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. 🐻

John Schuluman (Berkeley PhD) seems to have a knack for being part of high-profile startups. First he co-founded OpenAI. Now, he’s behind Thinking Machines, which just announced a pretty wild $2B seed (wowzers!) round. Possibly the largest ever.

No one quite knows what the company does, but it’s led by Mira Murtai the former CTO of OpenAI, who’s said to be a talent magnet. That said, at the current pace Zuckerberg is moving, $2B might only buy you about 1 and 2/3rds top-tier AI researchers… There’s an unconfirmed rumor that Zuck offered $1.2B for one OpenAI researcher alone.

They say you should hire missionaries, not mercenaries, but at $1.2B a head, don’t all missionaries eventually become mercenaries?

Last week I alluded to the Google / Windsurf / Cognition funny business. It turns out there’s a Berkeley angle here. Thanks to friend of the newsletter Will M for pointing it out.

Jeff Wang, a Haas alum, stepped in as CEO of Windsurf after the founders and most of the engineering team left to join Google in a $2.5B talent acquisition. Jeff then negotiated a sale of the remaining company to AI coding startup Cognition, which looks like a win all around.

Cognition picked up a business with ~$85M in ARR for about $250M (a bargain in this market), Google got the talent it wanted, and Jeff and team likely walked away with a fairly large chunk of change. Interesting post here with Jeff’s side of the story.

Some other fun stuff I recommend reading…

• First Round – Memo on the impact and implementation of AI at Shopify. Some good takeaways. Separately, I looked into Shopify’s efficiency: operating expenses fell to 36% of revenue in Q1 2025, down from 51% in Q1 2023. Obviously, AI is a great narrative for the stock, but it does seem to be genuinely driving efficiencies.

• Calvin French-Owen (Co-Founder of Segment, acquired by Twilio for $3B) – Article on his experience working at OpenAI. Super interesting to get a view into how OpenAI operates, both technically and culturally.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 5 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $3.4B of capital raised from the 14th July to 20th July

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

Closed Rounds

🤖 Thinking Machines Lab. $3B Seed 🇺🇸 Multimodal AI research company. 💰Accel, AMD Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz

🐻 John Schulman, Co‑Founder & Chief Scientist. PhD EECS. Article

🌞 38 Degrees North. $230M PE Growth/Expansion 🇺🇸 Sustainable infrastructure operator. 💰 Climate Adaptive Infrastructure, Kimmeridge, S2G Investments

🐻 Jake Carney, Founder & Partner. Haas MBA. Article

🌊 CorPower Ocean. $37M Series B 🇸🇪 Wave‑energy converter developer. 💰 Cisco Investments, NextWave Ventures

🐻 Patrik Möller, Founder. MSC Semiconductors. Article

🧠 SuperAnnotate. $13M Series B 🇺🇸 AI annotation software. 💰 Base10 Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Glynn Capital

🐻 Jason Liang, Co‑Founder & SVP of BD. Haas MBA. Article

🛎️ GoGoGrandparent. $0.2M Accelerator  🇺🇸 Phone‑based senior access platform. 💰 MassChallenge, Plug and Play Tech Center, Y Combinator

🐻 David Lung, Co‑Founder. Architecture & Structural Engineering.

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.

• Do you have a job you want to post from a Berkeley Company? Add here.

• Is there someone in the Berkeley ecosystem that you would want us to do a profile on? A founder, funder, or general startup person? Add here.

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