Built By Berkeley

Deal of the Week:

My 2024 Berkeley wins included LMArena (number 7 back when it was called Chatbot Arena), and we covered their first round back in May of 2025. They’ve just announced a $150M round at a $1.7B valuation. Off to the races!

LMArena gained prominence by becoming the de facto crowdsourced leaderboard for AI models. So much so that Meta was even accused of tailoring its models to game the system. They claim over 5M monthly users and 60M conversations, and are already at a $30M run rate just four months after launch. Wowzers!

The main revenue drivers seem to be AI evaluations, data access, hosting, and, in the future, custom analytics tools. The speed of this growth is amazing, and they seem well positioned to build a great business. Amazingly, this all started as an open-source project, Chatbot Arena. Congrats to Anastasios Angelopoulos and the team.

I’ve previously spoken about Berkeley professors winning big, and it’s hard to find anyone bigger than Ion Stocia. He is on fire—co-founder of LMArena ($1.7B), Databricks (last valuation: $134B), Anyscale (last valuation: $1.3B), Conviva (last valuation: $300M), and more.

The professor with the Midas touch.

OpenAI Pays the Big Bucks

OpenAI is paying an average of $1.5M per employee in stock-based compensation. This represents 46% of revenue, and is a lot higher than most other large tech companies prior to their IPOs. Why? The battle for talent is brutal, and OpenAI is fighting hard to stay ahead. Another argument could be that Sam Altman owns no shares in OpenAI. If you own no shares in a company, you don’t really care about stock-based dilution, this would be filed under the Charlie Munger quote ‘Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome’

AI is changing the landscape

Berkeley is the #2 school for OpenAI employees. Good to see those massive stock option grants going to the right place. 🙂

Probably not the kind of wealth generated at Nvidia for the 750+ cal alum there over the last 10–15 years, but not bad!!

If OpenAI, Anthropic and other massive AI companies IPO this year expect to see our SF is back thesis go into overdrive.

Masa is at is Again

A lot of OpenAI this week, but a shoutout to one of my personally favourite Berkeley alums Masayoshi Son (Masa) of Softbank. Who as usual is swinging from the fences, and just completed a $40B investment into OpenAI.

You got to love it when people really swing for the fence.

He has tried to invest in or acquire Nvidia three times, including a blocked deal to merge Arm and Nvidia in 2022. There’s a funny recent introduction by Jensen Huang here, along with a full interview linked here. At one point, Masa was the richest man in the world, but the dot-com crash saw his net worth plummet from $78 billion to $1 billion…don’t worry too much he is back to $38B+.

In 1999, Masa and SoftBank made a $20M investment in Alibaba. Their 30% ownership stake eventually grew to be worth $130 billion at its peak—a massive 6,500x return and one of the best venture investments of all time.

He faced heavy criticism for the $100 billion Vision Fund, raised in 2017 (still the largest venture capital fund ever assembled in one go), especially for some of its more audacious investments, such as the $16B invested into WeWork.

These highlights barely scratch the surface of Masa’s story. He has consistently been ahead of the curve in identifying emerging technology trends. 

The OpenAI deal is already looking like a shrewd move on paper, the deal was at a $300B valuation, while OpenAI are already in talks at $830B. So Masa is sitting on a 2x+ in just a few months on $40B!!

The Fightback Against AI Slop?

AI slop is getting out of control. LLMs let you create unlimited content, fast—which means too much content saying too little.

My thesis for 2026. There will be a pushback or even a snapback. As everyone gains access to the perfect AI-drafted email and polished presentation, the things that can't be generated at the touch of a button become more valuable. Your network, your taste, trusted recommendations, actual originality.

We're also going to see backlash against companies using AI in "easy mode" to flood the zone: automated outreach, generic content generation, templated everything. For some reason the only metaphor I can think of is throwing a grenade into a pond—yes, you catch a lot of fish quickly, but it's not exactly sustainable. And everyone else has grenades now too.

This idea is encapsulated well here: in 2026, the way to stand out may be to be less AI and more human. Funny how the pendulum swings or the AI narrative rapidly changes

Quick Takes:

• Victory lap on Google — not one to brag, but seeing Google now as a $4T company, you could have heard it here first on why we thought Google would be the AI winner.

• Claude Code – Opus 4.5. I continue to believe that the speed of change is accelerating, and Opus 4.5 will be a real turning point. I am hearing more and more stories about major productivity unlocks since this model was released. It’s so good that even people at xAI were using it. Until they were blocked by Cursor at the behest of the Anthropic team. The team there are now trying to market this model to more than just coders via Claude Cowork. The future is here it is just not evenly distributed.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 7 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $468M of capital raised from the 5th Jan to 11th Jan

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

Closed Rounds

🧬 Orca Bio. $250M Series F 🇺🇸Cell therapy transplantation. 💰 8VC, DCVC, Lightspeed Venture Partners

🐻 Nathaniel Fernhoff, CEO & Co-Founder. PhD Biochemistry Article

🤖 LMArena $150M Series A 🇺🇸 Community-driven AI feedback and leaderboards for AI models. 💰 Felicis, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

🐻 Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO & Co-Founder. PhD Machine Learning Article

🧪 Vizgen. $48M 🇺🇸 Spatial biology profiling. 💰 ARCH Venture Partners, Pura Vida Investments, Tao Capital Partners

🐻 Jeffrey Moffitt, Co-Founder & CSO. PhD Physics Article

💳 Xepelin. $20M 🇨🇱SME financial services. 💰 Avenir Growth Capital, Battery Ventures, Cathay Innovation

🐻 Sebastian Kreis, Co-Founder & CEO. Haas MBA Article

🏭 Avent. Undisclosed 🇺🇸AI industrial workflows. 💰 Camford Capital, Y Combinator, 

🐻 Abhay Kalra, Founder & CEO. BS EECS Article

🤖 Fiddler. Undisclosed 🇺🇸Explainable enterprise AI. 💰 Bloomberg Beta, In-Q-Tel, Insight Partners

🐻 Amit Paka, Founder & COO. Haas MBA 

🔥 Molten Industries. Undisclosed 🇺🇸Clean hydrogen production. 💰 Fifty Years, Sozo Ventures, Union Square Ventures

🐻 Caleb Boyd, Co-Founder. BS MEng 

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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. 🐻