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. 🐻

Hosting an event for PhDs and some cool companies tomorrow in Berkeley for those around tomorrow evening - sign up here. And for Berkeley alum’s in venture check this out.

A Broken Clock is Right Twice a Day

After mentioning one that got away last week, this week we’ve got one that didn’t. Hyperbound, an AI sales enablement platform, just announced a $15M round led by Peak XV (Sequoia India). Founders Atul and Sriharsha (Go Bears!) are among the best at building in public. We backed the company when it was a completely different idea, and after a few pivots they’ve landed here—already winning massive clients like LinkedIn, Monday.com, Bloomberg, and Vanta, all while scaling extremely efficiently. Well done! If you’re interested, check out our “Why We Invested” from the previous round to learn more. Try the demo here and get your company to buy. Check out full Portfolio of Courtyard Ventures here.

Berkeley Top’s Founder List

Berkeley once again came out on top of PitchBook’s ranking (for the 3rd year in a row) for companies founded by undergraduates.

This is great…but after three straight years at #1, I think the goal posts should shift. Berkeley’s undergrad enrollment is ~33K compared to Stanford’s ~8K and Harvard’s ~7K. Being firmly established at the top is just the start; now it’s time to be even more ambitious.

Momentum is clearly building. Initiatives like Startup Campus, How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups highlight the story. Well worth a read. For some reason I did not know that Gordon Moore, of Intel and Moore’s Law, went to Cal, as did the founders of Sun Microsystems, Cadence Design Systems , and many more.

Here’s to tripling the founder count in the years ahead

$1.1B in Berkeley Founded IPOs

We said a while back that IPOs were back—and last week was the busiest week in four years. Two Berkeley companies joined the action: Netskope ($900M raise) and Urban Company ($216M). We had pegged Netskope for a $7–10B market cap, so it was great to see them close day one at ~$8.6B.  Huge congrats to both teams on an incredible milestone.

Waymo Numbers

Berkeley- founded Waymo dropped updated safety numbers last week. Wowzers.

If you can, it really feels like you should take Waymo whenever possible. They’re even cheaper than Ubers in SF right now. The numbers are pretty amazing and they point toward a future where self-driving makes up more and more of the miles on the road.

How Do People Use AI?

OpenAI released an interesting graph showing how people use AI.

This was also an example of how not to create an interesting graph from super cool data as the graph is terrible. Thanks to Pete Walker of Carta who recut this:

Does this resonate on how you use AI?

Opendoor the Return of the Meme?

Opendoor SPAC’ed in 2020, hit $35 a share, and as rates rose and housing slowed, the stock dropped from $35 to $0.53 and the founders left.

A Twitter influencer/fund manager Eric Jackson has been pushing that it should be worth $500+ while also standing outside Drake’s house every day asking him to buy. Since his campaign started, shares have jumped to $10.

I got swept up in the Drake hustle, bought a few shares, watched them pop 150%, and sold most while keeping some for fun. YOLO! 

Now the story’s getting more exciting. Keith Rabois just joined the board and they hired Kaz Nejatian the COO of Shopify. He also has a really cool compensation package - where he getting $1 a year but if he hits certain stock numbers he could end up with 11% of the company and be worth nearly $3B. All in!

It feels like a meme stock but with real players stepping in with a big vision to make money by selling the services around the home sale and purchase. Wild times!

Eric then posted about another stock today and it jumped 123% in a day!

Final Thought

Interesting thought on the road to AGI may not be straight from a Berkeley Professor.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 9 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $259M of capital raised from the 15th Sept to 21st Sept

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

IPOs & Acquisitions

🌐 Netskope. $908.2M IPO 🇺🇸 Cloud security leader. 💰 IPO

🐻 Sanjay Beri, CEO & Founder. Haas MBA. Article

🏠 Urban Company. $216.3M IPO 🇮🇳 On-demand home services. 💰IPO

🐻 Raghav Chandra, Co-Founder. BS EECS. Article

🧾 Additive. Acquisition 🇺🇸 AI tax workflow platform. 💰 Thomson Reuters

🐻 Dwight Crow, Founder. BS Chem & EECS. Article

💉 HilleVax. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Norovirus vaccine developer. 💰 XOMA Royalty Corp

🐻 Aditya Kohli, Co-Founder & Director. PhD Bioengineering. Article

🎉 Hobnob. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Mobile invites app. 💰 Zazzle

🐻 Tina Fitch, Founder & CEO. BA Economics. Article

📊 Lokavant. Acquisition 🇺🇸 Clinical trial analytics. 💰 Proofpilot

🐻 Rohit Nambisan, Co-Founder & CEO. BA Cognitive Science. Article

Closed Rounds

🛰️ Hubble Network. $70.0M Series B 🇺🇸 Bluetooth satellite network. 💰 Samsara Ventures, Soma Capital, Y Combinator

🐻 Ben Wild, Co-Founder & CTO. MSEE EECS. Article

💊 Dualitas Therapeutics. $65.0M Series A 🇺🇸 Bispecific antibody drugs. 💰 Alexandria Venture Investments, Eli Lilly, Qiming Ventures

🐻 Greg Lazar, Co-Founder & CSO. PhD Molecular Biology. Article

💵 PayNearMe. $50.0M Series E 🇺🇸 Cash bill payments. 💰 August Capital, Floodgate, Khosla Ventures

🐻 Danny Shader, Founder & CEO. BS Industrial Eng. Article

🔌 Omni Design. $35.0M Series A 🇺🇸 Low-power chip IP. 💰 Foothill Ventures

🐻 Harry Lee, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD EECS. Article

🏦 GrowXCD Finance. $22.8M Series B 🇮🇳 Inclusive lending platform. 💰 Blue Earth Capital, Prosus

🐻 Arjun Muralidharan, Co-Founder & CEO. MS IEOR. Article

📧 Hyperbound. $15.0M Series A 🇺🇸 AI sales email tool. 💰 Fellows Fund, Peak XV Partners, Courtyard Ventures

🐻 Sriharsha Gudguntla, Co-Founder & CEO. BA EECS. Article

🎾 Vamos Racquets. $1.2M Seed 🇺🇸 Padel & tennis gear. 💰 Unknown

🐻 Katherine Lynch, Founder & CEO. MPH. Article

🧪 ThinkCyte. Growth 🇯🇵 Cell-sorting biotech. 💰 Berkeley SkyDeck, ITOCHU Ventures

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

👁️ LandingAI. Growth 🇺🇸 AI vision inspection. 💰 AI Fund, Insight Partners, Intel Capital

🐻 Andrew Ng, Founder & Chairman. PhD EECS. Article

🧬 Danu Insights. Accelerator 🇬🇧 ML for clinical trials. 💰 Creator Fund

🐻 Chris Lucas, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD Cognitive Science. 

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….