Next Cal Café — Berkeley Founders, Funders, and Friends, hosted by Canvas Prime & Accel. Thursday, March 26 at the Accel office in South Park. Sign up here. ☕🐻
Deal of the Week:
Ayar Labs raised a $500M round led by Neuberger Berman and founded by Vladimir Stojanović (Berkeley professor!). So what does Ayar Labs do?
Ayar Labs is looking to build the next generation of optics within data centres, allowing GPUs to communicate with lower latency and maximise bandwidth by moving toward photonics and away from copper wiring. The idea is that as workloads become more complex, data needs to move faster between GPUs, and copper wiring might not be the end state.
My guess would be that if this works, it becomes a potential takeover target for Nvidia, which in 2020 paid $6.9B for Mellanox Technologies, the company behind InfiniBand that is the current networking fabric within many data centres. That deal is frequently listed as one of Nvidia’s best acquisitions, as it has become a multi-billion-dollar run-rate business and is massively strategic for Nvidia.
Cursor - Narrative Violation
Potential narrative violation. If you frequent the dark halls of Twitter and speak to early-stage startups (I do both!), you would have read and heard that Cursor was getting cancelled left, right, and centre and was dead (see previous post about narratives in the age of AI). However, it seems they have doubled revenue run rate to $2B in just 3 months. Wow! So either:
In the words of Mark Twain — “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
Cursor is making strong progress outside of startups and moving to enterprise, who likely have a different sales cycle and maybe higher switching costs.
This is creating an inherently new TAM that is bringing more people into a market that is huge.
Or all three!
There are some other factors at play, including annual contract renewals, but in any case it is impressive. What probably cannot be disputed is that a lot of this revenue is going to Anthropic, who reported even more insane numbers, going from $9B at the end of 2025 to around $20B three months later. I expect Cursor to continue a trend we previously pointed out around the atomisation of data pipelines to try and lower the dependency on the frontier model players.
Quick Takes
🐻 Bear Intros is off to a good start. Since launch, Bo (the AI agent) has made dozens of intros and one company just raised $500K in pre-seed funding from a Bear Intros connection. If you haven't checked it out yet, Bear Intros is an exclusive founder-investor matching platform for the Cal network. Bo analyzes your deck, interviews you, and connects you with investors who actually fit. Completely free.
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
11 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$676M of capital raised from the 2nd March to 8th March
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Closed Rounds
🧠 Ayar Labs. $500.0M Series E 🇺🇸 Optical interconnect computing. 💰 Insight Partners, Intel Capital, Playground Global
🐻 Vladimir Stojanović, CTO & Co-Founder, Professor. PhD. Article
🤖 Robotera. $144.8M Series B 🇨🇳 AI humanoid robotics platform. 💰 Alibaba Group, Turing Ventures, Wing Venture Capital
🐻 Jianyu Chen, CEO & Founder. PhD. Article
❄️ Rebound Technologies. $10.8M Series A 🇺🇸 Thermal energy storage cooling. 💰 Incite Ventures, iSelect Fund, Village Capital
🐻 Russell Goldfarbmuren, Co-Founder & CTO. MS MEng. Article
🌿 Antheia. $9.0M Grant 🇺🇸 Plant-derived pharmaceutical APIs. 💰 In-Q-Tel, Viking Global Investors, Western Technology Investment
🐻 Christina Smolke, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD Chem Eng. Article
🛠️ Traversal. $5.0M Round 🇺🇸 AI SRE observability agent. 💰 AMEX Ventures, Hanabi Capital Management, Kleiner Perkins
🐻 Raaz Dwivedi, Co-Founder. PhD EECS. Article
🌱 Plant Path. $3.7M Round 🇺🇸 Metabolite-focused crop breeding. 💰 First Flight Venture Center
🐻 Todd Wehner, Co-Founder & CSO. AB Botany. Article
⚡ Vor Systems. $3.0M Seed 🇺🇸 Renewable energy deal software. 💰 Gigascale Capital, Virta Ventures
🌊 Aquatic Labs. Early Stage 🇺🇸 Ocean monitoring sensor platform. 💰 Burnt Island Ventures, The Engine
🐻 Allan Adams, Founder & CEO. MS Physics.
🥤 One% Nutrition. Seed Round 🇮🇩 Protein hydration beverage brand. 💰 First Move Fund, Init 6, Scale Up by Endeavor
🐻 Ken Opamuratawongse, Co-Founder & CEO. BA & MS Data Science. Article
✈️ Portside. Growth 🇺🇸 Aviation fleet management software. 💰 Dragoneer Investment Group, Insight Partners
🐻 Alex Vernitsky, Co-Founder & CEO. BA Business Admin. Article
🧬 Valius Health. Undisclosed 🇺🇸 Precision oncology diagnostics. 💰 Even One Ventures,
🐻 Claire Oldfield, Co-Founder & COO. PhD Neuroscience.
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($M) |
7/8/24 | 675 | 208,850 |
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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. 🐻
