Deal of the Week
Slow week out there — might even be the slowest on our record, with just $6.3M raised. Maybe it’s the calm before the storm, or maybe no one wants to announce before a long weekend.
That entire $6.3M was raised by Benji, which helps power company loyalty programs, including JetBlue.
Loyalty programs are huge businesses, and one of my favorite (directionally correct) stats is that U.S. airlines would basically not be profitable without their loyalty programs.
My other favorite example: Starbucks holds around $2B in its prepaid loyalty program at zero percent interest, and probably even makes money on top of that, given that maybe ~10% of balances go unclaimed.
Congratulations to Benji and Nick Anastasiades on the round.
SpaceX IPO Incoming
SpaceX dropped its IPO prospectus and it’s worth reading for the pictures alone.
Love him or hate him, what Elon Musk and the SpaceX team have built is undeniably impressive (also shoutout to the less-covered but indispensable President, Gwynee Shotwell). It’s pretty remarkable that a private company built reusable rockets and a satellite network through Starlink that now provides internet access across the globe, including many places that previously had none.
Is it worth the reported $2T valuation Musk is targeting? Not by any traditional metric. But will it pop massively post-IPO? I think so. Not investment advice but an interesting way to play this pre IPO is to buy EcoStar a listed company that apparently owns ~2% of SpaceX.
The second-order implications are exciting too.
This is a huge moment for venture capital. LPs have been starved of liquidity for years, and this could return a significant amount of capital back into the ecosystem. Well done to Washington University’s endowment, which reportedly made an early $50M investment now worth ~$1.7B, alongside firms like Founders Fund and many others.
Could this finally reopen the mythical “IPO window”? For years there’s been talk of an IPO bonanza (including from me back in 2025 here and here) that proved a little premature. But now it feels like we may actually be at the precipice. Rumors are already circulating that OpenAI and Anthropic could file as well. Given the amount of capital both businesses need, it increasingly feels inevitable.
Quick Takes
This has got to be the fastest revenue ramp of all time at a massive scale?
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
2 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$6.3M of capital raised from the 18th April to 24th May
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Acquisition
🧬 Engage Bio. $202.0M Acquisition 🇺🇸 Non-viral DNA medicines. 💰 Eli Lilly
🐻 Kathryn Strobel Kwant, Co-Founder & CSO. PhD Biomolecular Eng. Article
Closed Rounds
💳 Benji. $6.3M Seed 🇺🇸 Loyalty payments API. 💰 Preface Ventures, Great North Ventures
🐻 Nick Anastasiades, Co-Founder & CEO. BA Psychology. Article
♻️ TreaTech. Incubator 🇨🇭 Waste-to-renewable gas. 💰 Undisclosed
🐻 Frédéric Juillard, CEO & Founder. MS Biomechanics
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($M) |
7/8/24 | 753 | 212,199 |
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