Deal of the Week
More robotics—this time, the data that feeds the machine!
Last week we featured a robotics startup, Generalist, and talked about Berkeley’s strong track record in robotics. This week, we have a company close to my heart (as a small investor!) that is creating the datasets that feed the robots: Human Archive, which recently raised an $8.2M round and was co-founded by Berkeley alumni Raj Patel, Rushil Agarwal, and Samay Maini.
Conceptually, if you think about a standard AI model, much of the training data is text-to-text, image-to-text, or even 3D data. But robotics models require something different: understanding how people actually interact with the physical world. There simply isn't as much of this data available today.
Human Archive is working to manufacture this data for embodied intelligence. That means putting gloves, hats, and other sensor-equipped gear on people as they go about their daily work, capturing data that robotics companies can use to train their models.
NOTE HUMAN ARCHIVE ARE HIRING - APPLY HERE
An honorable mention goes to Jeff Bezos and Berkeley alum Vik Bajaj, who recently completed another massive round for Prometheus—a hefty $12B raise just a few months after a whopping $6.2B seed round. Prometheus is developing a suite of AI tools to help engineers design and manufacture physical products faster and more efficiently.
Who cares what it does!? As Elon Musk has proven with the SpaceX IPO, when one of the best entrepreneurs in the world asks for a big check, the only response should be: how much can I put in?
World Cup Drives Record Prediction Markets Volume
In December we covered the prediction market boom. That trend seems to be accelerating with the Football World Cup (and I will die on the hill that it's football, not soccer 🙂).
We are only a few days into the tournament and haven't even seen this year's champions, England, play yet, but the volumes are already stratospheric. Wall Street brokerage Bernstein noted that betting on World Cup football matches jumped from $2.2 billion on June 11 to $4.8 billion on June 12 alone. For context, that's more than the $1.4 billion traded during the Super Bowl.
Anthropic Fable Wings Clipped
Anthropic got caught flying too close to the sun this week. The US government placed an export ban on its latest Fable Mythos-class model, meaning non-US citizens are no longer allowed to use it. (Incidentally, one of Anthropic’s co-founders is British—can he now not use the model!?)
We touched on the potential regulatory capture angle last week, but the sequence of events is fascinating. After spending months banging the drum about the dangers of Mythos for offensive cyber capabilities, Anthropic released Fable. A version of the Mythos model that was supposed to include extensive guardrails. The US government was then alerted to vulnerabilities that allowed users to jailbreak those protections and promptly banned the model from use by non-US citizens.
This may signal that we are entering a new era of AI: sovereign AI and the deglobalization of data, a theme I wrote about three months ago. As models become increasingly capable and strategically important the calculus is changing at the highest levels.
Quick Takes
Interesting read on how the US decision around Mythos/Fable might ricochet within the ecosystem
Shout out to Michael Grimes one of the lead investment bankers in the world and a key part of the SpaceX IPO for all his work giving back to Berkeley.
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
6 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$12.2B of capital raised from the 8th June to 14th June
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Acquisition / IPOs
🧬 FireFly Bio. $1.0B M&A 🇺🇸 Degrader antibody conjugates. 💰 Johnson & Johnson
🐻 Carolyn Bertozzi, Co-Founder & Advisor. PhD Chemistry Article
💊 Enliven Therapeutics. $335.0M Public Offering 🇺🇸 Small molecule therapeutics. 💰 Jefferies, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley
🐻 Joe Lyssikatos, Co-Founder. PhD Chemistry Article
🐻 Eric Olden, Founder & CEO. BA Article
Closed Rounds
🏭 Prometheus. $12.0B Series B 🇺🇸 Industrial AI engineering platform. 💰 DST Global, ARCH Venture Partners, BlackRock
🫧 SonoThera. $125.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Ultrasound gene therapy. 💰 Vida Ventures, ARK Invest, CureDuchenne Ventures
🐻 Kenneth Greenberg, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD Visual Neuroscience Article
👶 Infinant Health. $39.3M Later Stage 🇺🇸 Infant microbiome therapeutics. 💰 Bow Capital, Cargill, Gates Foundation
🐻 Carlito Lebrilla, Co-Founder. PhD Chemistry Article
🤖 Human Archive. $8.2M Seed 🇺🇸 Physical AI data platform. 💰 Wing Venture Capital, NVP Capital, Y Combinator
💳 Reset. $6.0M Seed 🇺🇸 Embedded earned wage access. 💰 J4 Ventures, Meridian Ventures, Precursor Ventures
🐻 Brian Mascarenhas, Co-Founder & CTO. BA Philosophy Article
🔬 Shuimu BioSciences. Undisclosed Series B 🇨🇳 Cryo-EM drug discovery. 💰 Gaorong Ventures
🐻 Allen Guo, Founder & CEO. PhD EECS
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($M) |
7/8/24 | 769 | 224,953 |
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