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. 🐻

Got to love the ambition of Berkeley founder (and Built By Berkeley reader 🙂) Arvind, who is on a serious roll. He recently launched an AI-native browser, Comet, and this week bid $34.5B to buy Google Chrome. Now looking to raise more capital at a $20B valuation. I doubt Google is selling Chrome, but it’s a clever way to get publicity. And if they ever said yes, I’m sure someone would find the $34.5B to make it happen! I spoke about this a while ago, but distribution is king and Google Chrome is massive distribution.

I saw this Dharmesh (founder and CTO of Hubspot) post, and it crystallized a couple of thoughts.

The coding market is moving quickly

Cursor exploded to $500M ARR in two years and is rumored to be valued at $20B. Now I keep hearing developers say they are moving to Claude Code (the Claude AI model powers Cursor!). Early AI leaders can lose share quickly, especially when they sit on top of foundational models that want to eat their lunch eventually!

Price wars are coming for “magic” AI features.

Why do I think we are going to see price commoditization? Well there are a few initial ‘magic’ use cases of AI - such as Customer Support, Note Taking, Medical Scribing, Coding, Document Processing to name a few. These just provide out of the box magic.

The first wave of AI use cases — support, note-taking, medical scribing, coding, document processing — all felt magical out of the box. Companies priced them relative to humans (“5x cheaper than a support rep!”). But as contracts renew, buyers start shopping. Competitors undercut. Incumbents bundle. Suddenly, pricing is less about humans and more about GPUs + margin.

We are seeing this writ large in AI medical scribes, one of the breakout use cases in healthcare. Just this year $975M has gone into medical scribes:

Yet in two weeks, Doximity launched a free scribe, and Epic (EHR provider to half of US hospitals) announced one at $59/month — while Abridge, which Epic partially owns, charges $200/month. (Side note – amazing podcast on the history of EPIC).

What can you do if you are in a fight like this? Well, Abridge quickly announced that they are moving into prior authorization. So other startups up probably need to think along similar lines:

• Realise that the ‘magic’ AI feature is only likely to be a small wedge and quickly expand within customers workflows to become sticky.

• Assume pricing will compress in many of these categories, but AI can allow you to unlock new customers at a lower cost so the end results will likely still be massive!

Fun times!

In other news, I was invited to my first event as ‘media’. I now feel like a member of the Illuminati! It was a great launch event for a Berkeley-focused book, and I’ll share more once it’s officially out.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 6 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $56M of capital raised from the 11th Aug to 17th August

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

Acquisitions

🥊 Mayweather Boxing + Fitness. Acquisition 🇺🇸Tech-enabled gym chain. 💰 Giant Ideas

🐻 Mike Melby, Founder. BA Political Economy Article

Closed Rounds

💸 OY!. $15.0M Series A 🇮🇩 Digital payments platform. 💰 Saison Capital, Wavemaker Partners

🐻 Hilfi Alkaff, Co-Founder. BS EECS Article

🪙 Cache. $12.5M Series A 🇺🇸 Exchange-fund for concentrated stock portfolios. 💰 BBQ Capital, First Round Capital, Quiet Capital

🐻 Srikanth Narayan, Founder & CEO. MS Human-Computer Interaction Article

🧬 Angiex. $11.0M Series A 🇺🇸 Cancer biotherapeutics. 💰 Agilent Technologies, Apeiron Investment Group, Thiel Capital

🐻 Paul Jaminet, Founder & President. PhD Physics SEC Filing

🚗 Helm.ai. $10.0M Series A 🇺🇸 Autonomous driving AI. 💰 A.Capital Ventures, Sound Ventures, SV Angel

🐻 Vladislav Voroninski, Founder & CEO. PhD Mathematics Article

💊 Bryn Pharma. $4.7M Series A 🇺🇸 Needle-free epinephrine. 💰 Chazen Capital Partners, Fourward Ventures, RezVen Partners

🐻 Steve Hartman, Co-Founder. BS Business SEC Filing

🧪 Nanotein Technologies. $3.0M Seed 🇺🇸 Cancer cell-therapy tools. 💰 Polaris Group

🐻 Curtis Hodge, Founder & CEO. Post Doc 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.

• Did we miss a company or want to announce a round? Add it here, and we will post it next week.

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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….