Built By Berkeley

Deal of the Week

Back in June (five months ago), I announced the GC AI Series A that I invested in via Courtyard Ventures. A $10M round at a $50M post-money valuation. This week, they announced a $60M round at a $555M valuation led by Scale Ventures! Why the big jump?

• As a reminder, GC AI is AI for in-house lawyers. These Lawyers love GC AI.

• 1,000+ top companies around the world are now adopting it, including Gusto, Eventbrite, Snyk, Penguin Random House, and NewsCorp (who love it so much they are now an investor).

• Revenue is up 10x from the start of the year, with still a couple of months left.

For me, the biggest driver behind this success is Cecilia, the co-founder and ex- in-house lawyer. This experience gives the team an incredible product taste. When you speak to customers, they rave about how specialized and tailored this is for in-house teams. And this is a massive market: there are 140,000 in-house lawyers in the US alone. I also think the potential is much broader.  GC AI can be used by anyone adjacent to the in-house team to speed up processes and approvals across entire organizations.

Exciting times, and if they get this right, we’re looking at a generational company.

If you’re looking to work at a rocketship, they’re hiring across roles.

Jobs

A couple of other companies I’m a small investor in are looking for high-agency people:

• One is a digital health company that just raised a Series A from a top-tier investor. They’re looking for someone who has built the finance/accounting function at a rapid-growth tech company and wants to do it again.

• The other is Faction, an AI-native company for distributors and manufacturers, looking for an SF-based founding engineer. Full job description here. 

• Happy to help on any of these roles just reply to this email 

Thinking Machines

Berkeley co-founded Thinking Machines, which previously raised a $2B seed, is now in talks to raise a fresh round at a $50B valuation. It’s still unclear what the company actually does, apart from being founded by members of the ex-OpenAI founding team (including ex OpenAI co-founder and Berkeley alum John Schulman).

There are quite a few of these “neo labs” now, AI labs founded by people coming out of Anthropic or OpenAI, and the numbers are getting pretty wild. In total, you are probably looking at around $100B of notional valuation across them, with likely less than $50M of revenue combined. Source (but I assumed Thinking Machines gets the $50B valuation).

Times are changing!

The Golden Age of Cyber?

Google recently bought (although it still hasn’t closed) Wizz for $32B, a leading cloud-based cyber player, but it seems that in the AI paradigm cyber is set for a massive shift. Why? The surface area of attack is multiplying with AI agents and other new vectors.

So it’s pretty scary that Anthropic announced some bad actors had used Anthropic to try to orchestrate a cyber attack. The AI was able to execute 80 to 90 percent of the work independently. That is alarming, but it also creates a massive opportunity for the next generation of cyber defenses. Anthropic goes into this a bit more here. 

Short takes:

• Warren Buffett, clearly reading my previous posts on Google (1, 2) about what a great company it is, had Berkshire Hathaway take a $5B position.

• Cool Berkeley research this week on sperm whales communicating in ways similar to humans.

• What do you do when you’ve started a $2.5T company and retired at 57? You get back on the horse. Jeff Bezos is back! He will be Co-CEO of a company called Project Prometheus, which has raised $6.2B to bring AI into manufacturing. And guess where the co-founder, Vik Bajaj, did his post-doc 😉. Excited to dig more into this story next week. Biggest seed round ever!?

• Interest in private-market secondaries is heating up. Goldman Sachs bought the venture secondaries firm Industry Ventures for up to $1B, Charles Schwab purchased Forge for $660M, and Morgan Stanley acquired EquityZen. What does this mean? Large institutions want to offer their high-net-worth clients access to hot private-market companies. Expect a lot of change in this space, with Robinhood also announcing a new fund aimed at private companies.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 11 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $256M of capital raised from the 10th Nov to 16th Nov

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

IPOs

🧩 Klook Technology. IPO 🇨🇳 Global travel experiences platform. 💰 Bessemer Venture Partners, SoftBank, TCV

🐻 Chuan Sheng (C.S.) S., CEO, Klook Protect. Haas School of Business. Article

Closed Rounds

💊 Iambic. $100M Series B 🇺🇸 AI-driven drug design platform. 💰 Alumni Ventures, Coatue Management, Mubadala Capital

🐻 Thomas Miller, Co-Founder, CEO & Board Member. PhD Chemistry. Article

⚖️ GC AI. $60M Series B 🇺🇸 Legal AI assistant. 💰 Scale Venture Partners, Sound Ventures, Courtyard Ventures

🐻 Cecilia Ziniti, Co-Founder & CEO. JD Law. Article

💊 House Rx. $55M Series B 🇺🇸 Specialty pharmacy model. 💰 Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures

🐻 Alon Krashinsky, Co-Founder. BS Business Admin. Article

⚡ Voya. $13.0M Seed 🇺🇸 Metal-based clean energy fuel tech. 💰 Energy Impact Partners, Founders Fund, In-Q-Tel

🐻 Steven Kaye, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD Chemistry. Article

🛠️ Deductive AI. $7.5M Seed 🇺🇸 AI debugging engine. 💰 CRV, Databricks

🐻 Sameer Agarwal, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD Databases. Article

🧩 Sim Studio. $7.0M Series A 🇺🇸 Visual AI workflow builder. 💰 Ritual Capital, Standard Capital, Y Combinator

🐻 Emir Karabeg, Co-Founder & CEO. BA Data Science & Cognitive Science. Article

🌲 Vibrant Planet. $4.29M Series B 🇺🇸 Climate resilience planning platform. 💰 Cisco Foundation, Day One Ventures, Valia Ventures

🐻 Maria Tran, Co-Founder. BS Business Admin. Article

🔬 ThinkCyte. $3.93M Series C 🇯🇵 Image-based single-cell sorting tech. 💰 Berkeley SkyDeck, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Investment

🐻 Sadao Ota, Co-Founder & CSO. PhD Applied Physics

📊 VRGL. $3.57M Series A 🇺🇸 Wealth-management analytics. 💰 Fin Capital, FINTOP Capital 

🐻 Joshua Zimmerman, Co-Founder & CTO. BS Nuclear Eng Article

🔍 Relixr. $2M Seed 🇺🇸 AI generative engine optimization platform. 💰 Rocket Internet, z21 Ventures

🐻 Sean Dorje, CEO. BA EECS. Article

🦴 Osteoboost. Equity Crowdfunding 🇺🇸 Wearable vibration therapy device. 💰 Ambit Health Ventures, Berkeley Catalyst Fund, Good Growth Capital

🐻 Michael Jaasma, Co-Founder & CSO. PhD Mechanical Eng. Article

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….

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. 🐻