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. 🐻

Wowzers..has a 61 year old man ever looked so good in a leather jacket as Jensen Huang at CES this week?

I hope to look half as good at his age. He really is at the peak of his powers having made a big bet 10+ years ago on GPUs that is paying enormous dividends right now.

Here’s a wild stat: If you joined Nvidia in 2013 and received $400K in equity over four years, that would now be worth $150M, with the stock having grown 375x since then. A quick LinkedIn search shows 778 people from Berkeley currently work at Nvidia—can anyone confirm that from the private island you are currently sitting on?

Beyond looking sharp in his leather jacket, Jensen delivered an incredible talk at CES this week (check it out here). He shared his vision for the future of AI. Hint: robots, self-driving cars and AI home computers.

Also, some cool stuff is coming out of the Berkeley AI Research Lab. Researchers there took an open-source model and, with less than $450, trained it to perform as well as OpenAI's GPT-4O preview.

This highlights three important points:

1. Open source is quickly catching up to the closed frontier model providers.

2. The curation and mixture of data are critical to training effective models.

3. Berkeley really is at the forefront of AI research.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 10 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $101M of capital raised from the 6th January to 12th January

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

Exits

🛡️ Kivu Consulting Acquisition 🇺🇸 Cybersecurity consulting services.💰 Quorum Cyber

🐻 Kim Niquette, Founder & CEO. Haas MBA. Article.

🏡 Neat Capital Acquisition 🇺🇸 Mortgage financing platform. 💰 Lower

🐻 Luke Johnson, Founder & CEO. Haas MBA. Article.

Closed Rounds

🌲 Gridware $26M Series A 🇺🇸 AI-powered grid monitoring.💰 Sequoia Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures.

🐻 Timothy Barat, Co-Founder & CEO. MS & BS EECS. Article.

🚀 X-Bow $25M Series B3 🇺🇸 Rocket propellant manufacturing. 💰 AE Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures.

🐻 Maureen Gannon, Founder & CRO. BA EECS.

💻 Nema Health $14M Series A 🇺🇸 Online trauma healing platform. 💰 CVS Ventures, .406 Ventures, Optum Ventures.

🐻 Mariam Malik, Co-Founder & COO. BS Business. Article.

🔋 Prieto Battery $13M 🇺🇸 Worlds fastest charging battery using 3D printing. 💰 Intel Capital, Stanley Ventures, Stout Street Capital.

🐻 Michael Rosenberg, CEO & Founder. Haas MBA.

📊 Truewind $13M Series A 🇺🇸 AI-powered bookkeeping. 💰 Thompson Reuters Ventures, Rho Capital Partners, Peninsula Ventures.

🐻 Alex Lee, Co-Founder & CEO. MPH & PhD. Article.

🧊 Axiom Cloud Undisclosed 🇺🇸 Power maintenance tech for sustainable cooling.
💰 Artifact Capital, Blue Bear Capital, Correlation Ventures.

🐻 Patrick Castles, President & COO. Haas MBA. Article.

🚽 D Free Undisclosed 🇯🇵 Urination prediction for incontinence. 💰 Eucalia 

🐻 Atsushi Nakanishi, Co-Founder & CEO. MBT in Business.

👔 Mitsucari Undisclosed  🇯🇵 Job-culture matching platform. 💰 Future Venture Capital, Nippon Venture Capital.

🐻 Takanoir Omote, Co-Founder & CEO. Haas MBA.

🧬 Maze Therapeutics Filed for IPO 🇺🇸 Gene-based precision medicine. 💰 Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Moore Capital Management

🐻 Jason Coloma, Co-Founder & CEO. MPH & PhD. Article.

Built By Berkeley Tracker

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Any startups looking for free Berkeley labor - check out the Cleantech to Market program application. 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.

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Built By Berkeley is not affiliated with UC Berkeley, but maybe we will be one day if we get enough subscribers….