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. 🐻

We’ve been on a tear with new subscribers, recently. Thank you! if you know a Berkeley friend who’d enjoy these updates, please forward! Also a recent podcast on the Berkeley ecosystem.

YC

YC wrapped Demo Day this week, and Berkeley led the pack with 26 founders in the latest batch.

YC is a wild institution. Founded in 2005, it has already create four Fortune 500 companies: Airbnb, DoorDash (shout-out to fellow Bear Tony Xu!), Coinbase, and Instacart, with 13 others public companies. Stripe would likely join the list the moment it goes public.

There’s real magic in taking ambitious people and throwing rocket fuel on their journey. Sure, people grumble about $30M+ seed valuations for months-old startups, but YC keeps proving its worth. Gary Tan, the current CEO, is also one of the loudest champions of the San Francisco rebound we’ve discussed here.

Moving the Goalposts

For years we celebrated whenever Berkeley topped an entrepreneurial chart—YC founder counts, PitchBook rankings, whatever.

Now that first place is table stakes, let’s address the elephant in the room: Berkeley has ~45k students, while Stanford and Harvard hover around 20k. Even though spending far less per student, I think the focus should be now about pushing Berkeley into a league of its own as a startup capital. Onwards! 🐻

 OpenAI Marchs On

OpenAI continues the relentless drive to gobble gobble more of the application layer. They released a new product this week that allows you to record meetings and link your google drive and other file storage to ChatGPT using MCP (this allows applications to chat to LLMs).

It will be fascinating on how MCP develops as in theory it should disintermediate things like CRMs if models like ChatGPT can record meetings update the CRM and then allow you to question the CRM. How do these companies fight back!?

Unverified but fascinating nugget: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI reportedly rely on very different underlying datasets for answers (see chart below). If true the outputs must also diverge a lot!

Looking to Raise?

If you are looking to raise I would watch this by Vinod Khosla (Disclaimer: I have not watch but it is Vinod Khosla…so assume worthwhile). For what is is worth my advice on pitching/raising is:

• Create competitive tension.

• Story tell : Why you? Why now?

• Show logical steps: Then leap to the grand vision.

• Don’t bury the lead: If growth is on fire, put it out front; if you’re early, be transparent and focus on the path forward.

Happy to chat with anyone on their pitch

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 5 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $93M of capital raised from the 2nd June to 8th June

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

Closed Rounds

🧬 Antheia. $56M Series C 🇺🇸 Plant‑inspired biomanufacturing. 💰 Global Health Investment Corporation, EDBI

🐻 Christina Smolke, CEO & Co‑Founder. PhD Chemical Engineering. Article

🤖 Veris AI. $8.5M Seed 🇺🇸 Enterprise AI agent training. 💰 Decibel Ventures, Acrew Capital

 🐻 Mehdi Jamei, Founder & CEO. MS Physics & PhD EECS. Article 

📊 Avantis. $8.0M Series A 🇺🇸 On‑chain DeFi derivatives DEX. 💰 Coinbase Ventures, Founders Fund, Pantera Capital

🐻 Harsehaj Singh, Co‑Founder. BA Business. Article

🌱 ChemFinity Technologies. $7M Seed 🇺🇸 Molecular resource‑recovery platform. 💰 Breakthrough Energy, Climate Capital

 🐻 Adam Uliana, Co‑Founder & CEO. PhD Chemical Engineering. Article

💧 Kumulus. $3.5M Seed 🇫🇷 Solar atmospheric‑water generators. 💰 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Techstars

 🐻 Iheb Triki, Co‑Founder & CEO. MS Civil Engineering. 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….