Hosted a lot of Berkeley related events recently, the ecosystem is on fire!
Deal of the Week
The chart below shows why Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world. They are selling the picks and shovels for the AI data centre boom. It is no surprise that companies in this space are getting funded.
So congrats to Berkeley-founded Cognichip on announcing a $60M round and coming out of stealth. Got to love the $60M and out of stealth rounds 🤣
If chips are the bedrock of AI, why can it not work the other way around, using AI to design better chips? Cognichip believes they can reduce chip design time by 75 percent. Very cool if true.
I would assume Nvidia is a potential customer here, alongside the hyperscalers and others looking to challenge its crown. Nvidia still controls roughly 80 to 90 percent of the AI data centre market.
The prize is huge. Congrats.
The Inference Explosion?
Tatyana Mamut (founder of Wayfound) gave me a great quote this week (initial attribution of this to Trisha Wang):
AI Agents are like teenage sex everyone is talking about it but no one is doing it’
Apart from making my chuckle, I think this won’t be true for long and people are getting off thier traing wheels 😀 . This leads me back to an idea I have been pulling on for the last few weeks and that is we are in line for a massive explosion in inference.
I just look at my AI usage and continually hitting Claude/OpenAI limits over the last few months (see the soft flex that I use AI), and this is probably fairly low when you start to think about how agents are starting to get deployed and as they become more automous the token usage increases further. The signs are there H100 GPU prices are now 40% higher than October, Nvidia buying Groq, a ton of capital starting to flow into companies (led by lots of Berkeley companies!) looking to optimise inference.
I think it is hard for the brain to comprehend (or maybe just my brain) how vertical a takeoff when you work in the compounding nature of agents and other token usages taking off. It directionally feels we are headed that way this year! Buckle up for the year of inference.
OpenAI’s cap table
Note: I haven’t verified this, but it’s too juicy not to share. The below shows the cap table of OpenAI, and a couple of things stand out:
If you were an early angel, you’re “only” at ~140x. I say “only” not because 140x is bad, obviously it’s incredible, but if you backed one of the biggest startups of all time at the angel stage, you would probably hope for even more.
Sound Ventures (friend of the newsletter) is at 43x+ sitting on $1.3B
The numbers start to look a lot better if OpenAI ends up IPO’ing at $2T. It also highlights the different games people are playing. For example, Thrive Capital is at ~5x, but having put in $3.5B, that translates to ~$13.4B of unrealized value. Pretty good outcome.
Finally, is Microsoft a buy? There is ~$215B (~10% of market cap) of value tied up in OpenAI alone, and it is trading at ~21–22x forward P/E while growth is accelerating to 20%+. I remain very bullish on mega-cap tech, Amazon, Google (see my old article), and Meta, as major winners in AI.
Quick Takes
Great podcast by Sergey Levine Berkeley professor and co-founder of Physical Inteligence (rumors going around they are in market to raise another $1B). Capital continues to flow into Berkeley robotics companies!
TBPN a live stream / news outlet for the tech industry was bought by OpenAI for in the $200-300M range after 18 months. Shows two things a. you don’t need to have a lot of technology in Silicon Valley for amazing outcomes. b. my inbox is open if Anthropic want to sling a few hundred $M for Built By Berkeley 🙂
Allbirds - a Berkeley founded company I touched on a while back is being taken private for $39M having once been valued at $4B. Wild ride.
Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:
7 Berkeley-founded companies funded
$74M of capital raised from the 30th March to 4th April
💡 Got any ideas or feedback on how to improve this weekly digest? Just hit reply.
Acquisition
🐻 Jens Wohltorf, Co-Founder & CEO. Finance & Marketing. Article
Closed Rounds
🧠 Cognichip $60.0M Series A 🇺🇲 AI chip design platform. 💰 FPV Ventures, Lux Capital, Mayfield Fund
🐻 Simon Sabato, Co-founder & Chief Architect. BA EECS. Article
🧬 onyx $8.0M Series A 🇺🇲 Precision medicine platform. 💰 Undisclosed
🐻 Roger Chen, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD EECS
🤖 Anvil Robotics $5.5M Seed 🇺🇲 Modular robotics platform. 💰 DNX Ventures, Humba Ventures, Matter Venture Partners
🐻 Haomiao Huang, Co-Founder & Board. PhD EECS. Article
🔐 Subsalt $0.1M Seed 🇺🇲 Secure data sharing platform. 💰 Data Tech Fund, Founder Collective, Rackhouse Venture Capital
🐻 Luke Segars, Co-Founder & CTO. MS Computer Science. Article
🧩 Autyvia $0.1M Seed 🇺🇲 Decision intelligence platform. 💰 Undisclosed
🐻 Bruce Rinehart, Co-Founder & CTO. MIMS.
🏭 Context/Fab Undisclosed 🇩🇪 Manufacturing intelligence software. 💰 Yellow (Barcelona)
🐻 Marc Krüger-Sprengel, Co-Founder & CEO. Visiting Researcher
🧪 Supra Elemental Recovery Undisclosed 🇺🇲 Critical minerals recovery platform. 💰 Climate Capital, Crucible Capital, Founders Factory
🐻 Jonathan Sessler, Co-Founder & Inventor. BS Chemistry. 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, 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. 🐻
