Built By Berkeley

Deal of the Week

Databricks announced a $4B Series L at a $134B valuation for the Berkeley-founded company, just months after raising $1B at a $100B valuation in September. We may run out of letters in the alphabet soon! Jokes aside, it’s an amazing story. Growing 55% at scale and profitable is insane. So why raise such a big round now? Because they can.

Databricks has the quintessential Berkeley history.  It started as an open-source project at the AMPLab at Berkeley and was initially built on top of the open-source Apache Spark project that originated there. Today, the company works with large organizations to help them manage and unify their data including AI applications. 

The number are impressive…

Good article article comparing Databricks’ valuation with Snowflake’s. The two are often compared and are fierce competitors. At this valuation, Databricks is nearly 2x Snowflake, despite being at a similar revenue run rate. Why?

• Revenue growth: Databricks is growing ~55% vs. Snowflake at ~29%. If that persists for a few years, the revenue gap becomes meaningful.

• AI monetization: Databricks has done a better job monetizing AI earlier, with roughly $1B in AI-related run rate versus ~$100M for Snowflake.

I’m not entirely sure what constitutes “AI revenue” in each case, although it seems to be tools like Mosaic AI, Vector Search and MLflow, but the market clearly believes it justifies the ~2x valuation premium. Recent talk by the CEO and Co-Founder here.

Massive congrats to Databricks — and excited for the IPO (2026!?). We need a few more of these late-stage private companies to subscribe to the Lion King Song.

Founded → Raise VC money → IPO → VC money returned to limited partners (pension funds, etc.) → Repeat

The circle of startup life!

Honorable Deal of the Week Mention

Honourable mention to Qualified’s acquisition by Salesforce. An unannounced deal size, but rumours suggest $1–1.5B. Last valued at $745M in April 2022 (very much a ZIRP-era deal time frame), so this looks like a strong outcome and definitely not a zombicorn. 

Well done  Kraig Swensrud and team! 

Prediction markets is bad news for crypto? 

I was recently thinking about the impact of prediction markets. One thing I had not really considered before is the effect they might have on crypto markets. Bitcoin does seem to be fast becoming an institutionalized asset, with new ETFs announced this year etc. The price has not reflected this for the end of the year, currently trading around ~$88K, down from a peak of $123K (~29% decline). Are prediction markets partly to blame?

A recent survey pointed to an interesting trend:

• ~50% of Robinhood users plan to invest new money in prediction markets

• ~37% of Coinbase users expect to sell cryptocurrency to fund that activity

I don’t have much quantifiable data here, nor do I know the survey size, but it’s a dynamic worth watching if prediction markets really take off.

Could this have a negative impact on crypto markets? Possibly. If investors bucket prediction markets and crypto as similar risk assets, capital flows could meaningfully shift away from crypto.

One to pay attention to! 

Will 2026 be the rise of the rest?

Something I’m looking at for 2026 is the idea of the “rise of the rest” outside the obvious AI winners in big tech. This is likely to show up in more traditional industries, where companies that are fast movers in adopting AI (I am using AI broadly here, including traditional ML) can generate significant productivity gains using all the new AI tools or their large data sets. There’s a good blog that explains this idea here.

Quick Takes:

• Good read by Andrej Karpathy on of the OpenAI founders reviewing a year in LLMs

• As a devoted Roomba customer (there is nothing better than emptying a dust-filled bin), it was sad to see iRobot’s demise this week after the failed Amazon acquisition. Time to get a Matic!?

• Nice to see Goldman Sachs quoting Berkeley founded LMArena which is like the top of the pops for LLM models. We previously discussed LMArena here.

  

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 5 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $4.01B of capital raised from the 12th Dec to 18th Dec

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

Acquisition

🧠 Qualified $1-1.5B Acquisition 🇺🇲 Agentic marketing platform. 💰 Salesforce

🐻 Kraig Swensrud, Founder & CEO. BS Eng. Article

Closed Rounds

☁️ Databricks $4B Series L 🇺🇲 Unified data & AI analytics. 💰 Andreessen Horowitz, JP Morgan Asset Management, Insight Partners

🐻 Ali Ghodsi, CEO & Co‑Founder. Post Doc Computer Science. Article

🌐 Exponential.Fi $10.0M Series A 🇺🇲 DeFi yield optimization. 💰A* , Foundation Capital, Global Founders Capital

🐻 Greg Jizmagian, Co‑Founder & Advisor. BS Maths. Article

☀️ Solx $1.0M Seed Round 🇺🇲 Solar panel manufacturer. 💰 American Council on Renewable Energy

🐻 James Holmes, Founder & CEO. BS Business. 

📊 LobbyIQ $0.01M Accelerator 🇨🇦 Real‑time lobbying analytics. 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Guy Holburn, Co‑Founder. PhD & MA Economics. 

📞 Tin Can Undisclosed Series A 🇺🇲 Voice‑only kid communication. 💰 Greylock Partners

🐻 Max Blumen, Co‑Founder. BA Linguistics. Article

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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. 🐻