Shaun Arora
Managing Partner @ MiLA Capital (Make in LA)
Santa Monica, United States
Shaun Arora is a seed investor at MiLA Capital (Make in LA) in Santa Monica focused on Energy and Hardware. Shaun Arora graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with Honors and went to work as a cultural anthropologist for consumer packaged goods companies. In 2005, he joined the family electronics manufacturing business, NEO Tech, and worked to scale the business. As a result of his leadership, the business has grown 40X in that time and hasover 3400 employees servicing the aerospace, industrial, and medical device industries.As NEO Tech moves into a middle market growth phase Shaun allocates a larger portion of his time towards early stage companies. As an investor, board member and mentor, he’s often playing devil’s advocate and challenging executive teams towards brilliant and uncomfortable thinking. He has worked with a number of hardware startups in particular from prototype to crowdfunding, manufacturing, and subsequent stages of financing. In 2015, Shaun spun off Make in LA from the contract manufacturing business to improve learnings and outcomes for hardware startups. He remains an advisor and a board member at NEO Tech.At Make in LA, Shaun focuses on leveraging NEO Tech’s resources to support the startups, leveraging his portfolio for best practices, providing world class programming, and building strategic partnerships for the benefit of the startups.
- Total investments:
- 7
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 0%
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Shaun Arora invests in
Stages Shaun Arora invests in
Countries Shaun Arora invests in
Contacts
| Type | Contact | Validation |
|---|---|---|
| Work email | ||
| Personal email | ||
| Work phone | ||
| Personal phone | ||
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Investment Focus
Industry
- Energy 2 (29%)
- Hardware 2 (29%)
- Sustainability 2 (29%)
- Food and Beverage 2 (29%)
- Fuel 1 (14%)
Stage
- Seed 6 (86%)
- Series A 1 (14%)
- Debt Financing 1 (14%)
Country
- United States 7 (100%)
- Mexico 1 (14%)
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
Palladius
|
Palladius is an innovative real estate investment management organization focused on investing capital on behalf of institutional investors. | $15M / Series A / Mar 14, 2022 | |
Amogy
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Amogy is a company that develops carbon-free energy solutions aimed at decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors, including maritime, power generation, and heavy industry. Its patented ammonia cracking technology efficiently splits liquid ammonia to generate electrical power in conjunction with hydrogen fuel cells. | $3.1M / Seed / Mar 09, 2021 | |
Twigtale
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Twigtale is the first company to provide parents with personalized, high-quality, accessible expert advice for every major transition a child undergoes, such as welcoming a new baby, moving, even experiencing death or cancer. The personalized stories are scripted by child development experts, then personalized by parents. The books are engaging forkids and a powerful playbooks for parents. Customers are parents, groups, partners & sponsors. | $1.1M / Seed / Apr 21, 2015 | |
GroundMetrics
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GroundMetrics, Inc is the world leader in the development of land-based EM sensing and is working with oil, gas, mining, and geothermal companies to commercialize a new class of sensor system and methods and to provide advanced survey and monitoring services worldwide. GroundMetrics, Inc. spun-out of QUASAR Federal Systems (QFS) in 2010 with anexclusive license to productize QFS’s novel electromagnetic sensor technology for resource exploration, management and production. This technology offers advanced capabilities for electromagnetic (EM), induced polarization (IP) magnetotelluric (MT), and controlled-source EM (CSEM) surveys in arid regions common in Australia, Canada, Mongolia, Mexico, the Middle East, South America and the United States. Furthermore, it improves the precision, safety and economics of Borehole-to-Surface (BSEM) surveys and is ideal for time-lapse and continuous long-term monitoring applications such as reservoir imaging and monitoring for Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) and Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). GroundMetrics uses its proprietary sensors, noise mitgation methods and focused-azimuth borehole transmitter technology to provide survey and monitoring services directly to energy and mining companies. | $1.1M / Debt Financing / Feb 20, 2015 | |
Orange Chef
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Orange Chef designs and manufactures hardware and software applications to answer some of the toughest questions around health and nutrition. Widely regarded as leaders of the connected kitchen category, all products are created with an emphasis on quality, simple design, and smart utilization of artificial intelligence technologies. Orange Chefdistributes its products in stores like Williams Sonoma, Apple, Target, and Amazon, among others. Established in 2011, Orange Chef is privately held and headquartered in San Francisco. | $4.9M / Seed / Feb 07, 2014 | |
FloWater
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FloWater's mission is to inspire the world with the most premium water on the planet.We're driven by passion and purpose, committed to sustainability, and relentless about providing the highest quality water available, without generating any plastic bottle waste. Today, FloWater is a rapidly growing company that’s hydrating some of theworld's best organizations, including Google, Microsoft, Target, Airbnb, Playstation, Electronic Arts, Specialized Bikes, RedBull, Hurley, Dr. Bronner's, Poler Outdoor Stuff, Urban Remedy, Powder Mountain Resort, Club Pilates, David Barton Gyms, Crunch Gyms, US Fitness, Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott, Preferred Hotels, Viceroy Hotels, Fairmont Hotels, Two Roads Hospitality, and 1000s of others, while we save millions of plastic water bottles from the environment.We partner with foundations and non-profits to ensure people everywhere have access to great, trustworthy water, including donating a significant number of Refill Stations to schools, hotels, and public buildings for the people of Flint, MI.FloWater is funded by over 30 Angel and Super Angel investors from Silicon Beach, Silicon Valley, NYC, and other major markets. Institutional funding received through equity and venture debt, and equity crowdfunding. | $880K / Seed / Jul 10, 2013 | |
Sonoma Cider
|
Sonoma Cider produces a line of organic hard cider alcoholic beverages. The US hard cider category is undergoing rapid growth, roughly doubling each year in 2012, 2013, and 2014. While still small compared to craft beer, cider is growing much faster and is increasingly showing up at leading retailers, bars, and restaurants. Sonoma Cider hasassembled a team of experienced beverage industry veterans to go after this opportunity. David Cordtz, CEO and Cidermaster has over 30 years of experience as a wine-maker, cider-maker, and beverage formulator. Robert Cordtz, VP Operations, has extensive experience with high-volume beverage production.The company is based in Healdsburg in the heart of the California wine country 1.5 hours north of San Francisco. Sonoma Beverage Works' state-of-the-art production facility allows scaling rapidly to meet demand. | Seed / May 01, 2013 |
Co-Investors
MiLA Capital is a high-touch Venture Capital firm based in Los Angeles, CA. The team believes that (1) hardware can be brought to market more frugally than in the past and that (2) Los Angeles has the expertise and best resources to support founders who play in the physical world.Since 2015, MiLA Capital has seen a gap in SoCal’s startup hardtech ecosystem; talent was incredible but fragmented while capital was plentiful except for seed stage hardware founders. We addressed that by raising an early stage venture fund, building an innovation lab known as Toolbox LA, recruiting a values-driven community of founders and mentors, and connecting hundreds of talented founders with the resources they need to impact the world. We also operate the Make in LA accelerator to find, nurture, and invest in promising hardware companies at the earliest stages. We believe that undiscovered hardware founders are too often overlooked, and we are the right team to fund them at the significant inflection point of pre-manufacturing.
MiLA Capital (Make in LA) Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
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Shaun Arora
Managing Partner
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Carmen Palafox
Partner
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Marta Wojcicka
Director of Operations
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Noramay Cadena
Co-Founder and General Partner
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Sandeep Shroff
Advisor
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FAQ
What does Shaun Arora invest in?
Shaun Arora invests primarily in Energy, Hardware and Sustainability startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 7 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
How do I contact Shaun Arora?
Public channels for Shaun Arora include LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
When did Shaun Arora last invest?
The most recent investment recorded for Shaun Arora closed in Mar 2022. Shizune tracks 7 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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