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. 🐻

Slow week for fundraising…to be expected at this time of year as it is likely not the best time to be announcing a fund raise. 2024 was a banner year for innovation at Berkeley, so we thought we would do a recap:

Built By Berkeley Top 10 of 2024: 

1. Databricks secured a record-breaking $10B funding round, led by Berkeley founders. The largest ever VC round.

2. OpenAI raised $6.5B, co-founded by Berkeley alum John Schulman. The 2nd largest VC round ever. 

3. Four Nobel Prize laureates with Berkeley connections.

4. Record-breaking Olympic performance: 5 Gold, 10 Silver, 8 Bronze medals. More than many countries! 

5. Berkeley-founded Perplexity emerged as a genuine Google Search competitor, reaching a $9B valuation (9x increase in a year) with 15M+ active users (probably already much higher than this). Along with some unbelievable execution speed.

6. Chatbot Arena, founded at Berkeley, became the industry standard for AI benchmarking.

7. Rich Lyons became the new Berkeley chancellor. We think Rich will be a huge innovation catalyst and know he is a big Built By Berkeley fan! 

8. Berkeley beats Stanford in the Big Game…not innovation but fun nevertheless. 

9. Since launching Built By Berkeley in July 2024: 229 companies tracked, raising $27.4B. ~$1.1B per week raised! 

10. Berkeley leads the Pitchbook rankings with 1,642 VC-backed undergrad alumni-founded companies. 245 more than second-placed Stanford.

I am sure we have missed some milestones, but the above feels fairly massive when you look at it in retrospect.

Berkeley is shaping up to be ground zero of the coming AI wave from a company and research perspective. Looking forward to a bigger and better 2025. 

Onwards! GO BEARS 2025.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 2 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $87M of capital raised from the 23rd December to 29th December

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Closed Rounds

🚘 Seyond. $70M DeSPAC 🇭🇰 LiDAR solution for autonomous driving. 💰Techstar Acquisition Corp

🐻 Junwei Bao, Co-founder & CEO. MS & PhD EECS. Article

🪙 ChainOpera $17M Seed 🇺🇸 Blockchain & Protocol for co-owning and co-creating decentralized AI Apps and Agents. 💰 Finality Capital Road Capital and IDG Capital.

🐻 Salman Avestimehr, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD EECSArticle

Built By Berkeley Tracker

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 is not affiliated with UC Berkeley, but maybe we will be one day if we get enough subscribers….