Deal of the Week
Lime IPO’ed this week at a valuation of around $1.6B. Founded by Berkeley Haas alum Brad Bao, Lime seems to be the winner of the 2018 “Scooter Wars,” when e-scooters, and then e-bikes, took over the streets.
The Scooter Wars were characterized by a mad rush to gain market share and huge valuations. Lime itself was valued at $2.4B at the peak.
A fairly epic journey with many carcasses along the way. See Bird, an early winner that went from a $2.3B valuation to bankruptcy. This period also included COVID, when revenues dropped 95% in just a few days.
The unit economics were tricky to make work initially, which caused many of the failures. Lime persevered and has now served 19 million riders across 230 cities and 29 countries. They did nearly $1B of revenue last year at a pretty healthy 39% gross margin for this type of business.
What a journey and another great Berkeley story!
Also, just for fun, I am an investor in Ridepanda via Courtyard Ventures. Last year, they raised ~$13M to expand their offering. They provide bikes as a commuter benefit for corporations like Amazon, OpenAI, and Google. Get your company to offer this! Chinmay, the founder, cut his teeth at Lime.
Happy 250 Years USA
250 years seems very young for the USA, considering its impact on the world, including white lines on the side of roads! Obviously, a lot of ink has been spilled and many videos made around this day, including Matthew McConaughey’s soliloquy and these fun charts on the evolution of a country.
I will keep it Berkeley dream-factory focused and spotlight Sanjay Mehrotra, a double Bear. He is the CEO of Micron Technology, a company at the heart of the AI complex that produces memory for data centers, among other things. He is also the co-founder of Sandisk, another company that produces a different type of AI memory also at the heart of AI. Funnily enough, the two best-performing stocks this year are No. 1 SanDisk and No. 2 Micron. Berkeley really is at the heart of all layers of AI.
I will leave the impact the USA and Berkeley have had to Sanjay’s own words.
Berkeley Head of EECS Joins Anthropic
Last week, we talked about how Anthropic has become a talent magnet as the musical chairs of AI researchers went into overdrive.
This week, the head of Berkeley’s EECS department, Jelani Nelson, announced he is joining Anthropic. Well, ex-head — he is now on leave. Side note: what a great thing that Berkeley professors can take a leave of absence to go found or work at companies.
See our old edition on other professors making waves and building big.
Quick Takes:
Someone from a16z tracked all dog registrations in San Francisco — the dogs of SF. The most common name is Luna, and interestingly, each neighborhood has its own dog type. Who knew that 13% of Treasure Island’s dogs were pit bulls?!
This was interesting at a time where rents seem to be going parabolic in SF.
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
3 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$21M of capital raised from the 29th June to 5th July
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Acquisition / IPOs
🛴 Lime. $173.9M IPO 🇺🇲 Shared e-scooter platform. 💰 IPO
Closed Rounds
🤖 Queue. $12.6M Seed 🇺🇲 Autonomous robotic pharmacy. 💰 AlleyCorp, Banter Capital, Riot Ventures
🐻 Joshua Liu, Founder & CTO. BS EECS Article
🌲 Nordic Forestry Automation. $5.0M 🇸🇪 Physical AI forestry. 💰 Navigare Ventures, Almi Invest, LRF Ventures
🐻 Lars Svensson, Co-Founder & CEO. Visiting PhD Article
🧬 Terraflos. $3.5M Series A 🇻🇬 AI bioactives platform. 💰 Yaax Capital
🐻 Facundo Garretón, Founder & CEO. Post Grad Article
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($M) |
7/8/24 | 787 | 226,985 |
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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. 🐻
