Built By Berkeley: $1.1B 🦄 exit for Chemistry PhD

🦄🦄🦄 Last week, a Berkeley-founded company, Jnana Therapeutics, was acquired for up to $1.1B by Japanese giant Otsuka Pharma. Wowzers, guess Joanne’s Berkeley Chemistry PhD really paid off. This is an actual acquisition vs. a funding round.

Alongside that, we have another $252M raised from companies doing nuclear fusion to AI medical scribes. 

We believe Berkeley has the most entrepreneurial ecosystem in the world. However, we recognize that this ecosystem can sometimes feel fragmented. To help bring it closer together, we will announce all Berkeley-founded companies that receive funding each week. This is a community effort, so please let us know if we missed a company here. 🐻

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Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 9 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $1.35B of capital raised from the 29th July to 4th August

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Closed Rounds

💊 Jnana Therapeutics. $1.1B Acquisition. 🇺🇲 Clinical stage biotech with drug candidates for rare diseases and immune disorders. 💰 Otsuka.

🐻 Joanne Kotz, Cofounder & CEO. PhD Chemistry. Article

🪫 Zap Energy. $130M Round. 🇺🇲 Nuclear fusion exploration using superheated plasma. 💰 Breakthrough Energy, Lowercarbon, DCVC.

🐻 Uri Shumlak, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist. PhD Nuclear Engineering Article

🧑‍⚕️DeepScribe. $60M Round. 🇺🇲 Ambient medical scribe to streamline medical processes and documentation. 

🐻 Matthew Ko, Co-Founder & COO. BA Business 🐻  Akilesh Bapu, Founder & CEO. MS & BA EECS.

🌽 Applied Carbon. $21.5M Series A. 🇺🇲 Building automated biochar production machines to convert crop waste into biochar which is used for carbon removal. 💰 TO:VC, Congruent Ventures, S2G, Wireframe

🐻Morgan Williams, Co-founder & COO. PhD Physical Geography & Earth System Science. Article

🧑‍💻 Credo AI. $21M Series B. 🇺🇲 AI governance, risk, and compliance platform. 💰 Mozilla Ventures, FPV Ventures.

🐻 Eli Chen, Co-Founder & CTO. BS EECS 🐻 Andrew Ng, Co-Founder. PhD Computer Science. Article

🪙 Masa Research. $7.2M Seed. 🇺🇲 Using neural networks to discover new mineral deposits initially focused on nickel. 

🐻Jason Sudirdjo, Cofounder. BS Environmental Science. Article

💻 Hyperbolic Labs. $7M Seed. 🇺🇲 Developing an open access cloud to lower the cost of AI inference and compute. 💰Polychain, Lightspeed Faction. 

🐻 Jasper (Yue) Zhang, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD Maths. Article

🧑‍🏫 Skillful.ly. $2.5M Seed Round. 🇺🇲 Employment platform providing better candidates through simulation driven hiring 💰 Better Ventures 

🐻 Brett Waikart, Co-founder & CEO Haas MBA.  🐻 Johnson James, Co-founder & VP of Product. MEng Industrial Engineering. 🐻 Kelly Cure, Co-founder & Advisor. Haas MBA. Article

📊 Aviato. $2.3M Seed. 🇺🇲 Building an analytical layer for private markets. 💰8VC, Soma, NEA, Hustle Fund. 

🐻 David Razavi, Co-Founder & COO. BS CS & Maths. Article

Paris Olympic Fact:

Berkeley has over 59 alumni representing 31 different countries and 27 different sports at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Of those athletes, 13 are still students at Berkeley. So far Berkeley has 4 golds, 6 silvers, and 3 bronzes. Info 

Jack Alexy (far left), a current Berkeley student celebrating a swimming gold in the 4×100 men’s freestyle.

Our goal is to document the startup ecosystem of Berkeley-founded companies. Please share this newsletter with any Cal Bears in your network so we can crowdsource information about all investment rounds and job opportunities.

• Did we miss a company or want to announce a round? Add it here, and we will post it next week.

• Do you have a job you want to post from a Berkeley Company? Add here.

• Is there someone in the Berkeley ecosystem that you would want us to do a profile on? A founder, funder, or general startup person? Add here.

  What’s Next?

Eventually, we want to add any jobs at Berkeley-founded companies for people to apply to and ways in which founders connect.

Built By Berkeley is not affiliated with UC Berkeley, but maybe we will be one day if we get enough subscribers….