1H'25 Los Angeles Seed Report

We’re excited to share the latest update of our LA Seed Report, encompassing all Seed funding to SoCal companies in the first half of 2025.

As always, let’s begin with seed activity more broadly. Globally, investors allocated a total of $17.5B to seed-stage companies in 1H’25 ($7.2B in Q1 and $10.3B in Q2). It’s important to note that Q2 ‘25 saw a significant $2 billion “seed” round for Thinking Machines Lab (Mira Murati’s new frontier lab), accounting for nearly 20% of Q2 ‘25 global seed funding. 

Compared with the first half of 2024, which averaged roughly $7.6B, the 2025 half looks higher in raw Q2 dollars, but excluding the enormous inception rounds in frontier AI co’s like Thinking Machines, seed funding would have been essentially flat compared to the prior first half of 2024. While we’ve historically charted the rise of “mega-rounds” and their impact on funding data, it’s more unique to the current AI market to see rounds of this magnitude at truly seed-stage levels of traction. Historically, most mega-round financings were reserved for growth-stage companies. The incredible early capex requirements for new foundation model providers and ongoing spend on R&D by existing labs has continued to drive the entry price to compete higher.

Turning specifically towards Southern California-based deals, LA area startups raised $364.3M across 85 Seed rounds in the first half of 2025, compared to $392M across 92 rounds in 1H’24, a slight dip in both dollars deployed (-7%) and deals done (-8%).

While deal volume and seed dollars declined, the median Seed round grew 28% YoY, rising from $3.5M in 1H ‘24 to $4.5M in 1H ‘25. We may be continuing to see an overall sluggish market compared to ‘20 - ‘22, but activity has still rebounded from the depths of the drawdown in ‘22 - ‘23.

In the first two quarters of 2025 deal count held steady, but the share of larger seed rounds ($6M+) doubled from Q1 to Q2. We noted a similar inflection in the number of LA-based hardware deals being done, with the El Segundo ecosystem continuing to take both mindshare and investor dollars, likely contributing to the trend of larger early financing rounds in more capital-intensive businesses across aerospace, defense, and manufacturing applications.

SaaS and Hardware dominated LA’s early-stage investment scene in the first half of 2025, but the biggest inflection is the saturation of AI across all sectors. Over 40% of all LA Seed deals referenced AI. AI permeated every major category, from biotech and hardware to consumer and creative industries, and average round sizes for startups that distinguished themselves with AI were 45% higher than their non-AI counterparts.

Sector Breakdowns and Observations

SaaS Remains King: And it’s overwhelmingly AI-enabled. Of the 85 deals tracked, over 40% of all LA seed financings in 1H’25 referenced AI, and the majority of software pitches in particular described core AI elements to their products, or otherwise termed themselves “vertical AI”. We expect this to continue and to see the lines blur even further between software enabled by AI and pitches where the product itself is AI distinct from typical SaaS GTM, pricing and form factor.

Hardware Resurgence: Hardware companies accounted for 21% of all LA seed deals, continuing a rising trend we first noted in our 2024 Seed Deal Report. Capital-intensive sectors such as Aerospace and Defense remained dominant within this category, with standouts including Andrenam ($10M), Proteus Space ($6.1M), and Durin Mining ($3.4M). We’re seeing continued investor confidence in the tailwinds around increasing industrial investment in the US and the need to fund critical infrastructure to support the AI buildout.

Biotech’s Big Bets: After several quiet halves, biotech bounced back. Five of six SoCal biotech deals leveraged AI heavily, highlighting the convergence between computational and biological R&D, as investors expect continued acceleration in areas like drug discovery, imaging, and diagnostics.

If you found this valuable, consider sharing it with anyone tracking early-stage activity in Southern California.

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Amplify is a first-check fund backing LA’s earliest and strongest tech teams.

(Our report covers publicly announced Pre-Seed & Seed Deals. Please reach out to [email protected] with any questions or comments.)