Deal of the Week
Last year I flagged a pretty cool development out of the ARC Institute: Evo 2, the largest AI biology model, trained on 9.3 trillion nucleotides—the fundamental building blocks of DNA and RNA. Think of it as an AI that "speaks" the language of nucleotides rather than natural language. It’s a fascinating leap forward, and it feels like this wave of technology could have a gigantic impact on human health and longevity.
This week, some of the team behind that breakthrough broke away from the ARC Institute to launch Radical Numerics, raising $50M to build an AI research lab focused on biological intelligence. Congrats to Eric Nguyen and team.
The company is building a new class of AI that learns directly from biological data across DNA, RNA, proteins, and beyond, unifying all the pieces of biology into a single, general biological intelligence. Its multimodal models are designed to reason across every dimension of biology, at once, opening paths toward cancer diagnostics, drug target identification, and biosecurity that single-modality models cannot translate.
I believe AI is going to transform biology and it seems investors are also excited about this massive prize. Expect even more capital to flow into the space.
Honourable mention to XDOF, which, similar to Human Archive (mentioned last week), is building the data pipelines that power robotics companies and recently raised a $70M round. Another big win for Berkeley robotics.
Midjourney from AI images to Spas
I am a big proponent of venture capital (as one myself!), but I can also see some of its limitations. I'm not sure a venture-backed business could have done what Midjourney has announced.
For those unfamiliar, Midjourney is an AI image generator that has reportedly reached $500M in revenue with zero VC funding and just 150 employees (did someone say Velociraptor?).
The company has now announced plans to build a spa in San Francisco featuring a cost-efficient full-body scanner.
Love it!
Quick Takes
Quick takes
One cool thing to come out of AI so far is the number of fascinating vibe-coded tracker sites that keep popping up (apologies if this isn't one of them 🙂).
This one is particularly interesting because it tracks the nationality of AI researchers and where they studied. A huge amount of talent appears to originate in China, but many of the top researchers eventually end up in the United States.
It's a fascinating visualization of the global talent flows that are shaping the future of AI.
Although, interestingly, we've just seen a massively impressive new open-source model emerge from China (see the post below from the CEO of Berkeley-founded Arena). GLM-5.2 (Max) from z.ai (great URL!) appears to be at the frontier across a number of benchmarks and capabilities.
The battle at the frontier—and the broader open-source versus closed-source AI war—continues. (More on this here.)
Berkeley favourite Databricks is on a serious heater reportedly trying to beat its own record in terms of letter in the VC vernacular and raise a Series M. The business is on fire at scale.
Interesting read about the power of the Fable model.
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
6 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$175M of capital raised from the 15th June to 22nd June
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Acquisition / IPOs
❤️ Kardigan. $400.0M IPO 🇺🇸 Cardiovascular therapeutics developer. 💰 Public Markets.
🐻 Robert McDowell, Co-Founder & CSO. PhD Chemistry. Article
🧬 Enliven Therapeutics. $335.0M IPO 🇺🇸 Precision oncology therapeutics. 💰 OrbiMed, Venrock, Commodore Capital.
🐻 Joe Lyssikatos, Co-Founder. PhD Chemistry. Article
⚛️ Deep Fission. $40.0M IPO 🇺🇸 Deep borehole nuclear reactors. 💰 8VC
🐻 Rich Muller, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD Physics. Article
🐻 Vikram Singh, Co-Founder & CEO. BS Chemical Engineering. Article
🤖 Deductive AI. $85.0M Acquisition 🇺🇸 AI observability debugging platform. 💰 CRV, Databricks Ventures, Thomvest Ventures.
🐻 Sameer Agarwal, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD EECS. Article
Closed Rounds
🦾 xDOF. $70.0M Seed 🇺🇸 Robotics data infrastructure. 💰 Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, WndrCo.
🐻 Philipp Wu, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD EECS. Article
🧠 Radical Numerics. $50.0M Seed 🇺🇸 Scientific world-model AI. 💰 Emergence Capital, Obvious Ventures, Transpose Platform.
🐻 Eric Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO. BS Civil Engineering. Article
🖥️ AheadComputing. $47.8M Series A 🇺🇸 Next-gen RISC-V processors. 💰 Eclipse Ventures, Maverick Capital, Mesh Ventures.
🐻 Debbie Marr, CEO & Co-Founder. BA EECS. Article
🎬 KLIPY. $3.8M 🇺🇸 Creator monetization platform. 💰 AI Futures Fund*, Intuition Ventures, Sturgeon Capital.
🐻 Frank Nawabi, Co-Founder & Director. BA Business Administration. Article
🧪 Reservoir Neuroscience. $3.0M 🇺🇸 Blood-brain barrier therapeutics. 💰 Felicis, Dolby Family Ventures, Berkeley SkyDeck Fund.
🐻 Aaron Friedman, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD Biology.
🏭 Autonomique. Undisclosed 🇺🇸 Industrial physical AI robots. 💰 Inovia Capital, Innovobot, SRI Ventures.
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($M) |
7/8/24 | 775 | 226,128 |
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