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. 🐻

It was a very slow week for Berkeley startups…..After $412M raised last week, $6.5M was raised.

First, we had DeepSeek out of China; now we have Manus AI, and the demo video is pretty cool. It is effectively a multi-agent that can execute complex tasks, such as ingesting multiple CVs and creating a spreadsheet from them. The demo video is amazing, and in just a few days, their Discord channel got nearly 150,000 members, with people selling early access codes for a few thousand USD! Already, this performance is getting questioned after the massive demand for the preview. Even if this is not true, the direction of travel seems this way.

If you have not played around with ChatGPT’s DeepResearch yet, I highly recommend it.

In case anyone wants to see how Berkeley students are living now, you can read about the 11 female students sharing 3 bathrooms here.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 6 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $6.5M of capital raised from the 3rd March to 8th March

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Acquisition

📈 Sounding Board. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Leadership coaching platform. 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Christine Tao, Co-Founder & CEO. BS Business Administration Article

Closed Rounds

💊 Faks. €6.25M Seed 🇫🇷 Pharmacy operations app. 💰 FJ Labs, Kima Ventures, Speedinvest

🐻 Corentin Geoffray, CEO & Co-Founder. Entrepreneurship Article

🎵 Bovo. Seed 🇺🇸 AI-driven music composition. 💰 Zelda Ventures

🐻 Donald Szeto, Co-Founder & CEO. BS EECS

🚀 Crowdbotics. Series C 🇺🇸 Low-code app development. 💰 New Enterprise Associates, Samsung NEXT Ventures, The House Fund

🐻 Anand Kilkarni, CEO & Co-Founder. PhD Computer Science

💳 E6 . Series C 🇺🇸 Payment processing platform. 💰 Anthos Capital, Avenir Growth Capital, Japan Airlines

🐻 Futeh Kao, Co-Founder & CTO. BA Physics Article

📊 Fintary. Series A 🇺🇸 Financial operating system. 💰 Harlem Capital, Infinity Ventures (Palo Alto)

🐻 Michael Lee, Co-Founder & CTO. BS EECS

🎮 Gamefort. Series A 🇺🇸 Esports tournament platform. 💰 Dorm Room Fund

🐻 Roberto Hernandez Wesche, Co-Founder & CEO. Masters

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.

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

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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….