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. 🐻

Big Deals Afoot: It is deal season as mentioned in last weeks newsletter Perplexity is looking to raise another $500M (@ $9B valuation), but we are hearing that Databricks is looking to raise a cool $1B from Thrive, and Zetwerk (founded by Haas MBA Amrit Acharya) is looking at an IPO to raise $1B.

Does this signal that the liquidity markets are finally opening for tech? The answer might be maybe. In the past week, both Klarna and ServiceTitan have filed for IPOs, with expectations that they could each surpass $10B in valuation when trading begins. If achieved, these would be landmark events—2024 has yet to see a single tech IPO valued at $10B or more.

We have seen some encouraging signs for the few companies that already IPO’ed this year Reddit, which went public earlier this year at a $6.4B valuation, now boasts a market cap of $23B. Also Astera Labs initial market cap was $5.5B at IPO and is now $14B. Any one invest in these?!

The seasonality of venture capital activity (see below) shows that December is the peak month for VC rounds being announced, accounting for 10.7% of 2023 rounds. These rounds were likely completed in November, before Thanksgiving, which explains why January sees the lowest activity, with only 6.4% of rounds in 2023.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 12 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $332 of capital raised from the 11th November to 17th November

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

Acquired / IPO

🚚 CiDi (Changsha). IPO 🇨🇳 Autonomous vehicle technology for logistics. 💰 Baidu Ventures,

🐻 Zexiang Li, Co-founder. PhD Computer Science. Article.

💾 Flex Logix. Acquired 🇺🇸 Embedded FPGA semiconductor technology. 💰 Analog Devices

🐻 Cheng Wang, Co-founder & CTO. BA EECS. Article.

Closed Rounds

🚁 Skydio. $170M Series E 🇺🇸 AI-powered drone technology. 💰 Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, GSR Ventures

🐻 Adraham Bachrach, Co-founder & CTO. BA EECS. Article.

🩺 Beta Bionics. $60M Series E 🇺🇸 Sensors to deliver insulin 💰 Farallon Capital Management, Marshall Wace, Wellington Management

🐻 Edward Raskin, Co-founder. Berkeley Law. Article.

📈 SuperAnnotate. $24M Series B 🇺🇸 Build and evaluate LLMs💰 Base10 Partners, Berkeley SkyDeck, Fathom Capital

🐻 Jason Liang, Co-founder & SVP BD. Haas MBA. Article.

🔭 Akash Systems. $18.2M 🇺🇸 Thermal management for chip design with diamond 💰 10X Capital, ACME Capital

🐻 Ty Mitchell, Founder & CEO. PhD Materials Science. Article.

📊 Polar Analytics. $18M Series A 🇫🇷 Multichannel analytics platform. 💰 Chalfen Ventures,  Point Nine Capital

🐻 Charbel Seif, Co-founder & CTO. MS Machine Learning. Article.

👁️ Luum  $16M Series A 🇺🇸 AI-powered robotic lash extensions. 💰 Foundation Capital, SaxeCap, Sugar Capital

🐻 Nathan Harding, Co-founder & CEO. MS Mechanical Engineering. Article.

🏠 Villa. $10M 🇺🇸 Accessory dwelling unit construction. 💰 Atomic Labs, Mana Ventures, Western Technology Investment

🐻 James Connolly, Co-founder. BA Business Admin.

⚡ Celer. $7.5M Seed  🇸🇬 Layer-2 scaling for decentralized apps. 💰 500 Global, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital

🐻 Junda Liu, Co-founder. PhD Computer Networks. 

🩺 Avvio Medical. $7.1M 🇺🇸 Non-invasive kidney stone treatment. 💰 Berkeley Catalyst Fund, Constellar Ventures, Mission Bay Capital

🐻 Thomas Kenny, Co-founder & Chairman. PhD Physics. Article.

🌍 Atlas. $2M Seed 🇳🇴 Geospatial data mapping tool. 💰 6AM Accelerator, Pale Blue Dot

🐻 Harald Rieber, Co-founder & CTO. Exchange BA EECS Article.

🧬 Genesis Therapeutics. Series C 🇺🇸 AI-driven small-molecule drug discovery. 💰 Alumni Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Baker Brothers Investments

🐻 Ben Sklaroff, Co-founder & CTO. BS EECS. Article.

One We Missed

🌍 CredibleMind. $7.5M Series A 🇺🇸 Mental Wellbeing Platform 💰 Horizon Mutual Holdings

🐻 Derky Van Brunt, Founder & CEO. Dr Public Health. 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.

• 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….