Deal of the Week
Just last September we posted about our friend Michael LaFramboise (Haas MBA), who had just announced a $10M seed round for his company Aurelius Systems. Well, just a year later they announced a $40M Series A. Wowzers!
The Iran/Ukraine war has catalysed three things:
Increased military spending by gov’s across the world.
Efforts to modernize and infuse AI across militaries (Anduril reportedly looking to raise at $100B, and Palantir just announced they were growing at 93% y-o-y — this is insane at their scale).
And the realisation that the battlefield is changing, with drones flipping the equation away from high-capital-cost equipment to lower-cost, more nimble solutions. No one really wants to use a $12–15M THAAD interceptor to shoot down a drone bought for a few hundred dollars.
This is where Aurelius steps in, and they are building energy weapons to zap those drones out of the sky in a cheap way.
Not content with just doing this, Michael and the team are building the manufacturing facilities to build these lasers and really scale up into the demand pull they are getting from the military. If this story of a UK naval ship sending data to China from a Chinese made component is true then expect more of parts manufacturing to move out of China in military supply chains.
Congrats to the team at Aurelius!
Only problem here…I am sadly not an investor ☹️
AI is really just electrons
We previously touched on power as one of the biggest factors in the AI buildout, with the US currently losing against China. Now many other investors are turning a lot of attention to this, with a slew of nuclear startups and other forms of energy (Berkeley-founded Antora last week being another one).
Ribbit, who write some great content, recently released a Letter around this power bottleneck. Give it a read, but the bottom line is we are short a lot of power if the AI buildout is going to materialise.
Step in — capitalism — which is now going into overdrive to solve the power issue. It is going to be fascinating, and probably profitable, to see how this mix plays out. The below succinctly lays out the areas this capital will likely flow to.
This is showing up in the numbers. The US economy is increasingly being powered by a generational infrastructure buildout. See how US construction spending on data centers is now more than general office buildout.
Quick Takes
Interesting that Robinhood is doing a listed fund to invest in YC companies at an early stage. A few Berkeley companies are in there, including Opalite.
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
8 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$123M of capital raised from the 3rd August to 9th August
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Acquisitions
⚡ Wallaroo.AI Acquisition 🇺🇸 AI inference deployment software. 💰 d-Matrix.
Closed Rounds
🔬 Multibeam. $50M Series B 🇺🇸 Maskless semiconductor lithography systems. 💰 Onto Innovation, Lam Capital, UMC Capital.
🐻 Ted Prescop, VP Technology. BS Engineering Physics & MS Mechanical Engineering Article
🔫 Aurelius Systems. $40M Series A 🇺🇸 Autonomous counter-drone laser systems. 💰 Draper Associates, KAS Venture Partners, General Catalyst.
🐻 Michael LaFramboise, Co-Founder & CEO. MBA/MEng. Article
🤖 Naïve. $28.5M Series A 🇺🇸 Infrastructure for autonomous AI companies. 💰 Nexus Venture Partners, Zetta Venture Partners, Liquid 2 Ventures.
🐻 Sean Dorje, Co-Founder & CEO. Co-Founder & CEO. BA EECS Article
🧬 INNOVOTEX. $4.M Seed 🇺🇸 Tumor-targeting oncology therapeutics. 💰 Keiretsu Forum, University of Toronto,
🐻 Jonathan Sessler, Co-Founder & CSO. BS Chemistry. Article
🌱 altM. Early Stage 🇮🇳 Bio-based industrial materials. 💰 Omnivore, Theia Ventures, Thai Wah Ventures.
🐻 Apoorv Garg, Co-Founder & CEO. MEng.
🛡️ Precursory Technologies. Undisclosed 🇺🇸 Insurance for AI-agent performance. 💰 NewBuild Venture Capital
🐻 Mohan Krishnamurthy, Co-Founder & CEO. Haas MBA
🏥 Readily. Early Stage VC 🇺🇸 AI healthcare compliance software. 💰 Y Combinator
🐻 Edward Tiong, Founder & CEO. MEng Industrial Engineering & Operations Research
🦼 Strutt. Seed Round 🇸🇬 Smart personal mobility vehicles. 💰 Matter Venture Partners, Monad Ventures
🐻 Tony Hong, Founder & CEO. PhD Physics.
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($M) |
7/8/24 | 826 | 233,070 |
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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. 🐻
