Hosting two events at Berkeley this Thursday (April 2):
Berkeley Alumni in Venture (exactly what it says), and From Lab to Launch—bringing together Canvas, Mayfield, Skydeck, Bessemer, M12, and Playground portfolio companies with Berkeley PhDs. Come by!
Deal of the Week
Krane just announced a $9M Seed. A company I was able to invest in at the pre-seed via Courtyard Ventures (full portfolio here). You can read the full “why we invested” from three years ago, but the same remains true.
Eshan (Berkeley Masters) has exceptional founder–market fit. Krane focuses on the smooth running of procurement and materials flow within large-scale construction projects and is currently supporting ~$15B worth of projects. This is a complex operation, requiring coordination across general contractors, owners, and subcontractors.
Every real estate project I’ve ever been involved in has been delayed (and I’m sure many reading this have too), so anything that keeps a consistent flow of materials is gold.
Eshan lives and breathes this space. His father was in construction, and prior to his Stanford GSB MBA, he spent nearly a decade in project management — including on Chevron’s $46B infrastructure project in Kazakhstan.
Congrats team!
Unmet demand for Private Companies?
There is $2–3T of value locked in the top 10 most valuable private companies. There have been many calls to give retail investors access to these via IPOs (and I believe Anthropic & OpenAI will ultimately have to go public given their prodigious capital needs—see OpenAI offering a pref ~17% return to some PE backers in a JV).
However, something whacky happened this week. An ETF launched that holds a number of these high-value (and genuinely exceptional) private companies. It quickly 4x’d before selling off ~50% within a week—yet is still trading at ~6–7x its NAV (the value at which the fund marks its holdings), and at one point was closer to 30x.
The big fall was after this short report by Citron Research, I did like that they called out that the fund’s website was getVCX.com and that this indicated where we are in the hype cycle.
This likely indicates three things (not mutually exclusive):
People have massive FOMO on these private companies
These companies may be undervalued
No one really knows - given how small and illiquid the underlying exposure is
What this 100% does indicate is when any of these mega companies IPO we are in for a wild ride!
Wouldn’t mind owning the below portfolio myself, just not at 10x NAV!
AI Report
Great report by venture fund Redpoint about trends in AI at the moment. It is pretty crazy the explosion in websites, apps, and code we are already seeing.
Looks like they’ve come to a similar conclusion to what we posted a few weeks ago on the SaaS sell-off. It’s not that these aren’t good businesses, but rather that increased uncertainty around future cash flows—driven by AI—raises the discount rate, which materially impacts current valuations.
Also a fun analysis highlighting that frontier model companies are still relying heavily on many of these “legacy” SaaS products.
Just remember all AI narratives can change quickly 🙂
Quick Takes
For anyone in SF this Thursday I would recommend this conference put on by Grace Gong! The Smart AI summit. Should be a great event.
Spoke last week about Phoenix’s in the age of AI and Intercom’s transformation and this week they released a 'vertical model’ for customer support. There is debate at the moment on what wins in enterprise large generalized models or smaller specialised.
Interesting podcast on how the sausage is made at Waymo from its CEO. Also spent some time at Berkeley.
I found this interesting of who is actually trading the US stock market and who actually owns the equity. Turns out retail and high frequency traders make up 70% of the daily volumes. Note the below is based on Claude so maybe some issues!
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
9 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$90M of capital raised from the 23rd March to 29th March
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Acquisition
🔐 Antimatter. Acquired 🇺🇸 Cryptographic data security infra. 💰 Databricks
🐻 Andrew Krioukov, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD EECS. Article
Closed Rounds
🧬 Centivax. $37.0M Series A 🇺🇸 Broad-spectrum vaccine platform. 💰 Amplify Partners, Base4 Capital, NFX
🐻 Jacob Glanville, Founder & CEO. BA Genomics. Article
🧠 Oryon Cell Therapies. $32.7M Series A 🇺🇸 Cell therapy for Parkinson’s. 💰 Takeda Ventures, Byers Capital, Neuro.Vc
🐻 Nikola Kojic, Founder & CIO. BS MEng. Article
🛡️ Krane. $9.0M Seed 🇺🇸 AI platform for construction procurement and materials management💰 Courtyard Ventures, Link Ventures, Glasswing Ventures
🐻 Eshan Jayamanne, CEO. MEng. Aritcle
📜 AlphaLit. $3.8M Seed 🇺🇸 AI legal document analysis. 💰 Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital, Slow Ventures
🐻 Anand Upadhye, Founder & CEO. BA Philosophy. Article
⚡ Aurora Hydrogen. $3.0M 🇨🇦 Clean hydrogen production tech. 💰 Chevron Technology Ventures, Plug and Play Tech Center, Shell Ventures
🐻 Murray Thomson, Co-Founder & CSO. PhD & MEng. Article
🎙️ VoiceBit. $2.5M Seed 🇺🇸 AI voice automation platform. 💰 1984 Ventures, Berkeley SkyDeck, Redstick Ventures
🐻 Hitesh Kenjale, Founder & CEO. Haas MBA. Article
🧪 Affinity Biosensors. $1.6M 🇺🇸 Rapid antimicrobial testing device. 💰 Founders Capital Partners, Rose Ventures, National Science Foundation
🐻 Ken Babcock, CEO. AB Physics.
❤️ Secretome Therapeutics. $0.3M Grant 🇺🇸 Cell therapy for heart failure. 💰 UM Ventures,
🐻 Vinny Jindal, Founder & CEO. MA Endocrinology.
🔋 Juna Technology. Series A 🇨🇳 Electrolyzer materials for hydrogen. 💰
🐻 Zhensheng Zhou, Founder & CEO. Masters. 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, 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. 🐻
