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. 🐻

$40B raised by OpenAI… Wowzers! That’s a lot of money. If you stacked up $40B in one-dollar bills, you'd make it past the moon. So hopefully OpenAI does go to the moon!

Great to see our old friend Masa of Softbank (ex-Berkeley) leading the round for OpenAI, which was founded by John Schulman. OpenAI went viral last week with those Ghibli-style images, and as Chris Dixon (who we mentioned in a previous newsletter) said: the next big thing will start out looking like a toy. Maybe we’re seeing that here.

See Sam Altman below, en route to the moon 🚀

OpenAI does seem to be on a hot streak. They added 1 million users in just one hour last week, with India being one of their fastest-growing markets. The company is also saying they're short on compute, which could be great news for Nvidia and AI spending overall!

We are seeing a wild swings in the stock market with the tariff announcements and some areas of the stock market are potentially starting to look cheap. On thursday the median software NTM revenue multiple were 4.8x it has only hit this level twice in the last 10 years Feb ‘16 and Nov 2022. So maybe that is a good thing is you are looking to buy…or maybe not who knows! 

Rant of the week…I assume lots of Berkeley alumni and maybe even people who work at google read this newsletter. It feels a little crazy that you get 5GB of storage on your Berkeley alumni email. If you hit this limit emails suddenly get blocked. Surely there is some solution here to increase the storage or at least have some option to pay a little to Google to increase your storage!? Sundar if you are reading this, would be great to sort.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 13 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $40.1 of capital raised from the 31st March to 6th April

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

Closed Rounds

🤖 OpenAI. $40B Later Stage 🇺🇸 AI research & deployment platform behind ChatGPT. 💰 Softbank Investors, Thrive Capital

🐻 John Schulman, Founder. PhD Computer Science Article

🧠 Neurona Therapeutics. $102M Later Stage 🇺🇸 Cell therapies for neurological disorders. 💰 Fidelity Management & Research Company, Viking Global Investors

🐻 Cory Nicholas, Co-Founder & CEO. BA Neurobiology Article

🕶️ Renegade. $21M Early Stage 🇺🇸 Dark pool crypto trading. 💰 Dragonfly Capital

🐻 Chris Bender, Founder. BA Maths

🧬 CRISPR QC. $10M Series A 🇺🇸 Gene editing analytics. 💰 CaerusX Ventures, Xcellerant Ventures

🐻 Kiana Aran, Co-Founder. Post Doc Bioengineering

🚀 Parasail. $10M Seed 🇺🇸 On-demand GPU network. 💰 Basis Set Ventures, Threshold Ventures

🐻 Tim Harris, Cofounder & Board Director. BA Political Economy Article

🧑‍💻 AutonomyAI. $4M Seed 🇺🇸 AI-powered dev tools. 💰 Inbound Capital

🐻 Tammuz Dubnov, Founder & CTO. BA Math Article

🌎 Northwind Climate. $1M Angel 🇺🇸 Climate investment intelligence. 💰 Undisclosed

🐻 Aaron Burgess, Founder & Chief Climate Officer. MPP Public Policy Article

📊 Arcus. Early Stage 🇺🇸 AI data for enterprises. 💰 Firestreak Ventures, Flex Capital, Tola Capital

🐻 Kunal Gosar, Co-founder & CEO. BA EECS

🚗 Autolane. Accelerator 🇺🇸 Autonomous errands delivery. 💰 Feld Ventures, LAUNCH Fund, Plug and Play Tech Center

🐻 Ben Seidl, Co-Founder & CTO. Haas MBA

🛍️ Bonafide.  Accelerator 🇺🇸 Generative commerce infra. 💰 Javelin Venture Partners, Plug and Play Tech Center

🐻 Layton Han, Co-Founder & CEO. Haas MBA

💸 CaptivateIQ. Later Stage 🇺🇸 Sales commissions automation. 💰 Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundation Capital

🐻 Conway Teng, Co-Founder & Co-CEO. BA

📚 LBox. Series C 🇰🇷 Legal research platform. 💰 Samsung Venture Investment, SB Investment, SV Investment

🐻 Gene Lee, Founder & CEO. Haas MBA

📺 TVADS.ai.  Early Stage 🇺🇸 GenAI TV ad platform. 💰 nvp capital

🐻 Kevin Weatherman, Co-Founder & Head of Business. BS Legal Studies

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.

• 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….