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. 🐻

$215M was raised by Berkeley founders, but it was another slow week…. However, based on the volume of emails in my inbox today, it looks like we’ll see many companies raising funds in the coming weeks and months.

The most interesting thing I saw last week (well, on Christmas Day) was the release of DeepSeek-V3 (full technical paper) (a bit about the team here, here, and here) by Highflyer Capital Management, a Chinese AI lab/hedge fund.

This frontier large language model appears to match the performance of the latest OpenAI (ChatGPT 4o) and Anthropic (Sonnet 3.5) models, but at nearly 95% lower cost. Plus, it’s open-source, meaning anyone can download and use it.

The chart below illustrates the cost vs. performance comparison.

Why is this Interesting?

• The model costs $5.5M to train (yes, millions, not billions). For comparison, Meta reportedly spent $500M training Llama 3, which seems to be a similar model in terms of performance. This underscores the impressive innovation coming out of this lab by utilizing new techniques.

• The model was trained in China on an older generation of Nvidia GPUs, while the U.S. has been trying to limit China’s access to the highest-quality GPUs. The fact that this model matches the performance of others suggests the strategy might not be working.

• There are also rumors that the model may have been trained on ChatGPT data - especially as it sometimes hallucinates and thinks it is ChatGPT
  😂. Sam Altman recently took a dig at the company on Twitter.

  

What Does this Mean?

Inteligence continues to get cheaper and cheaper…great news for a lot of Berkeley founders out there building companies that utilize all this AI.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 5 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $215M of capital raised from the 30th December to 5th January

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Closed Rounds

🦾 Rainbow Robotics. $185M PIPE 🇰🇷 Industrial robot manufacturer - they also make robots that are like dogs. 💰 Samsung Electronics

🐻 Jun Ho Oh. Co-Founder & Board Member. PhD. Article.

💰 Nue. $20M Series A 🇺🇸 Revenue cycle management software. 💰 Penny Jar Capital, SV Tech Ventures

🐻 Kate McCullough. Co-Founder. Bachelors.

🌱 Type Five. $7.5M Seed Round 🇺🇸 Sustainable outdoor backyard buildings💰 Hawk Hill Ventures, Zelda Ventures

🐻 Tim Thimmaiah. CEO & Founder. BS Bioengineering.

🧬 Datma. $2.5M 🇺🇸 Precision medicine data platform to help monetize lab data. 💰 Business Oregon, Generator Ventures, National Science Foundation

🐻 Christopher Corless. Co-Founder. AB Molecular Biology.

📞 Loman. Accelerator 🇺🇸 AI phone agent for restaurants. 💰 Genesis Program

🐻 Christian Wiens. Founder & CEO. Bachelors.

Built By Berkeley Tracker

Jobs

AnswersAI, a Berkeley-founded edtech, is hiring for multiple roles here. 

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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• 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….