Built By Berkeley

From Legal AI to Blockchain Infrastructure: $66M Raised

Author

Xan Wood
June 02, 2025

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. 🐻

GC AI announced a Series A raise led by Sound Ventures (the VC run by Ashton Kutcher). This is personally a fun one for me. I have known Cecilia Ziniti (A Berkeley JD grad!) the founder of GC AI for a couple of years from when she was just throwing around the idea of GC AI and am a small investor. They are an AI co-pilot for in-house lawyers.

This is the most rewarding part of investing is seeing someone take nothing and build a verifiable rocket ship and becoming a great friend:

Why does Cecilia and team win?

  • Unstoppable: I haven’t witnessed it myself, but I’m convinced she’d run through a wall to make GC AI happen.

  • Deep domain expertise: Her customers love that Cecilia knows the space cold. She’s lived the in-house lawyer problem set at Replit, Amazon and Cruise, so she understands the workflows and pain points intimately. Paired with co-founder Bardia Pourvakil’s technical expertise, it’s a potent combo. GC AI feels magical out of the box.

  • Educating, not just selling: Cecilia and team host AI masterclasses to help people learn and use the product. It builds trust beyond the sale, with built-in network effects to grow the business.

If you want to try out GC AI let me know. 

If you have time I would highly recommend reading this (340 page!) report by Mary Meeker. She is the founder of BOND Capital and a well known tech analyst. The report is on the state of AI. It is great!

Some thoughts that this sparked and I have been having more generally:

  1. The speed of change is so fast, it feels we are underestimating this exponential nature (see below with ChatGPT as a proxy for the speed of change). 

  1. It is still early but the ‘early’ window will likely be correspondingly smaller than previous cycles just because the velocity of this cycle is faster

  1. The size of markets in an interconnected world is just massive

  1. Self driving cars are coming and I am not sure we really understand the impact this will have on cities in the long term. 

5. Real moats are ephemeral in AI (outside of distribution that gives you a head start). All you can do is execute at breakneck speed. Great piece on this here.

  1. Not the most unique thought but some of the bigger winners of this AI wave are likely to be the incumbents (e.g. Mag 7) who are going to be able to utilize AI in so many ways to make themselves more profitable.

    1. A fun quote I heard here was - Over the last 15 years betting against Google was like betting that the dollar will lose reserve status. Popular to do, never shown up in the data.

  1. Robotics and automation is coming and will be an enormous wave. Bigger than the AI software that is dominating the zeitgeist?

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

  • 5 Berkeley-founded companies funded

  • $66M of capital raised from the 36th May to 1st June

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

Closed Rounds

🛠️ Kadena. $35M Later Stage VC 🇺🇸 Blockchain infrastructure platform. 💰 Amino Capital, Susquehanna International Group, Vy Capital

🐻 Stuart Popejoy, Founder & CEO. BA Comparative Literature

⚡ Gridcare. $13.5M Seed Round 🇺🇸 AI-powered grid planner. 💰 Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Clocktower Ventures, Temasek Holdings

🐻 Amit Narayan, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD Electrical Engineering Article

⚖️ GC AI. $10M Series A 🇺🇸 Legal generative AI tools for in-house lawyers. 💰 Sound Ventures, Courtyard Ventures, Fellows Fund

🐻 Cecilia Ziniti, Co-Founder & CEO. JD Law Article

🧠 Godot. $7.7M Series A 🇯🇵 AI behavioral science tools. 💰 Dawn Capital

🐻 Go Suzui, Co-Founder & CTO. MS Development Practice Article

🌊 OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch. $0.05M Grant 🇺🇸 Sustainable seafood producer. 💰 Hatch Blue, Washington Maritime Blue

🐻 Aaron Huang, Co-Founder & CEO. Berkeley Extension

Built By Berkeley Tracker

Date Built By Berkeley Started

Companies Funded

Total Raised ($M)

7/8/24

385

71,250

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