SoCal VC Grows | TMV Raises $64 Million For Fund II | $30 Million for Healthcare AI

Happy new year! After a nice holiday break, Midas Touch is back to business. This edition looks at the venture ecosystem in Los Angeles and how it’s growing faster than many other emerging markets while getting a lot less attention, Alex chats with women-led TMV about its new early-stage fund, I talk with DeepScribe, a medical scribe company utilizing AI, and we look into funding numbers for 15-minute grocery delivery startups which saw 10x the funding in 2021 compared to 2020. Let’s dive in.

Subscribers receive our newsletter in full. Here, you'll get a taste of what you're missing this week. Sign up and join us below.

L.A.’s ecosystem was on the eve of evolution. A few short years later local startups including social media startup Myspace and early web application LowerMyBills.com, were grabbing national attention. Garrett seized the opportunity and in 2007, he and his cofounders launched Crosscut Ventures, a seed-focused firm based in the Big Orange. The city has since seen multiple startups thrive like social media company Snap, which went public at a $33 billion valuation in 2017, and fintech Honey, which was purchased by PayPal in 2019 for $4 billion. The broader VC community is just now starting to take note. 

“I’ve been calling it the great migration of talent for several years,” Garrett tells Midas Touch. “I’ve seen second and third-time entrepreneurs becoming confident that they have the same chances of success starting in L.A. as opposed to the mindset that they have to live and build it in Silicon Valley...

You're seeing this message because your free trial of this newsletter has expired. To read the rest of this story and more original reporting, data and analysis, please subscribe.

Matthew Ko, Bapu’s friend and classmate from UC Berkeley, and future cofounder, had his own negative experiences with the medical documentation system. As an adult, Ko was tasked with coordinating care and translating medical documents from English for his Taiwanese mother during her breast cancer treatment. According to his mom, the notes weren’t accurate to what she heard during her appointments. So Ko turned to his former college connection for help, initially asking Bapu’s dad for guidance in getting his mother better care, thinking that was the issue. Instead he learned that the inaccuracies in his mothers treatment notes were common in the existing medical documentation system. Turns out,  burnt-out doctors tend to file digital records hours after appointments, mostly relying on memory. “We were shocked,” Ko says. “We were working in tech and seeing what’s new in terms of natural language processing and he’s out here using 20-year-old tech.” 

The 2022 Forbes Under 30 duo, along with third cofounder Kairui Zeng, founded DeepScribe in 2017 to solve these problems. The platform uses AI to decrease the time doctors have to spend on digitizing their notes while producing more accurate results. Since its launch in March 2020, the company has grown like wildfire, Bapu says, scaling 30% month-over-month with almost 600 physicians signed on...

You're seeing this message because your free trial of this newsletter has expired. To read the rest of this story and more original reporting, data and analysis, please subscribe.