LA's AI Scene Heats Up With Major Funding
The Los Angeles AI startup ecosystem is seeing a massive influx of cash. AI video startup Moonvalley landed $53M, while Smack Technologies, a frontier AI lab for national security, secured a $32M Series A. These deals highlight investor confidence in LA's growing role in both creative and defense AI.
Smack Technologies' $32M Series A was co-led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, with participation from notable investors like Point72 Ventures and Bloomberg Beta. The El Segundo-based company was founded by MARSOC veterans Andrew Markoff and Clint Alanis, who bring direct combat experience to their mission of providing "Decision Dominance" to the U.S. Department of Defense. The company is developing a frontier AI lab to help the military make faster, more accurate decisions in high-stakes environments. Their Omega and Alpha product suites utilize deep reinforcement learning in synthetic warfare environments to fuse multimodal data streams into real-time, actionable plans, aiming to shorten the military decision loop from hours to seconds. On the creative front, Moonvalley is carving a niche in Hollywood with its generative AI video tools. The company emphasizes an "ethical AI" approach by training its model, Marey, exclusively on licensed content to avoid the copyright issues plaguing competitors. This strategy has attracted strategic investments from industry giants like Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and Comcast Ventures. Founded by veterans of Google's DeepMind, Moonvalley has a close partnership with Asteria Film Co., an AI film studio co-founded by filmmaker Bryn Mooser. This collaboration aims to build tools specifically for filmmakers, focusing on creative control and producing commercially-ready outputs for everything from special effects to B-roll footage. These funding rounds are part of a larger trend cementing Los Angeles as a key AI hub, ranking second in the U.S. for AI venture capital in the third quarter of 2024 with $1.8 billion invested across 31 deals. The region's deep talent pool, with the second-highest number of tech graduates in North America, fuels this growth. For a software engineering student, these companies showcase two divergent and compelling applications of AI. Smack Technologies offers a look into deep reinforcement learning and complex decision-making systems in the defense sector, while Moonvalley presents a case study in building ethically-sourced, commercially viable generative models for the creative industries.
