Chill — Los Angeles’ Proptech Scene Is Coming Along Just Fine

Hard to imagine, but even the rich real estate market of Los Angeles can fly a bit under the radar when it comes to proptech. Not, though, to some proptech founders in the City of Angels and its environs.

From startups and investors to more established companies, Los Angeles has produced a proptech ecosystem that many find as warm and inviting as the sun and the sea.

Sometimes, though, it’s just personal.

“Simply, I’m here because my wife and my wife’s family is here,” said Eric Migicovsky, a native Texan and founder of Propvetter, a Los Angeles-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to streamline due diligence for commercial real estate owners, brokers and lenders. “My sister’s here as well, but my parents are back in Texas, and occasionally people ask me if I want to move back. But I like Southern California for all of its faults, so, yeah, I think I’m here to stay for quite a bit.”

Also, the business scene is magnetic for Migicovsky, a former commercial real estate broker.

Founded in the second quarter of 2025, Propvetter is currently in beta mode and securing pilot customers, while benefiting from the L.A. area’s huge real estate market.

“I’m located in Century City, and on my floor alone there’s two or three other firms, as well as friends that I have on the top floor, and more right around the corner,” Migicovsky said. “There’s a great real estate ecosystem here that I can tap into in terms of business.

“My network is mainly real estate professionals in L.A., and that network has been incredibly supportive to me in my journey transitioning from a real estate transaction person to building a product that helps people on that side of the business.”

Compared to an uber-tech market such as San Francisco, L.A. has a fairly young proptech support system, said Migicovsky. “So I’m trying to marry those two worlds — the real estate network that I have with the tech ecosystem here. That’s a big part of what I’m trying to fuse together.”

For small startups such as Propvetter, the challenge of finding affordable talent that combines real estate and engineering experience is daunting, Migicovsky said. Even so, he is optimistic about L.A.’s future as a proptech hub.

“It definitely feels like it’s growing,” said Migicovsky. “I see every day there’s different companies in L.A. that are trying to hack various problems in real estate, and a lot of it is with AI obviously, and the incredible technology we have available.”

Proximity to investors and clients, particularly in markets like New York and L.A., is vital to venture capital success, said Nic Halverson, CEO and co-founder at Occuspace, a Marina Del Rey-based company that analyzes office space use in Los Angeles County.

Halverson lives in Austin, Texas, where his wife trains in the heptathlon for the Olympics. He commutes to L.A. once a quarter, while his co-founder and chief information officer, Linus Grasel, is in the Marina Del Rey office. The two founded Occuspace while engineering students at the University of California at San Diego, Halverson said.

“The whole company started as an idea to help avoid crowded places on campus,” Halverson explained. “It was essentially a school project. I hated how crowded the gyms, dining halls and libraries were, and I thought, ‘Man, we have an eight-story library. I wish I knew how busy every floor was before I came.’ So we built a sensor that you plug into a wall outlet, and it scans for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signal data. My co-founder has a master’s in machine learning. He figured out how to go from signal data to people estimates with 95 percent accuracy.”

UC San Diego continues to be a source of quality engineering and other talent for Occuspace and other proptech companies, he added. “We love hiring out of UCSD, particularly for engineers, as well as for other roles. Most of our talent is in Southern California. We hire a lot out of San Diego, a lot of our team was based out of San Diego, and a lot of them were open to moving to L.A.”

Occuspace has 23 full-time employees and no problem attracting talent, Halverson said. “L.A. is a place that everybody wants to live. It’s not hard to find talent. There’s tons of young talent. A lot of people want to be in Marina Del Rey. So, when we post jobs, we get well over 1,000 applicants for every job we post.”

As far as garnering investor interest, Halverson also touts the area.

“It’s 100 percent easier to network when you’re on the West Coast,” he said. “I mean, 90 percent of the investors that you get money from are going to be from warm introductions and from meeting them in person, usually meeting them several times. It’s relatively rare that you just get an intro to a VC, hop on a call, and they invest money. That happens sometimes, but, more often than not, it’s meeting people in person at networking events for a long course of time.

“And this is true with the lead investor in our seed round, Okapi Venture Capital, which is based out of Newport Beach, and Cove Fund, based out of Irvine. They were two big investors in our seed round.” That round was in August 2023. More recently, in March 2025, Lewis & Clark Ventures led a $6 million Series A round for Occuspace, with participation from Okapi Ventures and Cove Fund. 

Laurent Grill was for many years a generalist investor in L.A., where he is still based. He remains L.A.-based as a partner at JLL Spark Global Ventures. Over the years, he has seen the area’s technology ecosystem evolve from residential-focused to more commercial.

“Specifically talking about technology and the built world, I think there are hubs that are bigger than Los Angeles,” said Grill, who looks at investment opportunities worldwide on JLL Spark’s global investment platform. “New York has presented itself as one of the leaders in the space for a variety of reasons, along with San Francisco, but Los Angeles and California as a whole have generated some pretty great companies in our space. The only caveat from our perspective is that most of those companies, outside of a handful — you have Crexi, for instance, which is a great company based in Los Angeles that’s in the CRE space — have flourished here but have actually been focused a little bit more on the residential side.”

Grill invested in proptech startups such as LeaseLock when he was an investor, but while JLL Spark remains interested in funding L.A.-area proptech, it has yet to find a suitable company, he said.

“There haven’t been a ton of companies that have come out of Southern California, at least that we’ve seen or been involved with,” said Grill. “I’m looking forward to hopefully more, but I don’t really know what that looks like in terms of today versus what the future will look like.”

Proptech venture capital firm Fifth Wall originated in L.A. but has transferred its headquarters to New York City, while VC firm Navitas Capital has remained in the city and is thriving, said Grill, adding that, “there’s a handful of L.A.-based generalist funds that have made a handful of investments in this space, including Watertower Ventures [and] Crosscut Ventures.”

Karly Heffernan is a native of Canada, where she was a three-time nationals gold medalist on the Canadian women’s under-18 and under-22 ice hockey teams. Heffernan moved to L.A. in 2019, eventually co-founding Hardline AI Corporation, an AI-powered communications platform for construction site workers that came out of stealth mode in March 2025.

“We’re solving the communication gaps between field and office teams by streamlining the ability to document a lot of the things that aren’t picked up during phone calls and text messages,” said Heffernan of Hardline, which rebranded from Rivvet last week. “We work with superintendents, project managers and office teams, and use AI to pick up on conversations that happen naturally, like walk-throughs, on the phone. A lot of these groups do not want to use project managing CRMs and do manual note-taking, so what we’re doing is finding a way to help construction workers adopt technology without knowing it.”

Coming from a construction industry family, Heffernan was spurred by the L.A. fires to use technology to help the rebuilding process.

“I think that the L.A. proptech scene is growing,” Heffernan said. “A lot of people are interested in this space because of the lure of being in tech that is in a blue-collar or a legacy industry. So the tech ecosystem is critical.”

She credits the local chapter of the national Founders Network, a startup mentoring organization, as an important part of the support system for entrepreneurs such as herself. “I go every two weeks, and we discuss the landscape and how things are moving.”

Heffernan also noted that L.A.’s west side, which encompasses Venice Beach and Santa Monica, is seeing some proptech startups bubble up.

“I’m so biased,” she said. “I think that L.A. is the best place for a startup, because you have the consistency of weather, which makes people often happier. And you have consistency with the growth, like in L.A. There will never not be a lot of real estate action, a lot of construction. It’s something that will be consistent.

“I think these other hubs, like Austin, you saw a boom and their housing market is so expensive now because of that, but it’s slowing down. In L.A., it stays expensive.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.