. that puts its 15-minute grocery delivery service in more than 14,000 Circle K convenience stores and Couche-Tard locations. We first met the Chicago-based company and its founder and CEO Vitaly Alexandrov last year when we reported that Food Rocket launched in the Bay Area , goi

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TechCrunch LA

APRIL 11, 2022

When the topic of fertility comes up, we often hear hushed tones discussing someone else’s or their own journey through infertility. Sure, celebs have begun talking about it, but we’re rarely taught about it in health class. Nor is it typically a topic of discussion over holiday hors d’oeuvres. At a time when the world is fighting inequities around health and welfare, reproductive healthcare continues to be largely ignored in the conversation.

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TechCrunch LA

APRIL 5, 2022

We’re all guilty of it: sometimes, even when we’re not looking to move, it’s fun to look at home listings on Zillow just to see what’s out there. If that sounds weird to you… I don’t blame you, but I also recommend watching more HGTV. However, if this sounds like a fun way to procrastinate after you’re done playing the Wordle, Quordle, Globle and Heardle for the day, you’re not alone.

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TechCrunch LA

FEBRUARY 6, 2022

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review ! Last week, we talked about about the “de-stonkifying” of the market. This week, we’re looking at a wounded Facebook/Meta that finds itself backed into a corner. If someone forwarded you this message, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page , and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.

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TechCrunch LA

JANUARY 27, 2022

Gaming has been one of the most popular entertainment categories in the last two years of pandemic living. Now, a gaming startup that’s building a new kind of platform that it thinks will be a — wait for it — game changer in the category is announcing some funding as to ride that wave of attention. PortalOne , which is building an immersive gaming platform that describes itself as hybrid in more ways than one — it mixes games with a game show/talk show format, and it̵

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TechCrunch LA

JANUARY 26, 2022

Glossier, the popular beauty brand led by former blogger Emily Weiss, let go of 80 of its corporate employees today, according to an internal email obtained by Modern Retail. The cuts, which amount to around one-third of Glossier’s corporate workforce, will primarily impact the company’s technology team. “[W]e are shifting our technology strategy to leverage external partners for parts of our platform that we’re currently maintaining internally,” Weiss wrote in the email announcing the layoffs t

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TechCrunch LA

JANUARY 25, 2022

Starship Technologies , one of the bigger names in the world of autonomous delivery robots — those little caboose-like, boxy delivery vehicles that self-drive around cities — has been on a roll during Covid-19, providing extra (unmanned) horsepower to distribute food and other goods between stores or restaurants and consumers, at a time when consumers were either reluctant or being ordered to stay at home to minimize the spread of the virus.

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TechCrunch LA

DECEMBER 15, 2021

Paying bills is hardly a fun thing. So I think it’s safe to say that any technology that can make the process easier is welcome by all. Papaya is a Los Angeles-based startup with a mission to do just that. It has developed technology to give people a way to pay bills outside of traditional methods, such as through the mail, over the phone or via a Web portal.

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TechCrunch LA

NOVEMBER 5, 2021

The global meat substitute market was valued at $4.51 billion two years ago and is expected to double by 2027, attracting startups, like alternative meat food tech company AKUA , that aim to solidify a prominent place in the up-and-coming industry. Former technology journalist Courtney Boyd Myers co-founded AKUA with Matthew Lebo five years ago after seeking out a career where she could leave a legacy and fulfill her mission of reversing climate change.

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TechCrunch LA

NOVEMBER 2, 2021

Shares of Switchback II Corporation are off more than 14% in morning trading today, appearing to sell off sharply in the wake of news that the blank-check company’s merger with scooter company Bird has been approved by shareholders. Shares of the SPAC were off as far as 20% before recovering. dot.LA first spotted the vote news ; Bird is based in the Los Angeles metropolitan agglomeration.

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TechCrunch LA

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Salted , a Los Angeles-based startup creating digitally native quick-service restaurant brands, brought in a new round of $16 million in Series A funding to continue its nationwide expansion. The company was founded seven years ago by CEO Jeff Applebaum, but a focus on providing healthy QSR brands and going after the $325 billion food delivery space came about three years ago.

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TechCrunch LA

OCTOBER 28, 2021

During its big VR and AR-focused event Thursday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major new title headed to its VR platform that should turn a few heads. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is on the way to the Oculus Quest 2. San Andreas is Rockstar’s well-loved 2004 entry into the hit GTA franchise, which invites players to wreak havoc in an urban open world fashioned after cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas. “This new version of what I think is one of the greatest

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TechCrunch LA

OCTOBER 28, 2021

As urban rental markets recover and people flock back to cities, people are once again finding themselves with plenty of new neighbors in communities which are trying to embrace a renewed vibrancy of post-lockdown life. OneRoof is building a social network for residential buildings. Unlike Nextdoor which organizes communities based on zip codes or neighborhoods, OneRoof wants to build up a presence inside large multi-unit buildings so that neighbors can get to know each other in smaller, tighter

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TechCrunch LA

OCTOBER 26, 2021

“The Ruin stirs, and the Five Realms rumble,” a now-archived web announcement read on Thursday morning. “You are cordially invited to join New York Times bestselling and award-winning authors Marie Lu, Tahereh Mafi, Ransom Riggs, Adam Silvera, David Yoon, and Nicola Yoon in Realms of Ruin, a collaborative fantasy epic filled with dark magic, intrigue, and unique characters — launched online in a thrilling new way.”.

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TechCrunch LA

OCTOBER 21, 2021

Netflix employees staged a walkout yesterday in response to the company’s handling of a Dave Chappelle special that premiered on October 5. At the same time, Los Angeles-based trans activist Ashlee Marie Preston hosted a rally in solidarity with Netflix workers participating in the walkout. Netflix stars like Jonathan Van Ness of “Queer Eye” and Mason Alexander Park of “Cowboy Bebop” and “The Sandman” expressed their solidarity in a video made for the ra

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TechCrunch LA

OCTOBER 19, 2021

When you move around a city, you often end up farther away from some of your favorite restaurants and bakeries. Locale wants to keep you connected to the food you love, even if you live hours away now. Locale, based in San Francisco, enables customers to order from dozens of businesses, including bakeries and restaurants, and get them delivered in one box for just a $5 delivery fee.

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TechCrunch LA

OCTOBER 12, 2021

Carving out 45 minutes or an hour for a workout can be difficult between work, home and daily life. Digital fitness and wellness company FitOn was created to provide 15- or 20-minute workouts aimed at getting people moving in whatever time they can make. The company closed on an $18 million Series B round of funding, led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from existing investors Accel, Telstra Ventures, Crosscut Ventures, Maverick Ventures and Second Avenue Partners.

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TechCrunch LA

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Women have made great inroads into the tech world in recent years, but there remains a long way to go before we reach a truly equitable state of affairs in workforce numbers, remuneration and product development. An edtech startup called Entity Academy — which provides women with training, in areas like data science and software development; mentoring; and ultimately job coaching — has raised $100 million on the heels of strong growth of its business, and an ambition to improve that

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TechCrunch LA

SEPTEMBER 21, 2021

Just Insure , a pay-per-mile insurance technology company, has raised $8 million in a funding round. . CrossCut Ventures, ManchesterStory and Western Technology Investments co-led the investment, which brings its total raised to $15.3 million since its January 2019 inception. Los Angeles-based Just says it uses telematics “to reward safe drivers and reduce insurer bias” by looking at factors such as how, when and where customers drive, rather than factors such as ZIP code or marital status as mo

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TechCrunch LA

SEPTEMBER 13, 2021

When people talk about “online food delivery” services, chances are that they’ll think of the Uber Eats, Instacarts and Getirs of this world. But today a startup that’s tackling a different aspect of the market — addressing the supply chain that subsequently turns the wheels of the bigger food distribution machine — is announcing a big round of funding as it continues to grow.

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TechCrunch LA

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

Warby Parker filing to IPO last week was one more sign that direct-to-consumer (DTC) is an extremely powerful e-commerce trend. But LA-based performance marketing agency MuteSix didn’t wait that long to build its business around scaling DTC brands. Created in 2014 and acquired by Dentsu in 2019, MuteSix was recommended to TechCrunch by Rhoda Ullmann, VP Consumer at Sense, a Boston-based startup building a home energy monitor. “They demonstrate best-in-class expertise with Facebook an

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