Bidbus lands a $15M Series A as industry-specific AI deals spread across education, pharma, healthcare, defense, and space
Los Angeles venture capital is moving away from general-purpose AI and into two adjacent bets: vertical AI that digs directly into industry-specific workflows, and marketplaces that redesign consumer transactions themselves. The funding rounds announced across LA this week overwhelmingly targeted the inefficiencies of particular industries and corners of daily life, spanning used-car sales, university admissions, pharmaceutical manufacturing, Medicare care delivery, canine preventive health, and family scam protection.
Jung Han
Add the hard-tech mega-rounds in counter-drone defense, rocket engines, and space-economy infrastructure that LA funds joined, along with an $800 million AI infrastructure deal, and the picture that emerges is a local venture ecosystem whose center of gravity has shifted from the model race to the application race.
There is a structural backdrop to this migration. As foundation-model competition consolidates around a handful of big tech companies and mega-startups, early- and mid-stage venture capital is being redeployed toward areas with clearer paths to monetization. The conviction spreading among investors is that specialized startups are most defensible in markets with severe information asymmetry and high transaction values, and in industries where regulatory and domain-expertise barriers keep general-purpose AI from penetrating easily.
Dealers Fight Over Your Car: Bidbus and the Reverse Auction
At the center of the LA startup scene this week was Bidbus, a used-car reverse-auction platform. The company raised a $15 million Series A round led by Ibex Investors, with participation from Mucker Capital, FJ Labs, Motley Fool Ventures, Data Point Capital, Walter Ventures, and Yossi Levi, better known as the Car Dealership Guy.
Selling a car remains a transaction that seems designed to test the seller’s patience. The three available options have been to list it yourself and deal with strangers, accept an online instant offer while wondering how much money you left on the table, or walk into a dealership for the emotional sport of negotiation. Bidbus inverts the process. Consumers submit their car to the platform, and verified dealerships compete in a live auction to buy it for their inventory. Instead of a seller shopping the same car around, dealers fight each other for it. The flow runs in three steps: enter vehicle details for a free market valuation, watch more than 1,000 verified dealerships bid in real time — offers often rise within two hours — and close the sale with vehicle pickup scheduled through the platform.
Bidbus’ three-step flow: get an estimate, watch dealers bid in real time, get it sold. (Source: Bidbus website)
The company says its marketplace can generate offers that run $2,000 to $3,000 higher than Carvana in some cases. In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Duke Yan traced the idea to trying to sell his mother’s car: the dealer offers were insultingly low, so he put the dealers into a group chat, and to his surprise the buyers started bidding the price up. "Used-car affordability is not a financing problem. It’s a market efficiency problem," Yan told TechCrunch, noting that consumers lack real price discovery for trade-ins, dealers struggle to source quality inventory, and much of the best supply sits trapped in private driveways.
The business model lives in the spread between what online instant-offer services will pay and what dealers can actually pay — a gap that can stretch to thousands of dollars. Dealers have an incentive to participate because the most valuable used inventory tends to come from private sellers, and buying cars at auction is already standard industry practice, so Bidbus is not pitching a foreign concept. Yan also layered in an entertainment element inspired by Robinhood and TikTok: once a car is accepted, dealers have only a few hours to bid, and live offers flash across the screen in large type — a design meant to get users sharing screenshots and videos that draw in new sellers. "Our vision is to make selling a car as transparent and competitive as trading a stock, where price is determined by market competition rather than a single buyer," Yan said.
Growth has not been frictionless. In the bootstrapped early days, Yan had to ban one of the platform’s largest dealers. "At that time, he was the only one that bought so many cars, and so he felt like he could get away with haggling or low-balling," Yan said. "It hurt at first, but now our platform is better than ever. We have five to eight more dealers like him, buying a lot, upholding the standard experience that we want our customers to go through." Bidbus has facilitated roughly 10,000 car sales to date, and dealership groups including Lithia Motors and Penske Automotive now participate.
Jeff Peters, the Ibex partner who led the round, said he passed on Bidbus’ seed round because the company was operating only in Los Angeles at the time; the expansion into new markets and the signing of major dealership groups changed his mind. "It seems like this is scalable, and that it’s a universal problem and a universal opportunity, at least across the United States. I think it’s gonna be durable, too, because some of the most durable business models are marketplaces," Peters said, adding that the company delivers value on both sides — $2,000 to $3,000 more for consumers, and access to inventory dealers never had before. With Carvana having proven that selling a car online can be simple and quick, he expects consumers to hunt for the best deal however they can find it. Bidbus remains focused on California and Texas and will use the new funding to expand into more markets.
Education, Pharma, Healthcare: AI Investment Splinters by Industry
Vertical AI deals formed the backbone of this week’s LA funding activity. LA-based EdVisorly raised a $13.3 million Series A led by Breachway Capital, with participation from education-sector strategic investors including U.S. News & World Report, Lumina Foundation, Strada Education Foundation, Motley Fool Ventures, Juvo Ventures, and Zeal Capital Partners. According to Crunchbase News, the round brings total funding to about $22 million at a significant valuation step-up — a notable outcome given that edtech investment has shrunk from a pandemic peak of nearly $20 billion in 2021 to under $1.8 billion globally in the first half of 2026.
Founder and CEO Manny Smith’s biography maps directly onto the problem the company attacks. With parents who held no college credits and a family that could not afford tuition, Smith reached college through a sports scholarship to the U.S. Air Force Academy and went on to serve eight years on active duty as a technical product manager building satellites and software for the Air Force and Space Force. After returning from a seven-month deployment, he examined the data on community-college-to-university transfers and was struck that pursuing a military academy gave a student better odds of attaining a bachelor’s degree than enrolling at a community college. He founded EdVisorly in 2019 while working on his MBA at UC Berkeley.
The growth engine is EddyAI, the company’s proprietary platform that automates repetitive back-office work in admissions and enrollment — reading student transcripts and recalculating GPAs against each university’s specific criteria. Smith emphasizes that the software neither decides admissions nor acts as a gatekeeper; it clears the administrative work that bogs down university staff. For the 10.5 million community college students in the U.S. hoping to transfer to a four-year university, credit recognition has largely been a guessing game. On EdVisorly, applicants upload transcripts, the app reads their courses and matches them against university requirements, and families learn how credits stack up, what a degree will cost, and how many semesters remain — before ever speaking to an admissions counselor. On the university side, registrars use the same technology to process official transfer credits and rapidly build credit-matching rules.
EdVisorly’s homepage highlights automated transcript processing, transfer-student recruitment, and streamlined credit evaluations, with a chat interface to EddyAI. (Source: EdVisorly website)
EdVisorly counts more than 100 colleges, universities, and higher-education systems as customers — including Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, and Cal Poly Pomona — and has helped over 250,000 students since inception. The company sells B2B subscriptions directly to institutions and employs nearly 50 people; the new capital goes toward core engineering infrastructure and additional UX designers for the student-facing app. Jason Krantz, managing partner and founder at Breachway Capital, said the solution "drives real efficiency and tangible value for institutions while delivering a meaningfully better experience for students navigating one of the most important decisions of their lives."
In pharma, Bonfire Ventures led a $10.5 million seed round for San Francisco-based Katalyze AI, joined by Inovia Capital, Ripple Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and angel investors including Gokul Rajaram and Farzad Soleimani. Katalyze is building an agentic operating system that lets pharmaceutical scientists, engineers, and analysts deploy AI agents across scientific, engineering, and manufacturing workflows; the company says five of the twenty largest global pharma companies already use the platform. In healthcare, Ulysses Capital participated in Pearl Health’s $110 million raise — a $50 million equity round led by Andreessen Horowitz combined with a $60 million debt facility led by Trinity Capital. Pearl Health builds AI for Medicare-focused providers to manage risk, predict patient needs, and automate value-based care workflows, supporting more than 10,000 providers across over 40 states.
Paris-based biotech also drew LA capital: GordonMD Global Investments co-led Cyllene Therapeutics’ €33 million Series C alongside M Ventures, with existing investors including Andera Partners, Bpifrance’s InnoBio 3 Fund, and Lamond Ventures. Cyllene, formerly EG 427, develops precision genetic medicines on its non-replicating HSV-1 HERMES platform, with funding directed at clinical development of EG110A for neuro-urology indications; a Phase 2b/3 study is planned for 2027.
Korean Startup NearDoc Enters the U.S. via Cross-Border Financing
Korean capital and startups also surfaced in the week’s deal flow. Strong Ventures participated in Studio Kiko’s undisclosed Pre-A round for NearDoc, alongside Smilegate Investment and Korea Investment Accelerator. NearDoc is an AI medical charting service that listens to doctor-patient conversations in real time and automatically generates completed SOAP notes for EMR systems, cutting physicians’ documentation burden. The service was adopted by more than 300 clinics and hospitals within two months of launch. The company plans to use the funding to recruit talent, evolve the product into a clinical decision support system, and expand into non-English-speaking Asian markets. The structure — a Korean startup pairing Korean-affiliated VCs with an LA fund to enter the U.S. healthcare market — is a cross-border financing model worth studying for Korean content and entertainment-tech companies as well.
Consumer-facing AI also drew capital. LA-based Savi Security launched Savi, an iOS and Android app protecting families from AI-powered scams, while announcing $7 million in seed funding led by Acrew Capital, with Magnify Ventures, TTCER, and Resolute Ventures participating.
The origin story is emblematic of the moment: brothers Patrick and Ryan Coughlin founded the company in 2025 shortly after their mother nearly fell for a fake-kidnapping call built on AI voice cloning. Patrick is a national-security and enterprise cyber-defense veteran of TruSTAR, Splunk, Cisco, and Booz Allen Hamilton; Ryan is an AI and machine-learning product leader who built products at Apple and Spotify. Patrick told TechCrunch that with voices now cloneable from three seconds of publicly posted audio, the sophistication once aimed at government agencies and Fortune 500 companies is being deployed against consumers.
The numbers back the thesis: the FTC reported that losses to imposter scams reached $3.5 billion in 2025, triple the 2020 figure, and the company cites an estimated record $81.6 billion lost by Americans 60 and over in 2025.
The Savi app uses behavioral AI to analyze the content and patterns behind calls, texts, and voicemails before users engage. Core features include text protection that routes scam messages to junk, voicemail screening that answers unknown numbers and flags suspected scams, and On Call live monitoring that silently joins a call in progress and alerts the user when fraud patterns emerge. Scamwise, the company’s free scam checker, has reviewed nearly 100,000 submissions since launch, more than half of which were identified as scams. Pricing is unusual: a single plan at $7.99 per month ($62.99 per year) covers an entire family — parents, partners, children, and other dependents — with no cap on members.
Savi’s homepage: "Protect your family. Even when you’re not there" — positioning the app as 24/7 protection for parents, teens, and users themselves against AI-powered scams. (Source: Savi Security website)
In pet health, WndrCo co-led Wonderdog’s $5 million pre-seed round alongside Maveron, with participation from Cultivate Next, Mars Petcare’s early-stage investment program. Hermosa Beach-based Wonderdog is building a preventive health platform for dogs that combines microbiome, blood, and genetic testing to identify health risks earlier and recommend personalized diet, supplement, and care plans; the funding will scale its diagnostics platform and expand into new markets.
From Drone Defense to Rocket Engines and Space Finance
Large rounds continued in defense and space. UP.Partners co-led a $36 million seed round for Israeli defense-tech startup Skapion alongside Khosla Ventures — one of OpenAI’s earliest backers — with participation from Fusion VC, Stratos Ventures, TBD VC, and q Fund. For a company founded in late 2025 and less than a year old, the seed size is exceptional even by defense-tech standards. Skapion operated in stealth for seven months before this announcement.
The company’s claimed differentiation is a "Native Counter-Swarm System." Where most existing counter-UAS systems were originally designed against a single drone or a handful of targets, Skapion is building a mobile detect-intercept-neutralize system architected from the outset for swarm scenarios — attacks involving dozens or even hundreds of UAVs operating simultaneously. Since the war in Ukraine and the spread of one-way attack drones across the Middle East, swarm defense has become a central challenge for air-defense architectures, and the problem is economic as much as operational: expending costly interceptors against cheap targets rapidly erodes the defending side. According to Israeli outlet Mako/N12, co-founder and CEO Ido Bar-On said the defense against Iran’s April 2024 mass drone and missile attack cost Israel and coalition partners over $7 billion in a single night; Russia produces close to 10,000 one-way attack drones per month; and Kyiv has recently absorbed more than 600 Shahed drones in a single night. Skapion’s target is an interception cost below $10,000 per target — compared with Iron Dome’s Tamir interceptor, which starts around $40,000. The system is being designed for degraded-communications environments, "dark" drones that fly without GPS or emissions, and next-generation attack drones expected to reach 450–500 km/h. The company aims for annual production capacity of roughly 10,000 interceptors and an operational system by 2027, is working with Israel’s Ministry of Defense on subsystem trials, and is heading toward live-fire interception tests.
The founding team telegraphs the strategy. Chief architect Brig. Gen. (res.) Pini Yungman formerly led Rafael’s air and missile defense systems division and was involved in developing Iron Dome and David’s Sling. CEO Ido Bar-On led international government and defense business at drone maker XTEND, joined by CTO Gal Goren, Enlight Renewable Energy co-founder Tzafrir Yoeli, and Yaron Karp. The org structure telegraphs it too: R&D sits in Ramat Gan, Israel, while headquarters is in Washington, D.C. — a signal that the company is aimed at the world’s largest defense procurement market from day one. Skapion employs more than 20 people in Israel and is hiring dozens of engineers across electronics, software, robotics, autonomy, and aerospace. The funding goes toward engineering expansion, system development, integration and testing, and work with defense and government bodies in Israel, the U.S., and other countries.
Trousdale Ventures participated in Houston-based Venus Aerospace’s $91 million Series B, led by Mercury Fund with backing from investors including Lockheed Martin Ventures. Having completed a U.S. flight test in 2025, Venus is moving its rotating detonation rocket engine technology from prototype toward production, with applications spanning hypersonic aircraft, defense systems, orbital vehicles, and space propulsion. In space-economy infrastructure, Multiball Capital joined Nebex’s $30 million seed round led by GV. Founded by former Axiom Space executives Tejpaul Bhatia and Anand Subramanian, Nebex connects sovereign space programs with the founders and companies building space technologies, and announced a banking relationship with J.P. Morgan to support revenue, cash flow, and transaction infrastructure for space-sector deals.
$800M Together AI, $135M 8090 Labs: LA Funds Ride the Mega-Deals
LA funds also put their names on outsized AI infrastructure and enterprise deals. March Capital participated in Together AI’s $800 million Series C alongside Aramco Ventures, NVIDIA, Vista Equity, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, SE Ventures, Pegatron, Salesforce Ventures, DTCP Growth, Lux Capital, Geodesic, and others. Together AI provides infrastructure for open-source and custom AI — inference, training, fine-tuning, GPU clusters, and accelerated compute — and has secured commitments for more than 500 MW of compute capacity to support future growth.
WndrCo participated in the $135 million Series A of 8090 Labs, founded by Chamath Palihapitiya, in a round led by Salesforce Ventures with Craft Ventures, The Production Board, and Launch. 8090 Labs is building Software Factory, an AI coding agent for enterprise engineering teams that need production-quality software with audit trails and controls rather than quick prototypes. Palihapitiya is stepping in as CEO.
In construction, Fifth Wall participated in Higharc’s $95 million Series C, led by Insight Partners with additional backing from Wellington Management and existing investors including Spark Capital and Lux Capital, bringing total funding past $170 million. Higharc builds AI software for homebuilding that generates homes as 3D spatial data so builders and suppliers can manage design, estimating, sales, and construction workflows, and is expanding into building-materials supply chain workflows through a new partnership with US LBM.
In fintech, Singapore-based PvX Partners — where StoryHouse Ventures is an existing investor — secured a new $5 million equity investment from MIT to expand its user acquisition financing platform for consumer apps and mobile games. PvX uses its machine learning system, PvX Lambda, to evaluate marketing and performance data before underwriting user acquisition campaigns, offering an alternative to traditional venture capital or lending; committed UA financing has now surpassed $750 million. Separately, Foxhog Ventures invested $1.34 million in FundingBazar.com, a beta-stage fintech marketplace connecting startups and SMEs with investors through both equity funding and revenue-based financing, with planned tools for investor discovery, digital documentation, due diligence, and founder-investor communication.
Beauty Consolidates by Roll-Up: Versed Sold to Belle Brands
On the exit front, Versed, the clean skincare and makeup brand founded by Katherine Power, was acquired by Belle Brands, a platform company formed by consumer-focused private investment firm Windsong Global. Versed joins JVN Hair, Pipette, and KVD Beauty under the same roof, with CEO Andy Chiu supporting the transition; terms were not disclosed. The pattern of consumer brands that struggle to scale independently being consolidated into PE-driven roll-ups continues in the beauty category.
What this week’s LA deal list shows is a shift in the center of gravity of AI investment. Money is flowing to companies that plug models into the points where an industry’s money actually moves, and to companies that flip transaction structures that have long disadvantaged consumers. For Korean content and entertainment-tech companies, the NearDoc case is worth watching: combining Korean-affiliated capital with local U.S. funds is settling in as a viable route into the American market.
Sources
• dot.LA Weekly Update, "This LA Startup Wants Dealers to Fight Over Your Car" (July 10, 2026)
https://dot.la
• Bidbus official website
https://bidbus.com
• TechCrunch, "This startup pits dealerships against each other to bid on your used car" (Sean O’Kane, July 7, 2026)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/07/this-startup-is-pitting-dealerships-against-each-other-to-bid-on-your-used-car/
• Crunchbase News, "EdVisorly Raises $13.3M Series A To Fix The Messy College Transfer Process With AI" (Mary Ann Azevedo, July 8, 2026)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/edtech-university-ai-platform-funding-edvisorly/
• EdVisorly official website
https://www.edvisorly.com
• Savi Security official website
https://www.savisecurity.com
• TechCrunch, "Savi’s app aims to protect consumers from realistic AI scams like kidnappers demanding ransom" (July 7, 2026)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/07/savis-app-aims-to-protect-consumers-from-realistic-ai-scams-like-kidnappers-demanding-ransom/
• GlobeNewswire, "Savi Security Launches App to Protect Families from AI Scams and Fraud" (July 7, 2026)
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/07/07/3323124/0/en/Savi-Security-Launches-App-to-Protect-Families-from-AI-Scams-and-Fraud.html
• Techtime (Israel), "Skapion raises $36M to develop counter-drone-swarm system" (July 9, 2026)
https://techtime.co.il/2026/07/09/skapion/
• Mako/N12 (Israel), "An Iron Dome for swarms: the Israeli startup with a big promise" (July 2026)
https://www.mako.co.il/news-military/2026_q3/Article-dce7a286aed4f91027.htm
Individual funding-round details are drawn from company announcements as compiled by the dot.LA newsletter (July 10, 2026).