Built By Berkeley

Welcome to Built By Berkeley, where we announce all the funding rounds by Berkeley-founded companies. This is a community effort, so please let us know if we missed a company here. 🐻

Is OpenAI at a $150B valuation good value? OpenAI is reportedly in discussions to raise $5B at a $150B valuation. Sounds crazy? This would be a 42x revenue multiple on their (reportedly) current $3.6B revenue run rate! But perhaps not so crazy if you believe they'll reach a $10B+ run rate next year. In that scenario, the $150B valuation represents a 15x revenue multiple for 2025, which isn't out of the realm of possibility for a potentially category-defining company experiencing such growth.

Why does this matter for our newsletter? One of OpenAI's co-founders, John Schulman, is a Berkeley alum! He has recently left OpenAI and is now at Anthropic, who are reportedly considering raising at a 50x forward revenue multiple….

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 5 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $83M of capital raised from the 23rd September to 29th September

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Closed Rounds

💉 Mendaera. $73M Series B. 🇺🇲 Robotics for medical use cases 💰Lux Capital, PFM Health Sciences, Puma Venture Capital, Threshold 

🐻 Josh DeFonzo, Co-founder & CEO. BA Economics. Article

Letta. $10M Seed.  🇺🇲 LLM developer tools focused on long memory 💰 Felicis, Robert Nishihara, Jeff Dean, Clem Delangue

🐻 Charles Packer, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD Computer Science. 🐻 Sarah Wooders, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD Computer Science. Article 

💊 Kadence Bio. $100K Accelerator. 🇬🇧 Novel therapeutics for sexual and mental health 💰 The Zambon Group

🐻 Ryan Protzko, Co-founder & President. PhD Molecular and Cell Biology. Article

🖥️  HPC-AI. Undisclosed Series A+. 🇸🇬 GPU cloud on demand 💰 Lingfeng Capital, Stony Creek, Wuhan Capstone. 

🐻 Yang You, Founder. PhD Computer Science.

💉 Rapid Medical. Undisclosed Round. 🇮🇱 Neurovascular therapies.  💰Arbelon Holdings.

🐻 Ronen Eckhous, CEO. Haas MBA. 

Built By Berkeley Tracker

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.

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