Built By Berkeley

Deal of the Week

Berkeley-founded Cerebras announced that it was withdrawing its IPO application filed last year and, at the same time, raised a whopping $1.1B Led by Fidelity.

What does Cerebras do? It’s a semiconductor company. Similar in spirit to Nvidia they make silicon chip purpose-built for AI workloads. They sell access to their tech via an API or can install a full data center on-premises.

The CEO explained why they pulled the IPO because “a lot has changed.” When they initially filed, 87% of revenues came from a single customer in the middle east, but that concentration is now diversifying as their chips prove highly effective for AI inference.

So what happened? Investors likely saw another turn of the cards here. Pumping in $1.1 billion with the expectation of a blockbuster IPO down the line if demand keeps ramping.

Prediction of the Week

Prediction: Anthropic will try to buy Lovable or a “Lovable-like” vibe-coding company.

Barclays just released a report showing that web traffic to Lovable and other vibe-coding startups has started to dip.

These companies have been on an absolute tear. Lovable announced a $100M run rate in July (after just a year in the wild!) and is now reportedly closer to $150M.

I recently built a website using Lovable - it was easy!

Who knows what is happening under the hood and the Lovable CEO Anton, came out swinging.

This got me thinking, as word on the street is that Codex the OpenAI coding agent is catching up or getting better than the Claude Code that used to be the favourite of software developers.

If this plays out, Anthropic who are still performing strongly in the enterprise and sitting on plenty of cash, might need to make a move and acquire one of these vibe-coding players to expand its distribution. If growth stalls at these companies, I’d expect some M&A activity on the horizon!

We Need More Parking Spaces

Around the same time last year, I wrote a post about Berkeley running out of parking spaces — each Berkeley Nobel gets a spot! Well, it seems they’re at it again.

Berkeley faculty were awarded two Nobels this year:

• Faculty member: Omar Yaghi for his work in chemistry, particularly on Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs). MOFs are fascinating. They are essentially “molecular constructions with large spaces,” which enable all kinds of cool stuff, from harvesting water from air to carbon capture.

• Professor Emeritus: John Clarke for physics, recognizing his work on quantum mechanical tunneling. This is the ability of microscopic particles such as electrons to move, or “tunnel,” through barriers that classical physics says should be impossible.

The UC system as a whole took home five Nobels this year, a global record!

OpenAI Putting Themselves at the Heart of the Ecosystem

Must be pretty fun being on OpenAI’s corp development team at the moment. OpenAI has now ‘signed’ these ‘multi-billon dollar deals for buying compute / in:

1. Stargate - $500B

2. Nvidia - $100B

3. AMD - up to $100B

4. Intel - $25B

5. TSMC - $20B

6. Microsoft - $13B

7. Oracle - $10B

8. Broadcom - Multi $B

What does this all mean? Well if AI is as big as some people think it will be than OpenAI will be a $1T+ company and if not a lot of these contracts just never get fulfilled!

Cool image by the FT explaining all of this

Hot Takes

• Looks like Masa (Newsletter/Berkeley favourite 1,2 ) - is taking a big swing in Robotics. Buying ABB for $4.4B. It seems obvious to me that robotics is going to be the next massive wave. Exciting times!

• After spotlighting Sperm Racing last week and the way in which prediction markets are taking off, the NYSE just announced a $2B investment into Polymarket. Prediction markets are going mainstream from being illegal just a few years ago!

• One of the best in the investment game Orlando Bravo talking about the state of the markets.

Anyone on the look out for an AI conference checkout the DECODE conference on the 15th November.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 6 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $1.2B of capital raised from the 6th Oct to 12th Oct

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

Acquisitions

🧩 DoubleLoop. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Strategy alignment platform. 💰 Mixpanel

🐻 Daniel Schmidt, CEO & Co‑Founder. BA Philosophy. Article

Closed Rounds

🧠 Cerebras Systems. $1.1B Series G 🇺🇸 AI compute system 💰 Altimeter Capital, Atreides Management, Fidelity

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

🧬 Affinia Therapeutics. $40M Series C 🇺🇸 AAV gene therapy platform. 💰 Farallon Capital, GV, 

🐻 Botond Roska, Co‑Founder & CSO. PhD Neurobiology. Article

💳 Bold. $40M 🇨🇴 Digital payments merchant acquiring. 💰 General Atlantic, Global Founders Capital, Tiger Global Management

🐻 Enrique Ramirez, Co‑Founder & CFO. Haas MBA

🧪 Peer. $12.1M Series A 🇺🇸 AI medical writing clinical docs. 💰 Flare Capital Partners, Greycroft, SignalFire

🐻 Christopher Ceppi, Co‑Founder & CTO. BA English. Article

💬 Agent Shop. $5.5M Seed 🇧🇷 Conversational commerce chat stores. 💰 Caravela Capital, Maya Capital, 

🐻 Eduardo Petrelli, Co‑Founder. MBT. 

🏦 Selfin. $0.5M Accelerator 🇬🇧 Personal finance banking AI. 💰 YC

🐻 Paula Gutierrez Cascales, Co‑Founder. MEng Aerospace. 

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, 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. 🐻