Deal of the Week
Hadrian raised $40M for an offensive cybersecurity hacking platform. These guys use AI to try to hack companies that are their customers. Luckily, they are the good guys, and the idea is to let you know where your vulnerabilities are.
Back in November 2025, I touched on the ‘Golden Age of Cyber’ and then the Cyber Explosion in April.
It really does seem that AI creates endless opportunities for both cyber and fraud in general. So it feels like we are entering a generational moment in cybersecurity, where systems need to be fully rethought to fend off agentic attacks and infrastructure needs to be upgraded.
My big regret? Not buying Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike when everyone thought Anthropic would make them extinct.
Congrats to Maurice and the team!
Honourable mention to Arena, which raised a $200M round and which we have covered a couple of times here and here.
Berkeley’s Economic Impact
$8.3T is the combined market cap of the 17 S&P 500 companies with University of California, Berkeley origins.
Pretty incredible when you start to dig into the impact Berkeley founders have had and continue to have on the world.
17 companies in the S&P 500 have Berkeley origins (3.4%)
722,000 people employed there (wow!)
$8.3T in market cap - roughly 2x the UK stock market!
What is sort of crazy is that the number of companies will likely increase in coming years.
Why? The Nasdaq-100 which is more heavily weighted towards high growth tech companies (something Berkeley excels at!) has a massive 11% of Berkeley founded companies. More on that in another post.
Something else interesting is happening in venture. The biggest winners are getting MUCH bigger.
This chart from VenCap illustrates it nicely. In 2020–2024, the median of the top 50 exits was $9.4B, and the average was $14.8B. Today the median of the top 50 largest outcomes is $22B, while the average has exploded to $110B! Admittedly, the latest figures include private company valuations rather than just exits, but the direction is fascinating.
This is the power law at work. A small number of companies create an outsized proportion of the value (great book this). The same is true in venture, where research suggests that just 5% of VCs generate roughly 90% of the profits (just need to make sure I am one of them!).
Which brings me back to Berkeley.
I think Berkeley might be one of the great power-law ecosystems.
Look at the numbers. 17 companies in the S&P 500 with Berkeley origins, worth a combined $8.3T. And 11% of the Nasdaq-100 have Berkeley origins.
My hypothesis is that Berkeley has an unusually high propensity to produce these outsized winners. And in a world where the biggest outcomes are becoming exponentially more valuable, being deeply connected to an ecosystem capable of producing them becomes even more important.
The question isn't just how many startups Berkeley produces. It's how many of the next $100B or $1T companies will come from Berkeley. I think a lot!
Superintelligence is science fiction
In a world where everyone seems to be breathlessly calling for an AI slowdown, it was refreshing to read this interview with Berkeley professor Michael I. Jordan.
His view on some of the discourse happening around superintelligence:
Not absurd, but let’s say it’s a science-fiction term. And a large part of the debates I’ve witnessed belong to the realm of science fiction. Which isn’t a problem in itself: from time to time, society needs to talk about far-fetched things. Talking about it behind the scenes, as a science-fiction topic, is fine. But when it becomes the dominant discourse, it’s very, very harmful. For technological development, for young people, and for the mindset of countries alike.
Nice to see the interview ending on a positive note regarding the technology:
I think we have to be. We mustn’t forget that there are 7 billion of us on this planet. So we can throw up our hands and say that we’re running out of resources, but technology helps create resources. Indeed, the logistics systems we currently have, which deliver goods to every person in every city, all run on AI and machine learning. If there were 1,000 or 100,000 of us on Earth, we wouldn’t need such technology, but that’s not the case. And we can’t just proceed by making people feel guilty to discourage them from using technology. It’s a left-wing tendency that you have to some extent in Paris. Something like: “Let’s not use air conditioners because that makes global warming even worse.” Well, it’s like a refrigerator: are we going to make people feel guilty because they use refrigerators?
Perhaps an interesting counterpoint to this interview came from a post by Andrej Karpathy (a co-founder of OpenAI), who estimated that only around 5,000 people in the world (0.00006%) have access to frontier-grade AI models and are working with swarms of thousands of agents.
So, on the one hand, we have one of the pioneers of machine learning arguing that much of the superintelligence narrative is science fiction. On the other, we have another pioneer suggesting that almost nobody has actually experienced what the most advanced AI systems are already capable of doing.
Perhaps both are right. The capabilities are extraordinary, but that doesn't necessarily mean superintelligence is around the corner.
What an interesting time to be living in!
Nobel Train Continues
Not quite the blockbuster year of last year (when I thought we might run out of parking spots). But still not bad — two winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics with Berkeley ties: Michael Woodford and Robert E. Hall.
Quick Takes
Just a week after we discussed AI roll-ups, a favorite of the newsletter, Masa Son of SoftBank, is at it again and is looking to raise $100B for AI roll-ups. (Check out our old posts on him here and here.) Everyone is seeing the opportunity to take over a company and infuse it with AI. For example, Instacart founder Ravi Gupta took a swing at Bumble in a take-private deal announced today. Masa is a serious Berkeley GOAT.
Interesting post from Satya Nadella of Microsoft on Models as Insider Risks
A good read on the ‘State of AI’
How will Agents change the economy - a must read from the founder of Stripe.
Intelligence Continues to get Cheaper and Cheaper while the demand goes vertical!
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
9 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$637M of capital raised from the 5th October to 11th October
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Acquisitions / IPOs
💰 Rocscience. $535.0M Acquisition 🇨🇦 Geotechnical engineering simulation software. 💰 Acquired by Hexagon
🐻 John Curran, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD Mechanical Engineering. Article.
💳 Routable. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Automated global B2B payments. 💰Anchorage Digital.
🚗 Smartcar. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Connected vehicle API platform. 💰 Everyday Electric.
🐻 Sanketh Katta, Co-Founder & CTO. BA Operations Research. Article
🧬 Lycia Therapeutics. $100.0M Proposed IPO 🇺🇸 Extracellular protein degradation therapeutics. 💰 IPO
🐻 Carolyn Bertozzi, Co-Founder & Board Chair. PhD Chemistry. Article
Closed Rounds
🤖 Arena. $200.0M Series B 🇺🇸 AI model evaluation platform. 💰 Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Salesforce Ventures.
🐻 Wei-Lin Chiang, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD EECS (2024). Anastasios Angelopoulos, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD EECS (2024). Article
💊 Matchpoint Therapeutics. $150.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Precision covalent immune medicines. 💰 Nextech Invest, Norwest, Invus.
🐻 Nathanael Gray, Co-Founder. PhD Chemistry. Article.
🏥 General Medicine. $120.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Online marketplace for healthcare. 💰 Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix, Eli Lilly.
🐻 Elliot Cohen, Co-Founder & President. BA EECS. Article.
🧪 KymaThera. $80.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Precision medicines for genetic diseases. 💰 Alta Partners, Venrock, Foresite Capital.
🛡️ Hadrian. $40.0M Series B 🇳🇱 Agentic AI offensive cybersecurity. 💰 Forgepoint Capital, SmartFin, HV Capital.
🐻 Maurice Clin, Co-Founder & Head of Business Development. Haas MBA. Article.
🐻 Yann Fleureau, Co-Founder. Entrepreneurship Article
💳 NeoGrowth. $9.0M Funding 🇮🇳 Digital lending for small businesses. 💰 FMO, LeapFrog Investments.
🐻 Dhruv Khaitan, Co-Founder. Master's, UC Berkeley Article.
🧬 Onyx. $8.0M Seed 🇺🇸 AI-powered virtual immune system. 💰 Dimension, Haystack, Refactor Capital.
🐻 Roger Chen, Co-Founder. PhD EECS. Article.
🎓 Kollegio. $5.3M Series A 🇺🇸 AI-powered college admissions guidance. 💰 Reach Capital, JFFVentures, Alumni Ventures.
🐻 Saeed Naeem, Co-Founder & CTO. BA Applied Mathematics. Article
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($B) |
7/8/24 | 881 | 237.450 |
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.
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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. 🐻
