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. 🐻

Congratulations to the six Berkeley alumni who took home Pulitzer Prizes this year for their work in reporting. With only 14 Pulitzer categories, having six Cal grads represented across multiple fields feels pretty good.

Last week was another slow one. Just $22M raised by four companies. Marking two quiet weeks in a row. Feels like something big might be cooking…

The headline of the week: OpenAI’s $3B acquisition of Windsurf. Windsurf and its peers are AI-powered code editors that are revolutionizing programming in the age of “vibe coding’,” where you can spin up software with natural-language prompts. These tools are really changing the face of software development - even Google recently said 25% of their code was AI-generated, the founder of Anthropic sees this going to 90%+ in just 6-12 months. Times are changing!

Cursor the Windsurf competitor and market leader in the space raised $900M at a $9B valuation, some reports have Cursor showing insane growth from $100M ARR at the end of 2024 to $200M ARR in April 2025. Cursor and Windsurf are definitely Velociraptors!

OpenAI was an early seed investor in Cursor and tried to buy it outright but was knocked back. As I touched on recently, OpenAI (and other model providers) want to move up the stack into more applications, and Windsurf delivers both distribution and unique training data to improve coding models that has proven to be one of the breakout applications of AI.

Congrats to the Windsurf team on the big win! The company was started in 2021 for a completely different idea, then became Codieum and then about 12 months ago became Windsurf. That is entrepreneurship! 3 products in 4 years and then a $3B outcome. Wow!

Another winner here: whoever bought the $200,000 investment that FTX made in Cursor for $200,000 from the liquidators that is now worth $500M….I saw but did not verify this stats as was to fun to ignore.

A few weeks ago I posted about Zombiecorns, sad to see an unhappy ending for Berkeley founded Meati that had raised $523M but was sold for $4M. This is the game on the field: founders swing big, and sometimes it doesn’t work out. Wishing everyone there the best in their next chapter.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 4 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $22M of capital raised from the 5th May to 11th May

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Acquisition

🗣️ Cobalt Speech & Language. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Custom speech recognition software. 💰 Quansight

🐻 Jeff Adams, CEO & Founder. Math. Article

🧬 Fabric Genomics. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Clinical genome interpretation platform. 💰 GenDx

🐻 Martin Reese, Founder & CEO. PhD Computational Biology. Article

📡 Keonn. $68.1M Acquisition 🇪🇸 RFID systems and software. 💰 Novanta

🐻 Rafael Pous, Co-Founder. PhD Electrical Engineering. Article

🍄 Meati. $4M Acquisition 🇺🇸 Fungi-based meat alternatives. 💰 Liquidators

🐻 Justin Whiteley, Co-Founder. BS Mechanical & Nuclear Engineering. Article

Closed Rounds

🔌 Diode Computers. $14.5M Series A 🇺🇸 AI-based hardware design automation. 💰 BoxGroup, Caffeinated Capital, Y Combinator

🐻 Davide Asnaghi, CEO & Founder. MEng Bioengineering. Article

🧠 Onos Health. $6.3M Seed 🇺🇸 Behavioral health automation platform. 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Suhaas Prasad, Co-Founder & CTO. BS EECS. Article

🐄 Bovotica. $0.9M Seed 🇦🇺 Cattle microbiome modulation tech. 💰 AgriZeroNZ, Melt Ventures, SparkLabs Group

🐻 Gene Tyson, Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer. PhD Microbiology. Article

🍏 Akorn Technology. Accelerator 🇺🇸 Natural food preservation coatings. 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Anthony Zografos, Founder & 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….