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🔦 SpotlightHello LA,This week’s startup story began three years ago with an AI assistant built for almost any small business. It ended, or perhaps graduated, with an acquisition by one of the fitness industry’s largest technology providers.ABC Fitness has acquired Replify, an AI platform that manages customer communication for gyms and wellness businesses across phone, text, email and chat. Its virtual agents can answer questions, qualify leads, schedule tours and classes, follow up on missed calls and run outbound campaigns. Financial terms were not disclosed.Before Replify found its footing in fitness, it was HeyLibby, a general-purpose AI assistant founded in 2023 by former Zillow colleagues Spencer Rascoff, Tony Small and Anna Rodriguez. The company was incubated inside Rascoff’s 75 & Sunny Labs and initially set out to help small businesses turn incoming messages into qualified leads.That broad vision gave HeyLibby a large potential customer base, from real estate agents and contractors to hairstylists and event planners. But as the team searched for product-market fit, one industry’s problem stood out. Gym and wellness employees were often too busy helping customers in person to answer every call, text or email, leaving prospective members waiting and potential revenue on the table.That insight reshaped the company. HeyLibby narrowed its focus to fitness and wellness, raised a $4.5M seed round in 2025 and later rebranded as Replify. It went on to work with brands including Gold’s Gym and UFC Gym, proving that its AI agents could do more than answer routine questions. According to the company, customers have captured up to 10 times more leads and shortened sales cycles from roughly 30 days to as little as three to five days.ABC Fitness became a natural next step. The company provides software to more than 30,000 fitness businesses serving over 40 million members worldwide. By adding Replify to its platform, ABC can offer gyms an always-available AI front desk while bringing Replify’s technology to a much larger global customer base.Replify’s journey offers a useful lesson amid the rush to build AI products for everyone. The company began with a broad promise, identified a customer with a specific and expensive problem, and built deeply around that need. Gym owners did not need another flashy chatbot. They needed someone to answer the phone when the front desk could not.Sometimes the smartest AI strategy is simply picking up the call.More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.🤝 Venture DealsLA CompaniesDimension raised a $1.65M seed round backed by Science Inc., UpscaleX, OpenSky, Long Run Capital, 1864 Fund and others. The profitable social-commerce company will use the funding to launch Seller OS more broadly, an agentic AI platform that automates TikTok Shop operations for brands and agencies. - learn moreProcode raised a $10M Series A led by Health Velocity Capital, bringing its total funding to $14M. The AI-powered medical billing company will use the capital to acquire two additional billing businesses and expand its platform beyond plastic surgery and dermatology into all surgical specialties and ambulatory surgery centers. - learn moreAntares raised $470M in Series C financing, including $370M in equity and $100M in debt, in a round co-led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital. The nuclear energy company will use the capital to commercialize its autonomous microreactors, with an electricity-producing model planned for 2027 and initial deployments at U.S. military installations beginning in 2028. - learn moreLA Venture FundsWilshire Lane Capital participated in Ellis’ more than $10M seed round, which was led by First Round Capital and included Kearny Jackson, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures and others. Founded by Cadre founder Ryan Williams, Ellis has emerged from stealth with an AI-native operations platform that helps private credit managers reconcile fragmented data and automate workflows such as portfolio monitoring, investor reporting and compliance; the funding will support team growth and further product development. - learn moreRebel Fund participated in Dili’s $15M Series A, led by Khosla Ventures, bringing the AI compliance company’s total funding to $21.7M. Dili helps energy, construction, infrastructure and manufacturing companies identify compliance issues by reviewing project data in real time, and will use the funding to expand its team and broaden its platform into additional audit and waste-detection workflows. - learn moreB Capital led ChipAgents’ $60M Series A2, which brought the semiconductor AI startup’s expanded Series A financing to $134M. ChipAgents will use the funding to scale customer deployments, expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and further develop its AI platform, which automates complex chip design and verification workflows. - learn moreStoryHouse Ventures participated as a returning investor in Henry AI’s $16.5M Series A, led by FirstMark Capital with backing from Thomson Reuters Ventures, Y Combinator and others. The commercial real estate AI company will use the funding to expand its engineering and product teams and scale Henry Deal, a platform that automates underwriting, offering materials and other back-office work throughout a transaction. - learn moreWalkabout Ventures and Bungalow Capital co-led Discern’s $10M Series A, bringing the company’s total funding to $17.5M. Discern provides a software-based registered agent service that automates state filings and compliance tasks, and will use the capital to scale its platform following fourfold annual recurring revenue growth in 2025. - learn moreStarshot Capital participated in Quercus Biosolutions’ oversubscribed $5M seed round, which was led by Serra Ventures and included several climate, agriculture and grower-backed investors. The agtech startup will use the funding to expand its pipeline of AI-designed proteins for fighting herbicide-resistant weeds, begin regulatory work and explore applications targeting fungi, insects and other crop pests. - learn moreB Capital co-led Flourish Health’s $26M Series A alongside F-Prime and Cherryrock Capital, bringing the youth mental health provider’s total funding to $46M. Flourish will use the capital to expand its psychiatrist-led, in-home care model nationwide, hire and train clinicians and further develop its AI-enabled platform for coordinating care. - learn morePowerhouse Capital participated in European Technology Network’s $1.6M seed round alongside Axel Springer, a LADbible co-founder and angel investors from OpenAI and DeepMind. The London-based tech media startup will use the funding to open a larger studio, expand its team, launch a newsletter and increase its livestreamed programming from two shows per week to five. - learn moreLA ExitsSaltair, the Los Angeles body-care brand founded by model and entrepreneur Iskra Lawrence, is selling a majority stake to private equity firm TSG Consumer. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal will support Saltair’s expansion across e-commerce, retail and new products, while Lawrence transitions into the role of chief community advocate. - learn moreDigital marketing agency GR0 plans to acquire Ultimate AI’s enterprise deployment division and use the team’s technology to launch a new company called GR0 AI. The platform will deploy AI agents across brands’ customer data, commerce and marketing systems to personalize outreach, recover abandoned sales and generate measurable revenue; financial terms were not disclosed. - 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 | LA’s New Defense Startup Comes Out Swinging | 0 | 8.42 | 17-07-2026 |
| 2 | Why Samsonite Just Paid $178.5M for BÉIS | 0 | 12 | 14-08-2026 |
| 3 | Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews | 0 | 11.06 | 16-01-2026 |
| 4 | Lovable bolsters its AI software creation capacity, touts $400M funding round | 0 | 14.92 | 13-08-2026 |
| 5 | This LA Startup Wants Dealers to Fight Over Your Car | 0 | 7.64 | 10-07-2026 |
| 6 | I run a registry that tracks 218 AI and SaaS tools. 18 are already dead or dying - here are the patterns | 0 | 8.98 | 29-07-2026 |
| 7 | You know OpenAI and Nvidia. These are the AI companies building everything else | 0 | 7 | 26-06-2026 |
| 8 | Mobly Launches First AI-Native Platform That Turns Field & Event Marketing into a Real-Time Revenue Engine | 0 | 9.33 | 22-04-2026 |
| 9 | What AI fitness apps can and can't do — for now | 0 | 5 | 04-02-2026 |
| 10 | The New Front Door: AI Search for Business Owners | 0 | 6.62 | 07-07-2026 |