We’re excited to announce that applications for our Fall program, running September 12th - December 8th, are now live! You can apply to the program here through May 11th and you can learn more about Techstars LA and Techstars Space here. 

An exciting new development for this coming class is that Techstars Space will be rolling into the Techstars LA program. That means that while we’ll continue to invest in amazing founders and companies across our usual focus areas of digital health, e-commerce, proptech, edtech, retail, and deep tech, we’ll also be focused on investing in the next generation of aerospace and defense companies. Having originally founded and operated the Techstars Space program , Techstars LA Managing Director Matt Kozlov and Investor in Residence Sherman Williams bring a wealth of knowledge and network when it comes to backing winning spacetech businesses. Some examples include Orbit Fab ($16.3M raised), Hydrosat ($15.6M raised), Pixxel Space ($8M raised),Urban Sky ($6M raised), and Morpheus Space (undisclosed funding) and Zeno Power Systems (undisclosed funding). Sherman has advised and / or invested in 20+ SpaceTech startups. Further, Sherman is a former Naval Officer and is able to leverage his deep Government and DoD network in order to help SpaceTechnology startups. 

Techstars is among the most active early-stage investors in Spacetech with 40+ investments

Techstars is one of the most active investors in spacetech with over forty sector investments over the last sixteen years. Over that time we’ve developed an incredible network of mentors, investors and prospective customers that we’re excited to connect with our portfolio companies. In addition to our in-house experience, we’ll be bringing in our Techstars Space mentors, including experts from the US Air Force, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Lockheed Martin, Maxar, Boeing, Airbus, Voyager Space, Virgin Orbit, Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and many more. You can learn more about our approach to space investing by registering for our “How to Build a Spacetech Business” AMA we’re holding next week on 2/28, which will include Matt, Sherman, and several of our alumni founders. You can register for the event here. 

And while we are committed to the space industry, we’ll continue to build upon our existing platform for accelerating startups across a variety of other industries. Since launching in 2017, Techstars LA has invested in 52 startups that have raised $160M at a market cap of over $825M, such as Fernish ($58M raised), ComplYant ($5.5M raised), Fly by Jing (undisclosed private equity round), and Preveta ($2.1M raised). We’ve brought in an Investor-in-Residence focused on e-commerce and consumer businesses (Ana Rosenstein). Ana has been in the early stage consumer ecosystem from the start of her career. She started off at betaworks ventures, investing in consumer tech. She then went to RRE Ventures while at Harvard Business School to focus on early stage consumer businesses and went on to found a CPG business in the wellness space, which was incubated by RRE. After winding down her business, she started focusing on angel investing in seed stage consumer companies, predominantly in the consumer healthcare space. She was most recently brought on to RRE Ventures full time to build out the fund’s new office in Miami. We’re also super-charging our mentor pool with experts from some of the best LA-based consumer companies and will be including more vertical-specific programming to ensure all of our founders come out ready to hit new revenue milestones and raise their next round. 

We look forward to reviewing many amazing applications over the coming months and stay tuned for our announcement of our Spring 2022 class of companies in the next few weeks! 

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