Built By Berkeley

Deal of the Week

One thing Berkeley is pretty poor at doing is celebrating our winners. Did you know that the co-founder of Allbirds went to Berkeley?! That’s right — Joey Zwillinger was the co-founder and CEO. Allbirds was a phenomenon, built around ethical, comfortable shoes. It’s had a tougher time in the public markets, reaching a peak valuation of $4.1B before falling to ~$37M today. I’m sure a whole post could be written on what happened there.

Joey is now back, launching Biologica, an all-in-one daily supplement. Supplements are big business. Another example: Grüns, which is essentially Athletic Greens but in gummy form, is already at ~$300M ARR in just two years. Who needs a fancy AI company when you can sell gummies!?

More broadly, it feels like in the age of AI, consumer startups are back. My theory is that if you’re able to use AI well, you can leverage these tools to supercharge growth, and platform shifts typically mean new consumer businesses emerge. A lot of VC funds shut down their consumer teams, but now seem to be hiring aggressively again!

Waymo on a Tear

Berkeley founded Waymo continues to be on a tear, not just with more share than LYFT in SF, but also with the following crazy metrics:

• 14 million trips so far in 2025 alone

• 10 fold reduction in serious injury

• Now operating on freeways

• 20 new cities expected in 2026

The future is here. So what now?! There are still a lot of things that need to be worked out for autonomous driving to really take off:

• Who owns the fleets? I’m not sure Google wants to own fleets of autonomous vehicles and likely prefers to license the software instead.

• Infrastructure matters. Alongside the vehicles, you need cleaning and charging infrastructure, which could be particularly hard to make work in dense cities.

• Do the unit economics pencil? Estimates for a Jaguar Waymo are ~$150–300K. That’s a tough comparison versus a $15K second-hand car, which is why Google is testing the tech across other vehicle platforms.

• What does Tesla do? Tesla is also trialing autonomous driving and is pushing a model where you can eventually lease out your own Tesla. This neatly solves the “who owns the fleet?” problem.

• And what about Uber? In this new world, are they the dominant marketplace or the dinosaur?

I’m sure all of this will get worked out, but the technology feels like it’s accelerating fast. Now the economics need to catch up.

Productive Bubble or Destructive Bubble?

If you have time, this newsletter is well worth a read from legendary investor Howard Marks. He looks at today’s market and has an interesting take on productive bubbles (railways, dotcom) versus reductive bubbles, which are typically driven by financial engineering. Think the South Sea Bubble or 2008.

Quick takes:

• Note: Thanks to one of our avid readers who corrected me on the origin of the Anthropic AI model last week. It was actually named after Claude Shannon, not the recently deceased albino alligator Claude. Although he remains the unofficial mascot.

• Special congrats to a good friend of the newsletter, David Bloom, on his promotion to Partner at The House Fund. A great guy and a friend of mine personally, and to the Berkeley ecosystem more broadly.

• When venture works it is a beautiful thing - Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund invested $20M in SpaceX in 2008, this was a $227M fund (this is a big bet out of one fund!) and something Founders Fund do regularly with some pretty amazing success. I am sure they have continually doubled down but they now own ~10% of SpaceX (~$80B of value at the latest buy back of $150B of value at the touted IPO). Am sure that is a pretty tasty looking return for that fund!

• Things also seem to be getting a little competitive when a Berkeley PhD is caught sabotaging someone else’s work.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 9 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $197M of capital raised from the 8th Dec to 14th Dec

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

Acquisition

🎯 Swarm. Acquisition 🇱🇮 Decentralized finance platform. 💰 Inveniam

🐻 Philipp Pieper, Co‑Founder. BA Haas Article

💻 vCom Solutions. Acquisition 🇺🇸 IT lifecycle management. 💰AppDirect

🐻 Gary Storm, President & CEO. BA Article

🧬 Orbital Therapeutics. $1.5B Acquisition 🇺🇸 RNA therapeutics platform. 💰 Bristol Myers Squibb

🐻 Kristina Burow, Founder & Board Member. BS Chemistry Article

Closed Rounds

💊 BlossomHill Therapeutics. $84.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Oncology & autoimmune drugs. 💰 Plaisance Capital Management, Vivo Capital

🐻 J. Jean Cui, Co‑Founder & CEO. Post Doc Article

🧠 Radial Health. $40.0M Series A 🇺🇸 Psychedelic mental healthcare. 💰 BoxGroup, Founder Collective, General Catalyst

🐻 Elliot Cohen, Co‑Founder & Exec Chair. BA EECS Article

📡 Newsonic Technologies. $37.9M Series C 🇨🇳 High‑end RF filters. 💰 Hongsheng Investment Management, Zihe Capital

🐻 Jie Zou, CEO. MS & PhD EECS

🤖 Surf. $15.0M Series A 🇺🇸 AI crypto market intelligence. 💰 Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Pantera Capital

🐻 Ryan Li, Co‑Founder & CEO. BA EECS Article

⚡ Smart Joules. $10.0M Series B 🇮🇳 Building energy optimization. 💰 Sangam Ventures

🐻 Arjun Gupta, Founder & CEO. BS Civil Eng Article

🌿 Biologica. $7.0M Seed Round 🇺🇸 Women’s nutrition supplements. 💰 Addition, Greycroft

🐻 Joseph Zwillinger, Co‑Founder. BS Industrial Eng Article

💼 BON Credit. $3.5M Seed Round 🇺🇸 Crypto investment platform. 💰 Accel, Canaan Partners, Foundation Capital

🐻 Darwin Tu, Co‑Founder. MS Business Admin Article

🧫 Matrubials. $0.05M Grant 🇺🇸 AI for anti‑pathogenic therapeutics. 💰 Gaingels, Y Combinator

🐻 Carlito Lebrilla, Co‑Founder. PhD Organic Chem Article

🌍 Unravel Carbon. Seed Round 🇸🇬 AI decarbonization platform. 💰 Gaingels, Global Founders Capital, Sequoia Capital

🐻 Kevin Teng, Co‑Founder. BA EECS 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….

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. 🐻