Deal of the Week
What fun — last week I mentioned that I had a few unannounced Berkeley companies that had raised rounds and been invested in by me, and here is another one. With more to come!
Savvy Wealth (see post from the last round for more details) announced a $100M round. I remember taking the first call with Ritik Malhotra a few years ago at Canvas Prime while part-time. I know he was a little confused that I wasn’t on the website!
What struck us then remains true today. Savvy Wealth is laser-focused on giving time back to advisors and helping them grow their businesses. Advisors on Savvy save an average of 19 hours a week and grow organically at 3x the industry average. Just as importantly, they love the platform and view the team as true partners.
The biggest change has been scale: from ~$4M ARR when we invested in 2024 to $100M in 2026, and from $400M AUM to $9B+ AUM.
Savvy announced a $100M Series C led by Halo Fund, with participation from Canvas.
Huge congrats to the team — onward! And for any wealth advisors out there, don’t sleep on joining the Savvy platform.
Safety or Regulatory Capture?
“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.”
― Charlie Munger
One of my favorite quotes from one of the world’s most legendary investors (and generally a very funny character), Charlie Munger.
And it feels particularly relevant after the last week in AI.
First, the facts.
Last week, an Anthropic employee quit and posted the below. He had relatively few followers, had only been at the company for around a year, and the WSJ had already posted about it before the tweet really took off. His basic point was that he didn’t think the labs were taking AI safety seriously enough.
This was then retweeted by an existing Anthropic employee, who said he believed there was a 10% chance AI could kill all humans in the next decade.
10% is very high!!!!
Then Dario Amodei published a long-form post, effectively arguing that frontier AI development may be moving too quickly and that we should pace the frontier.
Sam Altman and OpenAI broadly agreed. Elon Musk also supported the idea. David Sacks very much did not. Two sworn enemies agreeing is interesting in itself!
Then today, Donald Trump phoned Jensen Huang at the All-In conference and effectively said: no slowdown. AI doom is a hoax, data centres are very good, and America needs to keep building.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg remains relatively quiet and Satya Nadella has posted in support, although clearly not everyone is aligned.
What a fascinating week.
But the Munger quote is what I keep coming back to:
Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
Everyone in this debate has an incentive:
Trump: U.S. dominance vs. China + economic growth. AI is now a meaningful driver of investment and the economy.
Jensen Huang: Sell more chips + avoid becoming dependent on too few customers. See my previous Open Source + Funding posts.
Hyperscalers: Use capital and distribution as a weapon to bludgeon these pesky startups.
Anthropic + OpenAI: Keep AI safe, but also maintain control of the frontier, keep their models premium, and ultimately build very valuable companies.
That doesn’t mean anyone is being disingenuous. Multiple things can be true at once.
AI safety can be a genuine concern and slowing the frontier can benefit the companies already at the frontier.
Just make sure you view everything through this lens and things start to make a lot more sense.
My view. The Hugging Face incident felt pretty whacky, and recursive intelligence does feel pretty seismic if it comes to fruition.
Sadly, the genie feels like it is already out of the bottle on AI. So yes, better safeguards, more monitoring, better evaluations, etc. all make sense. But I struggle to see a unilateral pause actually happening unless China also decides that the risks outweigh the strategic upside.
Finally, it seems that, in the words of Marc Andreessen, Software is Eating the World….
…and apparently politics too 🙂
Are we going to see the Berkeley Cambrian Explosion?
The signs are starting to point toward a Cambrian explosion of Berkeley startups. A few leading indicators stand out:
Y Combinator — Berkeley went from 23 founders in W25 to 45 in W26. Nearly 2x in a year, while most other schools have held relatively steady.
Leading the PitchBook rankings for company formation.
Becoming an open-source leader — see previous posts.
Robotics is taking off — see previous posts.
The dirty secret is that Berkeley is still actually underperforming on a per-student basis in areas like Y Combinator and the PitchBook rankings. Berkeley has ~45k students versus ~17k at Stanford and ~24k at Harvard. That is also what makes the opportunity so exciting: if company formation really is inflecting, Berkeley has the potential to produce startups at a scale few other universities can match. Choose your companies accordingly 🙂
I also think there is a cultural shift underway. Historically, Berkeley founders have often taken a more circuitous path — joining a leading tech company first and starting something later. That appears to be changing. More students are seeing startups as a credible first choice, more successful founders are emerging as role models, and more capital is starting to flow into the ecosystem.
If that continues, the next decade of Berkeley company formation could look very different from the last.
Quick Takes
The Empire Strikes Back — Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent to rival Instinct, which is reportedly in talks of raising at a $20B valuation with no revenue. Always a good time to rewatch this clip. I really do think this feels like a great way to interact with AI — inside messages, where people already spend so much of their time. If these products take off, I think they could materially change the AI landscape.
Profile on Mark Zuckerberg released today - not read yet but generally a good publication
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
5 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$2.01B of capital raised from the 7th September to 13th September
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Acquisitions
🔌 Alif Semiconductor. $1.4B Acquisition 🇺🇸 Edge-AI microcontrollers and processors. 💰 Analog Devices
🐻 Reza Kazerounian, Co-Founder & President. PhD EECS Article
🐻 Derek Richardson, Founder & CEO. MBA, Haas Article
🧾 Formation Financial. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Finance operations for startups. 💰 NOW CFO
🐻 David Mozaffarian, Founder. BS Operations Research & Management Science Article
Closed Rounds
🔦 Ayar Labs. $150M Series E 🇺🇸 Optical interconnects for AI. 💰 Undisclosed
🐻 Vladimir Stojanovic, CTO & Co-Founder. UC Berkeley EECS Professor Article
🌐 Celero Communications. $275M Series C 🇺🇸 Coherent DSP for AI infrastructure. 💰 Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, CapitalG
🐻 Oscar Agazzi, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD Electronic Engineering Article
💼 Savvy Wealth. $100M Series C 🇺🇸 AI-powered wealth management platform. 💰 Halo Fund, Thrive Capital, Canvas Prime
🐻 Ritik Malhotra, Founder & CEO. BS EECS Article
🧬 Moonwalk Biosciences. $70M Series B 🇺🇸 RNAi medicines for obesity. 💰 Alpha Wave Global, YK Bioventures*, Eli Lilly
🐻 Arash Jamshidi, Co-Founder, President & CTO. MS & PhD EECS Article
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($M) |
7/8/24 | 857 | 236,034 |
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….
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. 🐻
