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🐻 Bears, Bots, and Billions: $8.2B Raised in One Week
Xan Wood
November 24, 2025
Deal of the Week
Wow — when you have a week where just 16 companies raised $8.2B of capital, how can you possibly pick a “deal of the week”?! For this week, I’m going with sector of the week, and that sector is robotics.
Three companies raised mega rounds. The first was Jeff Bezos’s $6.2B round for Project Prometheus, where he’ll be Co-CEO. Not much is known about the company beyond “AI for the physical economy,” but this definitely feels like robotics to me. Pretty cool to lead a $6.2B seed round into a company you’re Co-CEO of. Go Jeff and Berkeley post doc Vik Bajaj , the Co-CEO.
The other two Berkeley robotics companies were Physical Intelligence ($600M this round) and Robotera ($140M). All three believe robot development is about to accelerate — and it really does feel like that’s happening.
Exciting times. A lot of startups are raising serious capital in this space. I’m sure some will get burned, but progress will absolutely be made.
What are the big questions for Robotics in the coming years:
China vs. USA: Will China’s hardware cost advantage and supply chain dominance trump US innovation?
Humanoid vs. Specialised: Will the general-purpose humanoid (like Figure & Tesla) reach cost/performance parity with specialised robtos?
LLM-First vs. Classical: Will LLM or another architecture win out?
Cost Curve: Is the cost going to come down to the $15-30K that might make robots mainstream
Many other questions to answer but it feels like these are fairly fundamental.
Billionaires Have Feelings
Elon and Jeff seem to have a little bit of beef over Jeff starting a rocket company. Now we see Elon’s reply to Project Prometheus…
Also, some people attribute Google’s resurgence to Sergey Brin getting back to work full time. Apparently, this was sparked by a guy named Dan approaching him at a party and saying, “What are you doing? This is the most transformative moment in computer science ever,” which goaded him back into the trenches. Dan was reportedly an OpenAI employee. Not sure Sam Altman would have been thrilled about that, and he recently called an all-hands in response to Google’s fight back.
If you haven’t played around with Gemini yet I highly recommend it. See a one shotted info graph on this newsletter:
Sad to see Berkeley lose the big game to Stanford this weekend, but got to love the game face’s as the Axe was handed over.
Happy Thanksgiving one and all.
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
16 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$8.2B of capital raised from the 17th Nov to 23rd Nov
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Closed Rounds
🛰️ Project Prometheus $6.2B Undisclosed 🇺🇸 Hands-on AI for manufacturing. 💰 Jeff Bezos
🎥 Luma AI $900.0M Series C 🇺🇸 Multimodal AI video generation. 💰 Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Matrix Partners
🤖 Physical Intelligence $600.0M Series B 🇺🇸 General-purpose robot foundation models. 💰 Anti Fund, Avenir Growth Capital, BOND Capital
🐻 Chelsea Finn, Co-Founder. PhD EECS. Article
🦿 Robotera $140.5M Series A1 🇨🇳 Humanoid robots for daily life. 💰 Geely Capital*, Turing Ventures, Wing Capital
🐻 Jianyu Chen, Founder & CEO. PhD Robotics. Article
🔗 Celero $140.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Coherent DSP for AI networks. 💰 Atreides Management*, CapitalG, Sutter Hill Ventures
🐻 Oscar Agazzi, Founder & CTO. Article
🧬 Profluent $106.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Generative AI protein design. 💰 AIX Ventures*, Altimeter Capital, Insight Partners
🐻 Ali Mandani, Founder & CEO. MS & PhD Mechanical Eng. Article
🫀 Okami Medical $43.1M Series F 🇺🇸 Peripheral vascular embolization devices. 💰 Trinity Capital*, U.S. Venture Partners, Vensana Capital
🐻 Bob Rosenbluth, Chairman & Co-Founder. PhD Mechanical Eng. Article
🧪 Angiex $31.0M Series C 🇺🇸 Nuclear-delivered ADC cancer therapy. 💰 K5 Global, Starling Ventures, Thiel Capital
🐻 Paul Jaminet, Founder & CEO. PhD Physics. Article
🛡️ Bedrock Data $25.0M Series A 🇺🇸 AI-native enterprise data security. 💰 Greylock, Mangusta Capital, Mantis VC
🐻 Pranava Adduri, Founder & CTO. BS & MS Industrial Eng. Article
📊 Span $24.8M Series A 🇺🇸 Engineering analytics & workflow platform. 💰 Alt Capital, Bling Capital, BoxGroup
🏥 Nest Health $22.5M Series A 🇺🇸 In-home Medicaid family care. 💰 10X Capital, 8VC, Alumni Ventures
🐻 Rebecca Kavoussi, Co-Founder & COO. Masters Public Policy. Article
📡 Picojool $12.0M Seed Round 🇺🇸 Optical connectivity for AI clusters. 💰 Playground Global
☁️ Poly $8.0M Seed Round 🇺🇸 AI-native cloud file storage. 💰 Bloomberg Beta, Felicis, Index Ventures
🐻 Abhay Agarwal, Founder & CEO. BS EECS. Article
💳 Kaaj $3.8M Seed Round 🇺🇸 Credit underwriting automation. 💰 Better Tomorrow Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Pythia Ventures
🐻 Utsav Shah, Co-Founder & CEO. Haas MBA. Article
⚡ Lexe $1.0M Seed Round 🇺🇸 Self-custodial Bitcoin/Lightning wallet. 💰 Hivemind Ventures
🦼 Strutt Undisclosed Seed Round 🇸🇬 Smart mobility hardware. 💰 Matter Venture Partners, Monad Ventures, Vertex Ventures SEA & India
🐻 Tony Hong, Founder & CEO. PhD Physics.
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($M) |
7/8/24 | 575 | 88,973 |
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