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. 🐻

What a week! We saw Berkeley-founded OpenAI raise $6.6B at a $157B valuation. Surprisingly, I think this is one of the less extreme valuations. This can actually make sense fundamentally, given the high cost of training and running LLMs, and the likelihood that foundational models could turn into an oligopoly.

What makes less sense is some of the behavior happening elsewhere in AI land, illustrated with this tweet.

The reality is the jury is out, and if these bets payoff, people will look like rockstars, and if not, well…

The best story I heard last week came from a Berkeley PhD who graduated in 1988. He recalled attending student happy hours where a young Mike Moritz was handing out business cards to founders. Moritz went on to become a legendary Sequoia investor, backing companies like Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, PayPal, and Stripe. It’s a reminder that there’s hope for us all! Just show up and hand those cards out.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 8 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $6,741M of capital raised from the 30th September to 6th October

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Acquired

🏡 Raise. Acquired by JLL 🇺🇲 Operating system for workplaces  💰Raised $34M prior to being bought by JLL 

🐻 Justin Bedecarre, Co-founder & CEO. BA Economics & Politics. Article

Closed Rounds

🖥️ Open AI $6.6B Round. 🇺🇲 LLM foundational model company who makes ChatGPT 💰 Thrive, Altimeter, Fidelity, Lightspeed, Khosla, Microsoft, Softbank, Tiger.

🐻 John Schulman, Co-founder (and now at Anthropic). PhD Computer Science Article 

💽 Ambiq. $86M Round 🇺🇲 Low power chip manufacturer  💰Undisclosed

🐻 Dennis Sylvester, Founder. Phd Electrical Engineering. 

💉 Arda Therapeutics. $43.3M Round 🇺🇲 Targeting cells to treat disease. 💰 Undisclosed.

🐻 Adam Freund. Founder & CEO. PhD Molecular & Cell Biology. 

🚚 Reveni. $5.5M Seed 🇪🇸 Reverse logistics for e-commerce. 💰 Inveready, Banco Santander.

🐻 Pablo Molinero, Co-founder & COO. Haas MBA

🤖 3Laws Robotics. $4.1M Seed. 🇺🇲 Dynamic safety guardrails for robotics 💰  Amazon Industrial Innovation, TenOneTen. 

🐻 Amir Sharif, Co-founder & Haas MBA. Article

🎲 Locker. $2M Seed. 🇺🇲 Live fantasy game. 💰Hatchery Investments

🐻 Noah Bernstein, Founder. BA EECS. Article.

🚛 Pulse AI. $0.25M Grant  🇺🇲 AI for supply chain intelligence. 💰 AI Grant.

🐻 Sid Manchkanti, Co-founder & CEO. BA Computer Science. 

💻Peer AI. Undisclosed.  🇺🇲 AI medical scribe. 💰 Shift Left Ventures

🐻 Christopher Ceppi, Co-founder & COO. BA English.

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.

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Built By Berkeley is not affiliated with UC Berkeley, but maybe we will be one day if we get enough subscribers….