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. 🐻

Wowzers… a $100M seed round was just announced for LM Arena (Chatbot Arena) at a $600M valuation, led by a16z and the University of California. This is the LLM leaderboard I’ve spoken (number 7!) about before. The de facto rankings site for AI models, so popular that Meta is rumored to have “tweaked” its entry to climb the charts. Pretty cool progress for something that (probably?) started as a bit of fun!

Apparently, they have 2.8M users. It was started by various Berkeley PhD’s including Wei-Lin Chiang and Anastasios Angelopoulos. Also, the legend that is Ion Stoica (Berkeley professor + a founder of Databricks, Anyscale and various others) is the Chairman so I am sure something interesting will come out of this. This reinforces my belief that Berkeley is at the cutting edge of AI research.

For my a16z readers, my inbox is open for Term Sheets for Built By Berkeley (happy with a ~$100M valuation 😂).

I spoke a while back about San Francisco is coming back, this continues to show momentum with many (and more) saying that the AI excitement is making them move back from places like Austin. Also see this tourist video showing SF in its best light while also announcing OpenAI’s $6.5B acquisition of Jony Ive’s IO that shows the company are thinking of ways to build their own unique distribution something we touched on last week.

This was a pretty crazy image I saw comparing US and EU Companies Less than 50 Years Old with $10B+ Market Cap’s.

Followed by Private US and EU Unicorns…

As a proud British person (and previously European), it would be great to see more huge companies that company out of Europe, but the above also serves to highlight the gravity of building massive company to being in SF/The Bay.

Finally congrats to Elliot Cohen (BA EECS), he sold PillPack in 2018 to Amazon for a cool $1B and he is back for more announcing his new startup General Medicine that is a healthcare marketplace to reduce the cost of expert care. Best of luck!

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 6 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $217M of capital raised from the 19th May to 25th May

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Acquisition

🧠 Arcus was acquired by Addepar. Undisclosed Acquisition 🇺🇸 AI data platform for enterprise workflows. 💰 Addepar

🐻 Kunal Gosar, CEO & Founder. EECS. Article

📸 Captiv8 was acquired by Publicis Groupe. $150.0M Acquisition 🇺🇸 Influencer marketing platform. 💰 Publicis Groupe

🐻 Taz Patel, Co-Founder. BA Pre-Law. Article

Closed Rounds

🤖 Chatbot Arena $100.0M Seed Round 🇺🇸 AI model benchmarking platform. 💰 Andreessen Horowitz, University of California

🐻 Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO & Founder. PhD EECS. Article

🎥 VuMedi $80.0M Series C 🇺🇸 Medical video education platform. 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Roman Giverts, CEO & Founder. BA Operations Research.

🩺 General Medicine $32.0M Series A 🇺🇸 On-demand healthcare marketplace. 💰 Matrix Partners, Solari Capital

🐻 Elliot Cohen, Co-Founder & Chairman. BA EECS. Article

🏭 Overview $3.8M Series B 🇺🇸 AI-powered manufacturing inspection. 💰 Alumni Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Array Ventures

🐻 Russell Nibbelink, Co-Founder & Head of Sales Engineering.

🌍 Travaras $1.5M Angel 🇺🇸 Sustainable travel booking platform. 💰 Blue Startups, Techstars

🐻 Jennifer Loh, Founder. Haas MBA. Article

🎬 Promise Seed Round 🇺🇸 Generative AI entertainment studio. 💰 Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Crossbeam Venture Partners

🐻 George Strompolos, Co-Founder & CEO. BA Mass Communications. Article

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….