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 Haas MBA and Duality Biologics founder John Zhu whose company just raised $200M in a Hong Kong IPO and is now valued at ~$2.1B. Duality Biologics is a biotech company focused on therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune diseases. Go Bears!

Narratives are a powerful thing….when I arrived in the Bay Area nearly three years ago, it felt like every major news outlet released an article every month or two declaring the chaos and decline of San Francisco. Drugs, homelessness, it was all wrong. The city became the punching bag for everything wrong with urban life and a symbol of post-COVID malaise.

To be fair, that narrative wasn’t entirely wrong. I moved to the Embarcadero for a few weeks in temporary housing, and it was empty.  Some parts of the city were/still are fairly bleak.

But the narrative has meaningfully shifted in recent months. More and more stories now talk about San Francisco being "back."

Maybe it’s the new mayor, Daniel Lurie, who seems to be doing a great job. But I think some of the momentum started earlier with return-to-office mandates pulling people back into the city, the return of conferences, and the AI boom.

What’s changed:

• AI – Both big and small AI-first companies are rapidly renting office space.

• Return to Office Accelerating – SF has lagged behind NYC, with many workers initially resisting, but the return is real and is accelerating.

The bottom line: we’re still early in the AI wave but for founders building AI-first companies, the talent, tech, and expertise seems to be gravitating to San Fransisco.

Is the city “back”? That’s hard to define and I didn’t spend much time in pre-COVID SF. But has it improved meaningfully over the past three years? Absolutely. Let’s hope this narrative shift continues.

What’s good for San Francisco is good for Berkeley.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 3 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $229M of capital raised from the 14th April to 20th April

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Closed Rounds

🧪 DualityBio. $211M IPO 🇨🇳 Antibody-drug conjugates. 💰 BioNTech

🐻 John Zhu, Founder & CEO. Haas MBA. Article

🧬 AdvanCell. $18M Grant 🇦🇺 Radiopharmaceutical cancer therapies. 💰 Brandon Capital, Gray Ventures, Sanofi Ventures

🐻 Andrew Adamovich, CEO & Founder. BA English. Article

🥣 Diet4life. $0.5M 🇩🇰 Protein hydrolysate research. 💰 Aarhus University

🐻 Jan Stagsted, CEO & Founder. Post Doc Biochemistry

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….