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. 🐻

Cal Hacks: I attended Cal Hacks yesterday, and it was truly an amazing event. Over 2,500 students spent 36 hours hacking together prototypes for judges to review and evaluate on Sunday. By the time I arrived, it was near the end, and there were a few "casualties" — some students were passed out under desks, exhausted. Despite that, the atmosphere remained electric, and the participants did a fantastic job.

My key takeaway from this event was the number of AI model APIs. Additionally teams demonstrated the ability to seamlessly switch between and integrate tools like ElevenLabs, Hume AI (a Berkeley-founded company), and Cartesia— and this was just in voice models. To me, this feels like a fast commoditization among providers.

What does this mean? By some estimates, $300B has already been invested in AI infrastructure. This provides significant leverage for anyone building at the application layer, as so much of the capital has already gone into developing the foundational models. As a result, the costs of inference and running AI models are decreasing rapidly, and this is already happening for certain models. Now is an excellent time to take advantage of this infrastructure investment!

I would check out the NFX FAST competition for any early-stage Berkeley company for the chance to win a $50-100K investment via an uncapped SAFE (this is fantastic terms!). Application dates is 1-10th Nov ‘24.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 9 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $213M of capital raised from the 14th October to 20th October

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

Acquired

🛡️ Dasera. Acquired after raising $21M in total 🇺🇸 Data security solutions. 💰Netskope

🐻 Noah Johnson, Co-founder & CTO. PhD & BS in Computer Sciences. Article

📄 nira. Acquired after raising $24M in total 🇺🇸 Cloud document organization and governance. 💰 Dropbox

🐻 Hiten Shah, Co-founder & CEO. BS Organizational Behavior. Article

Closed Rounds

🧬 Nuclera. $75.4M Series C 🇬🇧 Drug discovery automation for proteins. 💰 Amadeus Capital Partners, British Business Bank.

🐻 Jiahao Huang, Co-founder & CFO. BA Biology. Article

🤖 Robot Era. $42.5M Series A 🇨🇳 Humanoid robots for daily use. 💰 Alibaba Group, Wing Capital

🐻 Jianyu Chen, Founder. PhD. Article

🌊 CorPower Ocean. $35.4M 🇸🇪 Wave energy converters. 💰 Almi Invest, Cisco Investments, 

🐻 Patrik Möller, Co-founder & CEO. MSc semiconductor fabrication. Article

💡 Equilibrium Energy. $39.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Energy management platform. 💰 Breakthrough Energy, DCVC, Valo Ventures.

🐻 Ryan Hanley, Founder & CEO. Haas MBA. Article

🔋 Liminal Insights. $10.0M 🇺🇸 Battery analytics. 💰 ArcTern Ventures, Chrysalix Venture Capital.

🐻 Dan Steingart, Co-founder. PhD Materials Science. Article

📊Daash. $5.4M Series A. 🇺🇸 Brand intelligence 💰Undisclosed

🐻 Philip Smolin, Co-founder & CEO. Haas MBA.

🛰️ Blockcast. $2.9M 🇺🇸 Decentralized content delivery. 💰 Alliance DAO, Finality Capital Partners.

🐻 Omar Ramadan, Co-founder & CEO. MEng & BS EECS. Article

🌱 1s1 Energy. $1.4M Seed Round 🇺🇸 Hydrogen production systems. 💰 Asiri

 🐻 Don Tilley, Co-founder. Professor. Article

☕ Rarebird. $1.1M 🇺🇸 Bioactive coffee products. 💰 AgFunder, First Round Capital, Y Combinator.

🐻 Jeffrey Dietrich, Founder & CEO. PhD Bioengineering. 

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.

• 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….