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. 🐻

Berkeley tops global public universities…nice to see Berkeley coming in at numero uno for the top public university in the world and number six overall globally.

We made an error last week saying Meta was offering $10M salaries to AI researchers turns out Sam Altman of OpenAI claimed it was actually $100M. Wowzers! There also seems to be growing tension between Altman and Zuckerberg. Will be interesting to see how that plays out. I’m not sure I’d bet against Zuckerberg…

Congratulations to Once Upon a Farm and its Haas MBA CEO, John Foraker, who appears to be preparing for an IPO. My view: we’re going to have an amazing year for IPOs, and we’re off to the races with many companies already performing strongly.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 3 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $112M of capital raised from the 16th June to 22th June

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IPO

👶 Once Upon a Farm. IPO 🇺🇸 Organic baby food snacks. 💰 Access Capital, Harbinger Ventures, S2G Investments

🐻 John Foraker, Co‑Founder & CEO. Haas MBA.Article

Closed Rounds

🔧 Traversal. $48 M Series A 🇺🇸 AI SRE agent platform. 💰 Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins

🐻 Raaz Dwivedi, Co‑Founder. PhD EECS. Article

🌱 Terviva. $64M Later Stage VC 🇺🇸 Sustainable Pongamia protein/oil. 💰 Allotrope Partners, Bayshore Capital, Emerson Collective

🐻 Naveen Sikka, Co‑Founder & CEO. Haas MBA. 

🏫 Pansophic Learning. PE Growth 🇺🇸 Global school network. 💰 BDT & MSD Partners, 

🐻 Ron Packard, Co‑Founder & CEO. BA  Engineering.

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.

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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….