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Built By Berkeley
$500B Investment By Berkeley Alum
Xan Wood
January 27, 2025
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. 🐻
Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank, is at it again (see our old Built By Berkeley post on Masa – he’s a Berkeley GOAT when it comes to big moves). He just announced a $500B investment in Stargate, a new AI supercluster alongside OpenAI, Oracle, and others. This move quickly got trolled by Elon Musk, who remarked, "They don’t actually have the money." In response, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivered a boss-level move, saying, "Look, all I know is I’m good for my $80B." I feel good just saying I’m good for a hundred bucks—this is a serious flex from Satya.
In contrast to this massive investment, there’s been a lot of buzz around the latest DeepSeek model. Many are claiming it’s on par with OpenAI’s newest models, but it’s free to download.
Why the excitement? The models appear to show step-by-step reasoning within the model (pretty cool!) and perform similarly to OpenAI’s latest model, OpenAI-o1, but at a fraction of the cost—25-30x cheaper and as DeepSeek is open source you can download the actual model to use as you like. Inteligence really is getting cheaper and fast.
DeepSeek is now at the top of the Apple App Store.
There are some questions DeepSeek is not so good at answering…
Furthermore, DeepSeek is claimed to have been trained in under two months for less than $10M. [Note: Some sources claim this is false, and DeepSeek may have found ways to bypass the US high-tech chip embargo on China.]
So, what does this mean when the US is announcing a $500B investment in AI infrastructure, but a Chinese startup can match OpenAI’s capabilities for less than $10M?
Who knows, as there’s still much to be determined:
Will advanced AI models all get quickly commoditized?
If so who wins and who loses? What does this mean for the massive CAPEX underway by the hyperscalers (see Stargate $500B above).
Who will win the AI race the US or China?
Are the DeepSeek claims on cheap training on an older generation of GPUs true?
But it’s certainly shaking things up, and there’s likely to be a lot of soul-searching across US AI labs about what happens next. The stock market has not reacted well with many companies in the AI supply chain like Nvidia trading down, as sure those early Nvidia employees will be fine and don’t bet against Jensen!
Note: I wrote this last night - Nvidia will potentially lose $500B in market cap today. This would be the biggest decline in history!
At Built By Berkeley, we covered DeepSeek’s progress in some detail a few weeks ago… looks like the rest of the media is a little behind us. ;)
This is why AI is so fun —everything changes every week, and there always seems to be someone from Cal right in the middle of it all.
In other Berkeley news, Berkeley alum Aravind Srinivas, founder of Perplexity, submitted an improved bid for TikTok that would give the US government a 50% stake. This seems like a low-likelihood outcome. Perplexity was last valued at $9B, and the TikTok US business, in a steady state, is probably worth around ~$100B. But hey, ‘You gotta shoot your shot.’ Fingers crossed, Aravind!
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
6 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$11M of capital raised from the 20th January to 26th January
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IPO
💊 Aardvark Therapeutics IPO Announced 🇺🇸 Small molecule therapeutics. 💰 BNH Investment, Cantor Fitzgerald
Closed Rounds
🐻 Shaival Shah, Co-Founder & CEO. Article
🛍️ Riley AI $3M Seed 🇺🇸 Product discovery platform. 💰 Hyphen Capital, NextView Ventures, Vertex Ventures US.
🐻 Claudia Natasia, Co-Founder & CEO. BS Psychology & Haas MBA. Article.
📊 ARTI Analytics Seed 🇺🇸 AI decision support software. 💰 Undisclosed.
🐻 Joerge Ferchau, CEO & Co-Founder. BA Mechanical Engineering & Material Science
🚚 GOGOX Later Stage 🇭🇰 Digital cargo logistics platform. 💰 Abacus Ventures, BoCom International, Cyberport Hong Kong Macro Fund.
🐻 Steven Lam, CEO & Co-Founder. BS Business.
🛡️ Verisoul Accelerator 🇺🇸 Fake account defense platform. 💰 500 Global, BITKRAFT Ventures, Hashkey Capital.
🐻 Raine Scott, Founder & CPO. BS.
Built By Berkeley Tracker
Date Built By Berkeley Started | Companies Funded | Total Raised ($M) |
7/8/24 | 262 | 28,352 |
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