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 is a K-shaped economy?

It’s when different sectors of the economy grow at very different rates. And it feels like that’s exactly where we are right now.

So where are we seeing this K-shaped economy show up?

In consumers. The top 10% of U.S. consumers now account for 49.2% of all spending. This is the highest level since 1989. This stat keeps circling in my head. Every time I read an article saying the “U.S. consumer is strong,” I can’t help but think its really the wealthy consumer who is strong.

In the stock market. I have a fairly firm belief that big tech will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI (see my recent post on Shopify). ). The market seems to believe this and the top 10% of the US stocks have a market cap of 78% of the stock market the highest since 1930. This concentration is unheard of.

But are they overvalued? In the long term, probably yes. But in the short term, they could still go up a lot. These companies are growing quickly (see: Google 😊), have incredibly strong balance sheets and cashflows, and benefit from massive network effects. They also look “cheap” compared to the Dotcom Bubble. So two things can be true at once: yes, they’re probably overvalued and yes, they could still climb much higher.

AI Infra Spend Shows No Sign of Stopping

Pretty interesting Nvidia committed $100B to OpenAI over a period of time to help them build out data centers. Interesting that OpenAI will actually be building the data centers. Jensen has got a big cheque book and he is not afraid to use it. But why? Rumor has it that 3 Nvidia customers are 50%+ of revenues (likely AWS, Meta and Azure). So, the simplest analogy is if you are an arms dealer, war is good for business and if you are the seller of GPUs (Nvidia) then competition is good for business so giving a large slug of money to OpenAI probably helps stimulate that competition among the hyper scalers. Jensen is really trying to tilt the scales on the prisoners dilemma game the hyperscalers are playing in AI.

Verdict we will likely see the AI infra CAPEX become a larger part of GDP. What is most exciting is all this CAPEX will likely create a platform for the application layer AI companies to build on and we saw this in both the railroad and telecom era. Time to go start that AI application AI companY to end busy work.

Google!

Sorry to keep on the Google drum, but I think this one still has a bit to run Nano Banna has had over 5B images made in less than a month. Not sure that will drive trillions in market cap. But this might – Gemini Robots. The next shoe to drop on AI is going to be robotics and drug discovery. We mentioned the ARC institute’s work biology a while back in (another interesting Berkeley founded institution) and they seem to be kicking out some interesting progress in utilizing AI for biology.

Also, a fun fact I did not know but Eric Schmidt went to Berkeley

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 7 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $235M of capital raised from the 22nd Sept to 28st Sept

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

Acquisitions

🗄️ Couchbase. $1.5B Buyout 🇺🇸 Modern cloud database. 💰 Haveli Investments

🐻 Steve Yen, Co-Founder. BA EECS Article

Closed Rounds

✈️ WeTravel. $92M Series C 🇺🇸 Travel booking platform. 💰 Foundation Capital, Index Ventures, Left Lane Capital

🐻 Johannes Koeppel, Co-Founder. Haas MBA Article

🧪 Manas AI. $50.6M Seed Round 🇺🇸 AI drug discovery. 💰 Blitzscaling Ventures, General Catalyst, Greylock

🐻 Ujjwal Singh, Co-Founder & CEO. MS EECS Article

🤖 Factory AI. $50.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Autonomous coding AI. 💰 Lux Capital, NEA, Sequoia 

🐻 Matan Grinberg, CEO & Co-Founder. PhD Physics Article

🪄 Obot. $35M Seed 🇺🇸 Open-source LLM stack. 💰 Mayfield Fund, Nexus Venture Partners

🐻 Will Chan, Co-Founder & CPO. BS EECS Article

🛡️ Solidcore.ai. $4.0M Seed 🇺🇸 GenAI security platform. 💰 EPIC Ventures, Runtime Ventures

🐻 Eric Chiu, Founder & CEO. BS Materials Science & Engineering Article

🏗️ Verustruct. $2.1M Seed 🇺🇸 Robotic 3D printing for sustainable homes. 💰 Anorak Ventures, Keel Ventures

🐻 Nicholas Callegari, Founder & CEO. MS Eng Article

📝 QuickCode. $1.4M Seed 🇺🇸 Text ML labeling. 💰 Buckhorn Capital, DataTribe

🐻 Joe Morales, CTO & Co-Founder. MS Information & Data Science Article

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.

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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….