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. 🐻

Firstly, some great news: a baby born with a rare disease has been successfully treated using CRISPR gene-editing technology and is now doing well. This is remarkable, since many rare diseases remain untreated due to limited investment in targeted medicines. As a reminder, Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna and colleagues won the 2020 Noble Prize for their CRISPR work. I believe we’re about to see a rapid acceleration in novel treatments. I recently spoke with a startup using AI to advance human cell-therapy development. Amazing!

What is CRISPR:

• CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a gene-editing technology that allows scientists to precisely modify DNA within organisms. It uses a guide RNA and the Cas9 enzyme to target and cut specific genetic sequences, enabling gene correction, deletion, or insertion.

$256M raised by Berkeley founders this week…we are back after a couple of slow weeks!

A few weeks back I mentioned Perplexity was gearing up to fundraise. That’s now confirmed: they’re targeting $500M at a $14B valuation (up from the last round of $9B at the end of last year). Word is, friends of the newsletter at Accel will lead the round. If Perplexity’s run-rate is, say, $200M, that translates to a 70× revenue multiple. Steep…but Arvind and the team seem to be executing at such a high velocity and innovation that it would be hard to bet against them. Continually launching features like finance, shopping and whatsapp replies.

And if growth ever stalls? Apple’s corp-dev crew is still sitting on $160B+ in cash. Someone there might eventually think, Yum yum, that’d be a tasty acquisition… 😉

Great reporting by the information on Perplexity’s cost structure here.

Here in Silicon Valley it’s easy to obsess over model minutiae: DeepSeek vs. Gemini vs. OpenAI vs. Llama vs. Anthropic and who’s best at what. However, this is because it is a bubble and outside of this it is very different. I was talking to a friend in the UK recently and asked him if he used any of these tools, he did. Microsoft Copilot (I have never heard anyone in Silicon Valley say this). Why? Distribution and enterprise readiness. Office 365 has ~400 million seats, giving Microsoft a direct line to millions of companies. When a CIO wants staff on AI, the path of least resistance is Copilot.

This ties to one of my favorite charts on how distribution compounds. OpenAI may have hit escape velocity, but it’ll be fascinating to watch the rest. Perplexity clearly gets it. Note their new deal with Motorola to ship pre-installed on every phone.

The future is here it is just not evenly distributed!

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 9 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $256M of capital raised from the 12th May to 18th May

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Closed Rounds

🚀 X-Bow Systems. $105.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Rocket propellant manufacturer. 💰 Crosslink Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures

🐻 Maureen Gannon, Co-Founder & CRO. EECS Article

💡 Avicena. $65.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Optical interconnect tech. 💰 Cerberus Capital Management, Maverick Capital, Tiger Global Management

🐻 Rob Kalman, Co-Founder & CTO. EECS Article

🧠 Cognichip. $33.0M Seed Round 🇺🇸 AI for chip design. 💰 FPV Ventures, Lux Capital, Mayfield Fund

🐻 Simon Sabato, Co-Founder & Chief Architect. EECS Article

🧬 Shenandoah Therapeutics. $21.5M Series A 🇺🇸 Stealth biotech startup. 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Isabella Graef, Founder & CEO. MS Microbiology

🧪 Remedy Plan Therapeutics. $18.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Cancer stem cell drugs. 💰 20/20 HealthCare Partners, Alexandria Venture Investments, Schooner Capital

🐻 Gregory Crimmins, Founder & CEO. PhD Molecular and Cell Biology Article

📸 SuperAnnotate. $8.1M Series B 🇺🇸 AI data annotation tools. 💰 Berkeley SkyDeck, Defy Partners Management, Glynn Capital

🐻 Vahan Petrosyan, Co-Founder & CEO. Skydeck 

📱 ClaimClam. $5.6M Seed Round 🇺🇸 Class action claims app. 💰 Indicator Ventures

🐻 Christopher Best, Co-Founder & CTO. EECS Article

🧫 Kioga. $0.3M Grant 🇺🇸 Gut-brain health biotech. 💰 Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade, University of Colorado Boulder,

🐻 Justin Whiteley, CEO & Co-Founder. Mechanical & Nuclear Engineering Article

📊 YourStake. Accelerator 🇺🇸 Impact investing platform. 💰 Fin Capital, Vectr Ventures

🐻 Darrell Benatar, Co-Founder & Exec Chairman. Haas Article

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….