Los Angeles is California’s largest city and the second most populous 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 grew under the flags of Spain, Mexico and, since 1850, the United States, to become the commercial, financial and cultural center of Southern California. Today, the city of Los Angeles has a population of 3.8 million, and the entire metropolitan area – which includes almost 90 cities, including Santa Monica, Long Beach and Pasadena – is home to 18.5 million people.
Los Angeles is most famous for its Hollywood district, cradle of the American film industry. The city’s flagship industries of the 20th century, aeronautics and oil, have gradually given way to finance, telecommunications, healthcare and transportation. Tourism has also become a major industry, with attractions such as Disneyland and Universal Studios Hollywood, as well as landmarks such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Rodeo Drive, Venice Beach and Malibu, visited by millions of people every year.

The city offers a pleasant climate, a quality of life marked by the proximity of mountains suitable for hiking, sunny beaches and strong connectivity to the world thanks to the presence of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), the largest airport on the West Coast, and its seaport, the busiest in the country and the third busiest in the world for container traffic.

The Los Angeles metropolis is the third largest metropolitan area in the world in terms of GDP, after New York and Tokyo, with an output in excess of $1T; 22 Fortune 500 companies are based here and its innovation ecosystem is valued at 297B. The most important industrial sectors are video games, life sciences and aerospace.

The video games and e-sport gaming industry is supported by the presence of Activision Blizzard Inc. 16 of the 60 e-sport teams based in the USA are based in Los Angeles. Life sciences are represented by over 350 research centers, laboratories and institutes as well as industry stalwarts such as Pfizer, Gilead and Thermo Fisher. For the fiscal year 2022, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invested around $1.5B in the various medical research institutions in the city of Los Angeles. Major fund-raisings by medical startups ($250M by ACELERYN in November 2021, and $52M by Appia Bio in May 2021), confirm the interest and promising future of this industry in the Los Angeles region. As for the aerospace industry, it is bolstered by the recent successes of SpaceX and the development of the James Webb telescope by Northrop Grumman.

The metropolis of Los Angeles 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 University of Southern California (USC), as well as biomedical research institutes and teaching hospitals at the interface between laboratories and the marketplace. 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), underlines 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 specialized in fundraising; Caltech Office for Technology Transfer & Corporate Partnerships, an accelerator that has supported and helped raise $630M in 2021 and $8.7B since its creation; USC Marshall/Greif Incubator, an innovation support program offered by USC to its students and alumni.

Further south, San Diego’s innovation ecosystem relies on academic research at institutions such as Scripps, University of California San Diego (UCSD), and the Salk Institute.

With its industrial base, climate, culture of creativity and cosmopolitan character, Los Angeles is a global hub for innovation. The influx of venture capital funds is a major asset. Every year, events such as the Upfront Summit  bring over 1,000 investors, entrepreneurs and key players in the entrepreneurial world to Los Angeles.

In addition to accelerators and incubators at universities, support structures in the Los Angeles region have succeeded in developing the entrepreneurial scene. In this context, Cedars-Sinai Accelerator aims to accelerate startups in the medical field by offering practitioners the opportunity to meet other players in the healthcare world to challenge, prototype and test the products they develop; Amplify LA relies on personalized mentoring to support early-stage projects; Biolabs San Diego gives entrepreneurs the benefit of its network of pharmaceutical and biotech industry leaders such as Thermo Fisher, Eppendorf and Agilent. The non-profit organizations  LA Cleantech Incubator and BioscienceLA aim to catalyze innovation in the fields of sustainable energy and life sciences respectively.