Built By Berkeley

Come and Hang at Cal Café w/ Canvas Prime & DTCP for some bagels and coffee on 19th Feb 2025. All Berkeley Founders, Funders & Friends invited.

Deal of the Week:

Big win for Fieldguide  and its Haas MBA founder, Jin. I had the pleasure of being on a panel with him recently. He is a genuinely thoughtful person. Fieldguide was early to the agentic AI future and now works with 50 of the top 100 CPA firms, including big players like KPMG, using AI to supercharge audit and advisory work.

This feels like a great use case for AI: an area where accuracy really matters and workflows need to be deeply customized. There’s a lot of value in eliminating busywork and improving accuracy. Even auditors make mistakes! Goldman Sachs seem to agree and just led a $75M round at a $700M valuation. Congrats!

AI Taking Over the Superbowl 

It felt like AI completely took over the Super Bowl ad breaks, with the major model companies all out showcasing their wares. Competition is clearly heating up. Anthropic went for the jugular at OpenAI’s upcoming ads. The Anthropic ads were great and seemed to get Sam Altman a little worked up. 

What really blew my mind, though, was the ai.com story. The founder of Crypto.com recently bought the domain for a reported $70M, then ran a Super Bowl ad (another $10M+?) to drive traffic to it. Only for the site to crash under the load. I am fascinated by who sold ai.com for $70M, and I can’t help but dream that it was someone with the initials A and I who bought it years ago for nothing. The AI world is wild.

CAPEX Is Not Slowing Down

All the hyperscalers reported earnings last week. Results were strong, but what really stood out were the 2026 capex expectations: nearly $700B (4x+ 2023!), and likely still going higher. That’s ~2.1% of U.S. GDP and more than the entire German government budget. The scale here is genuinely mind-boggling.

The image below is from 2025, but if you extrapolate to 2026, big tech capex as a percentage of GDP surpasses the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, the interstate highway system, broadband build-out, and even U.S. electrification. Insane.

One thing this really highlights: frontier AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI) are going to need extraordinary amounts of capital just to keep up with the hyperscalers. Anthropic is reportedly closing a $20B round, and OpenAI is looking to raise $100B. This just feels like peanuts compared to the capital bazookas the big players can deploy, sustained by massive free cash flow and fortress balance sheets. Everyone keeps asking when the frontier labs will go public; at this point, it feels less like an option and more like a necessity.

What a time to be building a startup on top of this once-in-a-generation infrastructure build-out. 

Magic Moment

There are lots of AI “magic moments,” but I want to call out one I had this week. I used the Claude (Anthropic) Excel plugin.

The Claude plugin is genuinely magic for certain tasks. In this case, I was building a cap table for an upcoming investment. What would normally take an hour was generated cleanly in about 15 minutes. You still need to understand the nuances: SAFE conversions, option pools, term sheets etf but the time savings were incredible. I’ve also been using Claude to spot errors in spreadsheets I am sent and to run quick analyses. Go try it. It’s amazing.

It does raise an interesting concern, though: how do people in finance learn when so much of financial modeling has traditionally been about doing the work to really understand the business? If you can just generate the model, do you still build that intuition?

That said, these tools will only get better for finance use cases. A Berkeley company, Fundamental, just announced a $255M round to build a large tabular model designed for analyzing millions of rows of data. The direction of travel here feels very clear, finance is next on the AI revolutions road map after customer service and coding breakouts. 

Nice to see Berkeley top of the pops in terms of founders from the latest Y Combinator  batch. Two times in a row. 

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 7 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $1.65B of capital raised from the 2nd Feb to 8th Feb

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

IPOs

🧬 Eikon Therapeutics. $381.2M IPO 🇺🇲 Clinical-stage biopharma company. 💰 IPO

🐻 Robert Tjian, Founder & CSO. Professor · Article

🧃 Once Upon a Farm. $198.0M IPO 🇺🇲 Organic baby food brand. 💰IPO

🐻 John Foraker, Co-Founder & CEO. Haas MBA · Article

Closed Rounds

🧠 Cerebras Systems. $1.1B Series H 🇺🇲 AI supercomputing infrastructure. 💰 Benchmark Capital, Fidelity, Hanabi Capital Management

🐻 Michael James, Founder & Chief Architect. BA EECS · Article

📊 Fundamental Labs. $255.0M Series A 🇺🇲 Structured data intelligence. 💰 Oak HC/FT, Battery Ventures, Valor Equity Partners

🐻 Jeremy Fraenkel, CEO & Co-Founder. MS Machine Learning · Article

🩺 Alan. $117.4M Later Stage 🇫🇷 Corporate digital health insurance. 💰 Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global

🐻 Charles Gorintin, Co-Founder & CTO. MFE Financial Engineering

📁 Fieldguide. $75.0M Series C 🇺🇲 Audit workflow automation. 💰 Goldman Sachs, Geodesic Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners

🐻 Jin Chang, CEO & Co-Founder. Haas MBA · Article

🧩 Gruve. $70.0M Series A 🇺🇲 Enterprise AI transformation platform. 💰 Mayfield Fund, Cisco Investments

🐻 Tarun Raisoni, Founder & CEO. Financial Engineering · Article

🔄 Turnstile. $29.0M Series A 🇺🇲 Revenue automation software. 💰 First Round Capital, Flex Capital*, OMERS Ventures

🐻 Jordan Zamir, Co-Founder & CEO. BS EECS · Article

🧳 BizTrip. $2.5M Seed 🇺🇲 AI corporate travel platform. 💰 AI Fund, Correlation Ventures, RRE Ventures

🐻 Scott Persinger, Co-Founder & CTO. BA EECS · Article

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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. 🐻