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Harri is dot.LA’s senior finance reporter. She previously worked for Gizmodo, Fast Company, VentureBeat and Flipboard. Find her on Twitter and send tips on L.A. startups and venture capital to [email protected].
Voyage SMS, which builds text message marketing tools for online stores, has closed a $10 million funding round as well as its first-ever acquisition, the company announced Thursday.
East Coast venture firms RiverPark and York IE led the funding and were joined by angel investors including former Airbnb executive James Beshara and Birthdate Co. CEO Ajay Mehta. Birthdate Co. is among Voyage’s customers, which also include online brands Zitsticka and Negative Underwear.
Alongside the raise, Santa Monica-based Voyage has snapped up LiveRecover, a company that aims to engage with online shoppers after they abandon their shopping carts. Like Voyage, Austin, Texas-based LiveRecover focuses on SMS marketing and integrates with ecommerce services like Shopify and ReCharge. LiveRecover, however, is less centered around automation; in lieu of chatbots, it employs customer service staff in the Philippines to offer a “hands-on, human experience,” Voyage CEO Rev Reddy told dot.LA.
When asked about Voyage’s valuation and the price of the LiveRecover acquisition, a Voyage spokesperson declined to share additional information. The company also declined to comment on previous funding or its total amount raised to date—though Reddy described the new funding as “more of a growth round” for the startup.
Reddy said he had kept an eye on LiveRecover since Voyage publicly launched in late 2019. “We were frenemies in a sense, because people were actually using both services,” he noted. LiveRecover’s principal backers, who Reddy described as an unnamed “family office,” first reached out to the Voyage CEO about a sale through a direct message on LinkedIn, according to Reddy. LiveRecover co-founders Cody Collier and Dennis Hegstad, who founded the startup in 2018, have left the company following the deal.
Voyage will put its new funding toward hiring, as well as expanding its feature set beyond SMS and into “other messaging channels,” Reddy said. Down the line, he added, the platform will know “when to use automation, AI and chatbots and when to add a human to the experience.”
Harri is dot.LA’s senior finance reporter. She previously worked for Gizmodo, Fast Company, VentureBeat and Flipboard. Find her on Twitter and send tips on L.A. startups and venture capital to [email protected].
Hello, LA.
Somewhere between the streaming service you still use and the free trial you forgot to cancel, recurring payments have become a surprisingly complicated part of modern financial life.
Los Angeles-based ScribeUp believes your bank should help manage them.
The fintech company raised a $13M Series A led by Curql, with participation from Mucker Capital and Service Ventures. The financing includes $10M in equity and a $3M venture debt facility, bringing ScribeUp new capital to expand its team, accelerate sales and further develop its AI-powered bill-management technology.
The product is designed to live directly within the apps of banks, credit unions, fintechs and neobanks. Instead of simply showing customers that a recurring charge occurred, ScribeUp gives them tools to do something about it.
That could mean canceling a forgotten subscription, changing a payment method, accessing an advance or exploring refinancing options for an outside loan, all without leaving the financial institution’s app.
It sounds like a useful feature. It is also part of a much larger contest over who gets to manage the consumer’s financial life.
For years, banks have held customers’ money while third-party apps have increasingly helped them understand and manage it. Budgeting platforms organize spending. Subscription services identify recurring charges. Fintech apps recommend ways to save, borrow or invest.
Now AI assistants are beginning to combine those functions into a single interface capable of not only analyzing financial information, but acting on it.
That creates a risk for traditional financial institutions. If consumers begin turning to an outside app whenever they need to cancel a service, manage a bill or make a financial decision, their bank could become little more than the infrastructure beneath someone else’s customer experience.
ScribeUp offers banks a way to compete without building that technology themselves.
Its platform combines recurring-payment information with the financial context a bank already has, including balances, cash flow and payment timing. That allows a financial institution to do more than flag an upcoming charge. It can potentially recommend and execute an action based on the customer’s broader financial position.
ScribeUp says its technology is already used by more than 60 banks, credit unions, fintechs and neobanks. It can be added through an API, software development kit or embedded interface, allowing institutions to introduce bill-management features without creating the underlying infrastructure from scratch.
The new funding will support more advanced AI capabilities that can take action across different billers. That distinction matters. The first generation of personal finance software helped people see where their money was going. The next generation wants permission to do something about it.
For banks, the opportunity is straightforward: become more useful before another app takes their place.
For consumers, the appeal may be even simpler. Most people do not want another financial dashboard. They want the unwanted charge to stop.
The next battle in banking may not be over who holds your money.
It may be over who gets to press cancel.
More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.
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Hey there, LA.
In Hollywood, every successful story eventually gets a sequel. This one brings Reese Witherspoon back to the company she built.
Five years after selling control of Hello Sunshine in a deal worth more than $900M, Witherspoon is partnering with French production group Mediawan to buy back the Los Angeles media company.
The reported purchase price is in the low-to-mid eight figures, significantly below Hello Sunshine’s valuation when Candle Media acquired a controlling stake in 2021.
That difference tells a larger story than any single Hollywood transaction.
Hello Sunshine was one of the most prominent acquisitions made during the streaming boom, when platforms were spending aggressively and investors placed enormous value on production companies with recognizable founders, established audiences and libraries of intellectual property.
Witherspoon had built all three.
Founded in 2016, Hello Sunshine developed its business around stories centered on women, producing projects including “Big Little Lies,” “The Morning Show,” “Little Fires Everywhere” and “Daisy Jones & The Six.” It also turned Reese’s Book Club into an influential audience and discovery platform that now reaches 6.2 million readers and drives approximately $900M in annual U.S. book sales, according to the company.
By 2021, that combination of talent, intellectual property and direct audience access looked like the foundation of a next-generation media empire.
Candle Media, backed by capital from Blackstone, acquired Hello Sunshine as part of a broader effort to assemble a portfolio of entertainment brands. The company also purchased businesses including Moonbug Entertainment, ATTN: and Faraway Road Productions.
Then the streaming market changed.
Entertainment companies became more disciplined about content spending. The race to accumulate subscribers gave way to pressure for profitability. Production budgets tightened, consolidation slowed and some of the valuations assigned during the streaming boom became difficult to maintain.
Hello Sunshine’s return to founder-led ownership reflects how dramatically the media landscape has changed since 2021. It also gives Witherspoon an opportunity to regain greater influence over the company at a moment when its core assets may matter more than its former valuation suggests.
Under the new ownership structure, Hello Sunshine plans to refocus on premium film and television, Reese’s Book Club and new storytelling and distribution formats. Mediawan brings an international production network, while Witherspoon brings something harder to manufacture: a trusted personal brand and an audience willing to follow her recommendations from books to screens.
That relationship with consumers is increasingly valuable in a fragmented media market. Studios can finance productions. Streaming services can distribute them. Far fewer companies can reliably convince millions of people to care before a project is even released.
For Los Angeles, the deal reflects the increasingly fluid boundary between entertainment company, consumer brand and technology-enabled audience platform. The most resilient media businesses may not be those producing the greatest volume of content, but those that own a direct relationship with a specific community.
The first Hello Sunshine deal captured the optimism of the streaming era.
The second may offer a more focused model for what comes next, with the company once again guided by the founder who understood its audience from the beginning.
Hollywood loves a comeback story.
This time, the company is making one too.
LA Tech Week’s Final Stretch
Still making the most of LA Tech Week? We have organized the remaining events by location to make planning the weekend a little easier:
Event schedules may change, so confirm the latest details with the organizer before heading out.
More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.
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Happy Friday, Los Angeles.
Next week, hundreds of tech events will take over the city, bringing founders, investors, engineers and creators together from October 12 through 18.
Calling LA Tech Week a conference does not quite capture the experience.
Presented by Andreessen Horowitz, Tech Week is a decentralized collection of panels, workshops, demonstrations and gatherings hosted independently by startups, venture firms and technology companies. There is no convention center or central stage. The programming stretches from Santa Monica and Venice to Culver City, Downtown, El Segundo and beyond.
In other words, the city is the venue.
AI remains the dominant theme for 2026, appearing across enterprise software, healthcare, finance, media and the creator economy. The schedule also reflects industries where Los Angeles has built a particular advantage, including aerospace, defense, robotics, advanced manufacturing, entertainment and consumer technology.
That range is what makes LA Tech Week distinct. It brings together the software companies shaping what comes next with the industries that already define Southern California.
The challenge is deciding where to show up.
Our advice: apply early and organize your schedule by neighborhood. Crossing from Santa Monica to Downtown may look manageable on a calendar created by someone who has never driven in Los Angeles.
To help you spend more time meeting people and less time crossing the city, we have organized each day’s events by location:
You can also browse the complete official LA Tech Week calendar.
Plan carefully, but do not fill every minute. The best conversation of the week may be the one that was never on your calendar.
More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.
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