Tourists come to Los Angeles every summer for the beaches and nightlife, but three investment firms have arrived because they see the city as a hot spot of a different type.

While Skype and smartphones have made doing business from afar easier than ever, there’s still no substitute for personal contact and knowledge of the landscape. That’s why Romulus Capital in Boston and FF Venture Capital in New York are sending key people on regular visits to Los Angeles, and Victory Park Capital in Chicago is opening a local office. They see money to be made investing in L.A.’s startups and lending to its middle-market companies.

“There’s a difference in phoning it in versus being there,” said Neil Chheda, a co-founder and general partner at Romulus. “I really don’t think we can do justice to our fund if we’re doing it from the other side of the country.”

Chheda first started coming to Los Angeles regularly about a year ago when Romulus invested in West L.A.’s Estify, which makes software for auto body shops. He quickly reached the conclusion that the city had a lot of talented entrepreneurs but not as many people to fund them.

“There was a mismatch between opportunity and capital,” he said.

There were 36 venture capital deals in Los Angeles that closed in the first quarter of this year, up 13 percent from the previous quarter, according to data from City National Bank in downtown Los Angeles. More than $174 million were invested in local startups in the quarter, lower than the $271 million the previous quarter because those were later-stage deals that required bigger dollar amounts.

So what’s on the rise now is interest in early stage investments, the specialty of Romulus and FF. Chheda thinks investors are only scratching the surface of what the city’s entrepreneurs have to offer.

So he now spends about one week every two months in Southern California, working out of Estify’s offices and pressing flesh with entrepreneurs and investors. One thing that has particularly appealed to him has been the collaborative nature of the city’s startup community, which reminds Chheda of home.

“Everyone in Los Angeles is focused on helping make it a stronger hotbed of startups than it is now,” he said. “It kind of looks like Boston several years ago.”

Chheda and Krishna Gupta, both 27, co-founded Romulus in 2008. The firm, which just closed a $50 million fund last month, invests exclusively in early stage companies. Chheda and Gupta prefer to write checks in the six-figure range, but their fund can invest up to $5 million at a time if the opportunity is right.

Chheda has built relationships with local incubators and sees them being a great source of investment opportunities. And that means he’ll be flying Boston to Los Angeles more often.

California cool

AJ Plotkin met FF Chief Executive John Frankel last year to talk about joining the firm. The meeting took place in New York, but Plotkin was California dreaming.

“One of the things that I was clear about from the beginning was that I wanted to spend more time in Southern California,” Plotkin said. “I saw a lot of opportunities and I wanted to provide a point of engagement for the firm out there.”

Since joining FF as a principal a little more than one year ago, Plotkin has made more than 20 trips to Los Angeles and is now splitting his time about evenly between coasts. He finds it useful to come for about two weeks at a time and says working the social circuit has been critical.

“It’s just being extroverted and out there and being a member of the community as much as possible,” he said.

He has a particular affinity for L.A. culture. He’s a pescetarian – he doesn’t eat meat but does do fish – “You can say that in L.A. and people know what that means” – and raves about the plentiful organic food options. He mentions Real Food Daily in Santa Monica as one of his favorite restaurants and speaks glowingly about his local yoga instructor.

FF invests in early stage companies and has funded more than 70 businesses since Frankel founded the firm in 1999. One of its most successful ventures was an investment in Santa Monica software company Cornerstone OnDemand, which went public in 2011. FF is currently invested in local companies such as Estify; Gigit in Santa Monica, an online platform for booking musical acts; and Hollywood cloud computing company Gobbler.

Frankel, who also travels to Los Angeles about once a month, has been pleased with the fruits of Plotkin’s journeys. So much so that he’s building a house in Laguna Beach he plans to use as a home base to check on his nine L.A.-area portfolio companies, a number he expects will go up.

“The opportunity is here,” Frankel said.

Top man

Brendan Carroll, a co-founder of Victory Park, decided to open an L.A. office because that’s what it took to bring Jason Brown aboard as a partner.

“We wanted to expand the business and having a West Coast presence is great,” said Carroll. “But it was really who the person was versus where he was located.”

Carroll does see some advantages in Brown’s L.A. location, though. It will allow him to more easily schedule face time with companies throughout California. Also, as a past president of the local chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth, a trade group for financial professionals, Brown has an extensive network in Los Angeles that should open up investment opportunities for his new firm.

Victory Park is an asset management company that invests mostly in the debt of small- and middle-market companies. Like many other financial firms, it has found more opportunities in business lending as commercial banks have been hamstrung by new regulations. Since signing on with Victory Park, Brown, a former managing director at GE Capital, has heard from folks at several banks who’ve expressed frustration by lending restrictions.

“I’ve definitely received a flurry of inbound messages from larger corporate finance bankers and other middle-market commercial bankers that have been interested that I’ve made this move,” he said. “They’ve voiced some of the frustrations that they’ve continued to feel toward the banks.”

Brown is working out of a temporary office in Century City and hopes to land in a permanent space soon somewhere in that general vicinity. He will also add support staff.

“Jason is obviously not going to be the only hire we make for that office over the next six months to one year,” Carroll said.

Plotkin and Chheda feel they can get what they need – for the moment – with their part-time presence.

“We’ve just found a tremendous amount of exciting opportunities in L.A. and it makes us want to dig in deeper,” Plotkin said.

While he’s here looking for great L.A. businesses, he makes sure there’s always time for classic L.A. fun.

“This may be kind of stereotypically East Coast,” Plotkin said, “but I do try and get to the beach every day.”