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. 🐻

If you have not already go and play with Nano Banana, an image model from Google, the results are insane…still some issues but you can see the direction of travel.

Many people have been bearish on Google/Alphabet, saying that Search is dead. Yes, search may be challenged in the medium to long term, but that’s a vast oversimplification of the opportunity in front of Google. Right now, Search still makes up ~60% of revenues and a large portion of profit.

Beyond that, Alphabet has a ton of opportunities: YouTube (1 in 10 streamed  minutes on the internet!), GCP (just signed an $11B deal  with Meta), Waymo, Android (Play Store, Chrome, and much more). They also own ~10% of SpaceX and ~14% of Anthropic. On top of that, they hold enormous data assets through Gmail, Docs, and other products.

I haven’t listened yet, but I’m sure this Podcast on Google’s history will be great.

The company also trades at a fairly reasonable ~20x Forward P/E multiple considering they grew net income 32% YoY in June and they are also the most profitable company in the US. 🫠 

So who wins in the world of AI?

I think we are initially going to see a bar bell of winners. The big guys and the little guys.

Earnings of the Magnificent 7 companies have surged +145% since ChatGPT was introduced in November 2022. By comparison, profits of the remaining 493 S&P 500 firms have increased just +4% over the same period. Furthermore, the Mag 7’s EPS has risen 700% since 2020, while the remaining S&P 500 components have seen +31% EPS growth. That marks 22 TIMES higher earnings growth in just 5.5 years. [Lifting this tweet that laid out the growth so well].

Over the last decade, the Magnificent 7 has seen a massive +2,134% growth in earnings. This is fairly insane and unlikely to slow down as big tech will likely be quicker to implement the AI productivity gains. You are seeing companies like Shopify also implement AI to slash costs. 

On the other hand, you’ve got younger, smaller companies that are able to be AI-native from day one. Or what I’ve previously called the new generation of Velociraptors. Bessemer, a little later to the game, has neatly branded these fast-growing AI rocketships as “Supernovas” and “Shooting Stars.” I prefer my naming…but slightly biased.

So who gets squeezed? Likely the messy middle, unwilling to adopt AI as quickly as the big players and unable to shift to be AI native like the current generation of start ups. 

Finally decided to continue this newsletter with a weekly cadence, after testing for more than a year. Coming out of stealth here.

Upcoming this week check out the Smart AI 100 Summit (50% off with: xan50). Also check out the applications for a great program called The SCET Innovators in Residence (IIR) Leadership to help with the SCET challenge on the Berkeley Campus.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 8 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $70M of capital raised from the 25th Aug to 31st August

💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.

Closed Rounds

🤖 FriendliAI. $20M Seed  🇺🇸 AI inference acceleration platform. 💰 Sierra Ventures, Alumni Ventures

🐻 Byung‑Gon Chun, CEO & Founder. PhD EECS. Article

🤖 AURA Network Systems. $13.3M Series C 🇺🇸 Nationwide FAA-compliant communications network. 💰 Fortress Investment Group, Tracker Capital Management

🐻 Bill Tolpegin, Founder & Advisor. BA. Article

🤖 Nest Health. $12.6M Series A 🇺🇸 In‑home family healthcare platform. 💰 8VC, Alumni Ventures, MVP Ventures

🤖 Matey AI. $7.5M Seed 🇺🇸 AI for criminal defense. 💰 Timespan Ventures, Neo, Streamlined Ventures

🐻 Hamza Khawaja, Co‑Founder. BA EECS. Article

🤖 Metafyed. $5.5M Seed 🇭🇰 Tokenized real‑world assets platform. 💰 Block Tides, Chain Valley Capital, Omni Chain Ventures

🐻 Mimi Vong, Co‑Founder & CEO. BA Economics. Article

🤖 Loman AI. $3.5M Seed 🇺🇸 Restaurant voice‑AI phone agent. 💰 Next Coast Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures, Antler

🐻 Christian Wiens, Founder & CEO. BA Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies. Article

🤖 Sidekick Robotics. Seed 🇺🇸 Intelligent workflow automation platform. 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Andrew Ansell, Co‑Founder. BS Mechanical Eng. 

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.

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