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. 🐻

With all the recent hiring from Meta, and the (whacky) Google deal for Windsurf after their OpenAI acquisition fell through, we’re deep in an AI talent war. So, are we at the peak of the AI craze? I don’t think so. This still has a long way to run and we are only in the early innings of the productivity gains AI will unlock.

If you look back at previous tectonic technology shifts, each sparked a fundamental change that triggered cascading effects. The Industrial Revolution marked the ‘End of Brute Force Labor’ it unshackled human energy from physical output and put it into machines. The internet brought the ‘End of Information Scarcity’, dismantling traditional information arbitrage models and replacing them with digital platforms. Think travel agents giving way to Booking.com and Skyscanner.

So what’s the fundamental AI transformation? The End of Busy Work. Busy work, to me, is any repetitive task that requires little thought but is critical to a business’s operations: data entry, formatting, coordination, and the like. Right now, far too much of people’s time is spent on this. That’s all going away. The cascading effects? They’ll be massive. So much time and productivity will be unlocked from ending busy work. So this is one of the reasons that you are seeing these talent wars, will some of it be overhyped. Yes. Will there be a tsunami of change. Yes.

Extremely sad news to hear the news of Berkeley Professor Pzemslaw Jeziorski who was shot in Athens.

Check out application for Foundation Capital’s free accelerator Cal Build here, apply before Aug 8th. I hear great things!

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 5 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $251M of capital raised from the 7th July to 20th July

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Closed Rounds

🎭 Robotera $70M Series A 🇨🇳 humanoid robot developer. 💰 Alibaba Group, Turing Ventures, Wing Capital

🐻 Jianyu Chen, Founder & CEO. BA Article

❤️ Belong Health $57M Series C 🇺🇸 Medicare‑advantage plan operator. 💰 Maverick Ventures, New Enterprise Associates

🐻 Patrick Foley, Co‑Founder & CEO. Haas MBA Article

🧬 Synfini $9M Seed 🇺🇸 AI‑powered drug discovery platform. 💰 Foothill Ventures, Jumpstart Ventures, Trust Ventures

🐻 Doug Donzelli, President & CEO. BA EECS Article

📱 Chariot Claims $6M Seed 🇺🇸 class‑action claims filing app. 💰 Indicator Ventures, Lightbank, Neon Ventures

🐻 Christopher Best, Co‑Founder & CTO. BA Article

📚 Zeroentropy $4M Seed 🇺🇸 AI document retrieval pipeline.💰 Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, Y Combinator

🐻 Ghita Alami, Co‑Founder & CEO. MS Applied Maths 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….