Los Angeles is the largest city in California and the second most populous city in the United States. Located between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the area of present-day Los Angeles was inhabited by Native American tribes before settlers established an agricultural community there in 1781. Over time, this community developed under the flags of Spain, Mexico and, from 1850 onward, the United States, becoming the commercial, financial and cultural center of Southern California. The city of Los Angeles now has approximately 3.9 million residents and its broader metropolitan area, which includes nearly 90 cities including Santa Monica, Long Beach and Pasadena, has approximately 18.5 million residents.

 

Los Angeles is particularly famous for Hollywood, the birthplace of the American film industry. The city’s flagship industries in the twentieth century, aerospace and oil, gradually gave way to finance, telecommunications, healthcare and transportation. Tourism has also become increasingly important, with attractions such as Disneyland and Universal Studios Hollywood, as well as places such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Rodeo Drive, Venice Beach and Malibu, which are visited by millions of people every year.

 

The city offers a pleasant climate, a quality of life marked by the proximity of mountains ideal for hiking and sunny beaches, and strong global connectivity thanks to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), the largest on the West Coast, and its seaport, the busiest in the United States for 26 consecutive years.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area is the third-largest metropolitan area in the world in terms of GDP, after New York and Tokyo, with output exceeding $1 trillion. Its innovation ecosystem, ranked fourth in North America and sixth worldwide by Startup Genome, is now valued at more than $1 trillion and includes 46 startups valued at more than $1 billion. The most important industrial sectors are video games, life sciences and aerospace.

 

The video game and e-sports gaming industry is supported by the presence of major studios such as Activision Blizzard, whose headquarters remain in Santa Monica although the company joined Microsoft Gaming in 2023; Los Angeles also concentrates a significant share of the e-sports teams based in the United States. Life sciences are represented by more than 350 research centers, laboratories and institutes as well as industry leaders such as Pfizer, Gilead and Thermo Fisher. For fiscal year 2024, UCLA’s medical school alone received $516 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), placing it among the country’s leading recipient institutions, alongside other medical research centers in the region such as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Recent investments in the biopharmaceutical sector, such as the $600 million expansion of Amgen’s R&D center in Thousand Oaks announced in September 2025, confirm the region’s lasting attractiveness for life sciences. As for the aerospace industry, it is strengthened by the recent successes of SpaceX and the development of the James Webb telescope by Northrop Grumman.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area is home to prestigious universities such as the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), University of California Irvine (UCI) and the University of Southern California (USC), and also hosts biomedical research institutes and university hospitals operating at the interface between laboratories and the market. The presence in Pasadena of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a research and development center largely funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), highlights the importance of the aerospace industry in the region.

 

Innovation and entrepreneurship are supported by these institutions through various programs, incubators and accelerators; to name just a few: Startup UCLA, an incubator known for its Summer Accelerator program, UCLA Anderson Venture Accelerator and UCLA Health TechQuity Accelerator, two accelerators specializing in fundraising; Caltech Office for Technology Transfer & Corporate Partnerships, which supported the creation of 8 new startups and generated $66 million in corporate contracts and gifts in fiscal year 2025 alone; USC Marshall/Greif Incubator, an innovation support program offered by USC to its students and alumni.

 

Further south, San Diego has established itself as the third-largest biotech hub in the United States and a leading medtech hub, with nearly 2,000 life-sciences companies and more than 71,000 jobs in the sector in 2024. This ecosystem is built on world-class academic research led by Scripps Research, the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the Salk Institute, as well as investment from the National Institutes of Health exceeding $1 billion in 2024.

Building on its industrial strengths, climate, culture of creativity and cosmopolitan character, Los Angeles is a global hub for innovation. The influx of venture-capital funding is a major asset. Every year, events such as the Upfront Summit bring together more than 1,000 investors, entrepreneurs and key players in entrepreneurship in Los Angeles.

 

In addition to accelerators and incubators within universities, support organizations in the Los Angeles region have helped develop the entrepreneurial scene. In this context, Cedars-Sinai Accelerator aims to accelerate startups in the medical field by enabling practitioners to meet other healthcare stakeholders to challenge, prototype and test the products being developed; Amplify LA relies on personalized mentoring to support early-stage projects; BioLabs @ Lundquist Institute, in Torrance, provides entrepreneurs with shared laboratories and equipment to accelerate the development of life-sciences startups. The nonprofit organizations LA Cleantech Incubator and BioscienceLA aim to catalyze innovation in sustainable energy and life sciences, respectively.