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. 🐻

This isn’t exactly a hot take, but something is clearly a miss in US healthcare. A few charts I saw this week brought it home once again.

No one I know ever seems to have a great experience. And we’ve all heard stories where the exact same procedure costs 10x more depending on who’s paying. If prices are that inflated, you’d assume the big insurers are printing cash, right?

Not really. Just look at the stock prices of Centene and UnitedHealth. Yes, there are some exogenous factors, but they still help illustrate the point (both down 50% in the last year).

Meanwhile, we are spending a growing share of our income on healthcare:

This is high relative to the rest of the world:

Healthcare is now the largest employer in most US states:

And yet—despite all that—we’re facing widespread shortages across nearly every part of the healthcare workforce:

So... why is everyone unhappy?

I think the simplest answer is incentives. As Charlie Munger said, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”

In most businesses, incentives are fairly aligned: make something people want, sell it profitably, repeat. Healthcare? It’s a multi-layered web of misaligned incentives—payers, providers, employers, consultants, government regulators—each pulling in slightly different directions. The result is a Frankenstein system that produces pricing chaos, poor outcomes, and a whole lot of frustration.

The good news? There’s a wave of venture capital now pouring into the space. In H1 2025 alone, VC investment is nearly equal to the full-year totals of the past four years. Link

I spend a lot of my time investing in this space. So if you're a Bear (or just someone interested in fixing broken systems), always happy to chat. Better to do something about it than complain. 🙂 

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 6 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $113M of capital raised from the 21st July to 27th July

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Acquisitions

💊 ClearCost Health. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Healthcare pricing platform. 💰 MacroHealth

🐻 Chris Santas, CEO & Co-Founder. BA Political Economy Article

🔬 Pi Imaging Technology. Acquisition 🇨🇭 Photon imaging sensors. 💰Zeiss

🐻 Edoardo Charbon, Co-Founder. PhD EECS Article

Closed Rounds

📡 Swift Navigation. $50M Series E 🇺🇸 Autonomous GPS navigation. 💰Crosslink Capital, Felicis, First Round Capital

🐻 Tim Harris, CEO & Founder. BA Political Economy Article

⚖️ Alix. $29.6M Series A 🇺🇸 AI estate management. 💰Acrew Capital, Alumni Ventures, Initialized Capital

🐻 Alexandra Mysoor, Co-Founder & CEO. BA Article

🖥️ Diode Computers. $14.5M Series A 🇺🇸 AI hardware design. 💰Andreessen Horowitz, Caffeinated Capital, Y Combinator

🐻 Davide Asnaghi, Founder. Meng Bioengineering Article

❄️ Cooler Heads. $11.0M Series A 🇺🇸 Cancer scalp cooling. 💰Ad Astra Ventures, California Innovation Fund

🐻 Michel Gelobter, Founder & Chairman. PhD & MS Energy & Resources Article

📈 Noise Labs. $7.0M Seed 🇺🇸 Trend trading platform. 💰Anagram

🐻 David Zhou, Co-Founder. BA Economics Article

✈️ BizTrip. $1.0M Seed 🇺🇸 AI travel management. 💰AI Fund

🐻 Scott Persinger, Co-Founder & CTO. BA EECS Article

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….