About Daniel Tellalian

Daniel Tellalian is the Founder and CEO of Angel City Advisors. Angel City was created to provide an accessible platform for investors, entrepreneurs, policy leaders, and community voices to come together in pursuit of a better world. It is a place where market-oriented solutions can be designed and executed to address complex problems. Indeed, most of our team are successful entrepreneurs in their own right.  Daniel comes to Angel City with three decades of experience in impact investing, social entrepreneurship, business mentoring, financial transactions, and community economic development. He also strives to come to Angel City every day with humility, integrity, and authenticity.

The firm is his fourth venture.  Immediately prior to launching Angel City Advisors, Daniel was the co-founder and Managing Partner of Avivar Capital, bringing his operator experience in economic development, real estate management, social entrepreneurship and impact investment to the firm. Avivar Capital is an SEC-registered investment advisor focused on impact investing. Daniel was the firm’s lead on a food investing and bioscience investing, as well as active in place-based community development initiatives, due diligence, and pipeline development activities. Since his exit, Avivar continues to advise a national roster of impact investors – mostly private and community foundations. 

Prior to joining Avivar Capital, Daniel was a Principal and 13-year partner at Emerging Markets, Inc., an economic development consulting firm that assisted the private sector to responsibly pursue business opportunities in low-income areas nationwide. During that time Daniel led client engagements within the firm’s regional banking and food retailing sectors, assisting a number of successful financial institutions and supermarket operators in California and nationally. As part of a place-based model, his primary client services included market research and sectoral analysis, real estate siting and entitlements, customer segmentation, community marketing strategy and campaigns, strategic partnership design, deal sourcing and structuring, workforce development, and community relations.

Daniel has also consulted broadly with clients on strategic grantmaking initiatives, market expansion strategies, and investment opportunities for traditional and impact investors. He served as the co-designer and lead for deployment of the California FreshWorks Fund, the nation’s largest healthy food financing initiative, originating over 70 successful transactions and $62 million invested into healthy food enterprises in the state. Daniel also consulted on the redesign and deployment of a FreshWorks Fund 2.0 program ($70 million deployed and counting), as well as the Michigan Good Food Fund, both ongoing statewide food financing initiatives. His connection to multiple regional and national food funds is ongoing. He now also advises on the pivot and expansion of the national Fair Food Fund with an integrated capital approach to equity-first food investing.

Daniel is also retained by economic development entities to attract new investment to underserved communities. He has consulted with Los Angeles County on the design of strategic funds dubbed the Catalytic Development Fund (real asset redevelopment) and Bioscience Investment Fund (early stage venture), LA COVID19 Fund (emergency small business lending) and the LA Microloan Program (microcapital to the informal economy). He has also advised on the creation of catalyst organizations intended to accelerate innovation ecosystems and commercialization of science and technology. Daniel helped launch and lead a new such organization, Bioscience Los Angeles County or BioscienceLA, in Southern California. Across multiple sectors, Daniel has consulted with enterprises seeking to secure investment, as well as investors seeking to place investments. He has also advised the LA Cleantech Incubator on its stated goal of securing a diverse and inclusive company portfolio, and currently sits on its board.

A proponent of neighborhood-scale development, Daniel has more than a decade of working knowledge designing and executing place-based initiatives in the urban context. He was a founding board member of the Center for Place-Based Initiatives (now known as the Emerging Markets Development Corporation). He is experienced operating in low-income and communities of color, and connecting them to the investment community. Daniel also served as an advisor to Nielsen, the world’s leading information source of what consumers buy and watch, to help ensure that underrepresented segments are adequately engaged and measured in market research.

Prior to his chapter at Emerging Markets, Inc., Daniel enjoyed successful career stints as a real estate and land use attorney, commercial developer, certified public accountant, nonprofit executive and alternative lender. A licensed CPA and attorney in California, Daniel draws upon an economics degree from the Wharton School of Business and graduate degrees in law and business from U.C. Berkeley. He was awarded an Echoing Green fellowship for social entrepreneurship in 1998 (his first startup!) and remains active in fellow selection, ecosystem development, and access to capital for the fellowship network. Daniel also remains active in civic efforts locally. He served four years on the Los Angeles Workforce Investment Board, the nation’s second largest, lending sector-specific counsel to the City. He was also a founding board member and three-term board chair of the Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation (now RiverLA), tasked with responsibly developing the 51-mile corridor adjacent to the Los Angeles River; a founding member of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, tasked with reworking the region’s food system; a Senior Fellow at USC’s Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab; and gubernatorial appointee to the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.  Daniel serves on the Investment Committee of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, one of the nation’s few private foundations who has committed 100% of its assets towards mission through impact investing and active ownership.

Daniel lives in Mid-City Los Angeles with his wife Monica Carlos and two daughters. He speculates he is the City’s only Puerto-Rican/Armenian resident.