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. 🐻

After all the fun on Velociraptors last week, I did a longer form post on the topic here. Looking forward to the term catching on…

Berkeley researchers are at it again…With all the arguments of who has a better LLM model, why not just sit on top of all the models and choose the best one for each prompt? In new research co-authored by Databricks co-founder and Berkeley professor Ion Stocia.

In simple terms, the AI model ranks different AI models on a leaderboard based on their performance for specific queries. For example, if Gemini is better at telling dirty jokes, it ranks higher in that category. Once the leaderboard is set, queries are routed accordingly, and this can then be repeated over and over. Some companies already do this, but it's fascinating research potentially allowing users to get the best response without knowing which model is being used.

See how this looks below.

Also, in case anyone missed it, it seems Sam Altman was reading Built By Berkeley a few weeks ago and announced OpenAI would simplify their model offering.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 6 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $110M of capital raised from the 17th February to 23rd February

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Acquisition 

🏨 Ruby Hotels. $300M Acquisition 🇩🇪 Luxury hotel chain. 💰 Intercontinental Hotels

🐻 Michael Struck, Founder & CEO. Haas MBA Article

Closed Rounds

🤖 Arize. $70M Series C 🇺🇸 AI observability platform. 💰 Adams Street Partners, Archerman Capital, Battery Ventures

🐻 Jason Lopatecki, Founder & CEO. BS EECS Article

🔧 AheadComputing. $21M Seed 🇺🇸 High-performance RISC-V cores. 💰 Eclipse Ventures, Maverick Capital

🐻 Debbie Marr, CEO & Founder. BS EECS Article

👶 Millie. $12M Series A 🇺🇸 Maternity care platform. 💰 Coyote Ventures, Foreground Capital, Hustle Fund

🐻 Sarah Reynolds, Co-Founder & CTO. BS Article

⚡ Shadow Power. $7M Seed Round 🇺🇸 Energy optimization 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Michael Ruehlman, Founder & CEO. Haas MBA

📚 Brian. Accelerator 🇨🇭 AI learning assistant. 💰 Microsoft, Venture Kick

🐻 Ralph Forsbach, Co-Founder. Learn 2 Launch

📊 Pulse. Seed Round 🇺🇸 Enterprise resource planning. 💰 Sequoia Capital, Soma Capital, Y Combinator

🐻 Sid Manchkanti, Co-Founder & CEO. BS EECS 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….