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 leaderboard do you aim to top after spending $7 billion? OpenAI is projected to spend $7 billion on training and inference in 2024, with other tech giants investing equally massive sums to train and refine their models. But where do companies like Meta, Google, and Anthropic turn to measure their models’ performance?

They look to Chatbot Arena, a platform created by Berkeley PhD students Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang. Originally a graduate project, it has quickly become the go-to leaderboard for ranking LLMs. Read the full article on this in the WSJ.

Here are the rankings as of 12/09/24. Looks like Gemini (Google) is just ahead of ChatGPT.

One observation here is that these models individually perform better for certain tasks than each other so it is hard to have a definitive ‘Top of the Pops’ but it is nice to have some spice in the competition, especially when supplied by a couple of Berkeley students.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 9 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $362M of capital raised from the 2nd December to 8th December

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Closed Rounds

🩹 Nuvig Therapeutics. $161M Series B 🇺🇸 Rebalancing immune function for chronic inflammatory and autoimmune disease. 💰 B Capital, Blue Owl Capital, Norwest Venture Partners

🐻 Pamela Conley, Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer. PhD Biochemistry Article

🧬 Maze Therapeutics. $115M Series D 🇺🇸 Genetic insights into medicines for common diseases. 💰 Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, GV

🐻 Jason Coloma, Co-Founder & CEO. BS Article

🏥 Commons Clinic. $29.8M 🇺🇸 Multi-specialty healthcare clinics. 💰 Asymmetry Ventures, Floating Point, Global Founders Capital

🐻 Paulo Da Costa, Co-Founder & COO. MBA Haas Article

💡 LIS Technologies. $22M Series A 🇺🇸 Advanced laser technology. 💰 28 Ventures, Innovating Capital, Minetta Brook Capital

🐻 Jeff Eerkens, Co-Founder & CTO. MS Nuclear Engineering Article

📱 Eagle Electronics. $14M  🇺🇸 Cellular module manufacturing. 💰 Asymmetric Capital Partners, The O.H.I.O. Fund

🐻 Mark Kvamme, Co-Founder & Chairman. BA French & Economics Article

🩺 Brellium. $11.1M Series A 🇺🇸 AI-driven medical chart audits. 💰 First Round Capital

🐻 Zach Rosen, Co-Founder & CEO. BS Business Article

🤖 Anyware Robotics. $5.7M 🇺🇸 Autonomous robots for logistics. 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Thomas Tang, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD Philosophy Article

🌐 Flume. $3.5M 🇺🇸 Fiber internet services. 💰 Citi, Everywhere Ventures, Pareto Holdings

🐻 Prashanth Vijay, Co-Founder & CEO. BS Mechanical Engineering Article

🏢 Arden Insurance Services. Undisclosed 🇺🇸 Insurance for condo associations. 💰 FTV Capital

🐻 Brian Cohen, CEO. BS Accounting & Finance 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.

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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….