Deal of the Week
Congratulations to Hightouch on their $150M round led by Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital Ventures at an impressive $2.75B valuation. I hear they’re growing quickly at over $100M ARR, and Tejas, the Co-CEO and Co-Founder, was a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley.
It looks like Hightouch enables leading brands to use AI to create marketing campaigns. This just feels like a very strong AI use case. Attach all the context of your company, and let AI do the work. It appears to be a “pre-LLM” company founded a while ago, but I’m sure there’s been a lot of machine learning under the hood, now likely supercharged with LLMs.
At Canvas, where I invest, we backed Offerfit. A similar company working with leading brands like Yum, that was sold last year for $325M. For these large companies the services like Offerfit and Hightouch are super valuable in create ‘lift’ that is the impact a campaign has on consumer behavior. I still firmly believe that we are in a period of AI that there is an interesting lift arbitrage as AI makes marketing more effective and prices have yet to catch up.
Tangentially, a week or two ago I said that Meta Platforms would be a big winner in the AI era (see my earlier post for why). Fast forward to today, the stock got hammered… I remain bullish. AI will allow Meta to help SMBs fully automate ad campaigns with better targeting in a similar way that Hightouch can offer to large enterprises. Time will tell.
Korea and Taiwan the real AI Winner?!
Taiwan and South Korea’s stock markets are rocking. Taiwan’s market is now larger than both Canada and the UK at ~$4.5T, up ~150% over the last 12 months. If this pace continues, it could overtake India within weeks.
Korea is showing similar momentum. It recently overtook the UK and could surpass Canada soon.
Why? You already know the answer: AI. Taiwan has TSMC (~$2T market cap) and a plethora of other AI-related companies, while South Korea is home to SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics—both critical to the AI supply chain. We posted recently about the compute crunch, and it’s now playing out across every layer of the stack as investors hunt for the next bottleneck.
What could slow this down? Oil prices. Both Taiwan and South Korea import large amounts of energy (including oil and Helium). If prices stay elevated, there will be pain.
AI CAPEX Train Continues
Big Tech reported earnings last week. Most of them smashed it. Google n particular (we were early to this one 🙂). Across the board, they’re increasing CAPEX this year and next. I’ve spilt a lot of ink on this buildout, but it’s still mind-boggling and is set to continue, especially as Big Tech starts to see real ROI on that spend.
The CAPEX will keep going. Position yourself accordingly.
Are we going to need even more consultants?!
For a while, the narrative was that AI would replace consultants. Increasingly, it looks like the opposite. AI is creating a much larger need for consultants and that is specifically to implement it.
Both Anthropic (announcement) and OpenAI ($4B raise announcement) have leaned into this, announcing efforts to build out AI services ecosystems, with involvement from major private equity players. The strategy isn’t surprising. If you look at Salesforce or SAP, a huge part of their success came from cultivating deep implementation partner networks. The learning is a lot of enterprise adoption is driven by services and not just features.
Aaron Levie captures it well:
That’s the shift that seems to be playing out. The constraint is no longer figuring out what to do, the market is moving to how to integrate AI into systems and workflows at scale.
From the model providers’ perspective, this is a logical move. Best case, we get to AGI and the need for consultants disappears. More realistically, they help build (or become) the next generation of consulting firms, with AI at the core.
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
4 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$176.5M of capital raised from the 27th April to 3rd May
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Closed Rounds
📈🤖 Hightouch. $150.0M Series D 🇺🇲 Composable customer data platform. 💰 Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, Bain Capital Ventures, ICONIQ Capital
🐻 Tejas Manohar, Co-CEO & Founder. Visiting Scholar. Article
🎮🛡️ GGWP. $15.0M Series A 🇺🇲 AI gaming moderation platform. 💰 BITKRAFT Ventures, Griffin Gaming Partners, Headline
🌱📊 Clarasight. $11.5M Series A 🇺🇲 Sustainability analytics platform. 💰 AlleyCorp, Bain & Company
🐻 Philip Charm, Co-Founder. Haas MBA. Article
🧠⚙️ TranscEngram. Series A 🇨🇳 Advanced AI computing systems. 💰 ZhenFund
🐻 Yi Ma, Founder. PhD & Masters EECS.
🚗⚡ 3V Infrastructure. Undisclosed 🇺🇲 EV charging infrastructure operator. 💰 Greenbacker Capital Management, Moderne Ventures
🐻 Benjamin Kanner, Co-Founder & CEO. BA Political Economy.
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.
Do you have a job you want to post from a Berkeley Company? Add here.
Is there someone in the Berkeley ecosystem that you would want us to do a profile on? A founder, funder, or general startup person? Add here.
Built By Berkeley is not affiliated with UC Berkeley, but maybe we will be one day if we get enough subscribers….
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. 🐻
