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. 🐻

Round Up of The Week

Monster of a week! Databricks raised a $1B round at a $100B valuation. A healthy upround after raising $10B in Dec 2024 at $62B. Well deserved, as they are reportedly at $4B ARR (with a 140%+ net retention rate!), up from $3B at the start of the year. They are on fire!

Not bad from Perplexity either. Fresh off trying to buy Chrome, they just raised $200M at a $20B valuation—a 20x jump from the start of last year. They’re now approaching a $200M run rate. Love to see the continued execution. 

The One That Got Away

A while ago, I mentioned one of my (many) misses. Passing on the chance to invest early in a startup that’s now sitting at a $500M valuation just ~15 months later. Well, that company has just announced its round.

Micro1 raised $35M from Adam Bain’s (ex-COO of Twitter) fund, 01A. Big congrats to Ali Ansari and the team. They’re crushing it at a $50M run rate, helping train AI models by recruiting data labelers, and taking share now that Scale AI is in turmoil. The one that got away!

As I am glass half full sort of person I view it more as a good sign that I am at least talking to interesting companies…😭

YC Demo Day

After attending YC Demo Day last week and seeing some amazing companies, with a high chance that some of these will be decacorns in the image of previous alums such as Airbnb and Stripe, I was feeling optimistic that SF is back. Then, as we turned down through the Tenderloin, we saw one person pushing a single ski (?) down the street and another man with his penis out.

SF may be coming back, but there’s still a lot to do!

Application Companies to Creep into the Model Layer?

A really interesting article by Berkeley alum Surya Dantuluri.. He posits that some AI applications should and do train their own models, or sell user actions back to the labs.

For example, Cursor can use RL from customer actions to build better models for specific features, allowing them to serve at a lower cost compared to paying for an API from the latest frontier model.

What are the long-term impacts of this? It can either be less favorable for the big model companies as their frontier models are only used (and paid for) in certain instances or you think that the total TAM expands so much that it ultimately doesn’t matter. That might well be the case.

Pokemon 

One of my first tastes of entrepreneurship was selling Pokémon cards at around 9 years old. We once managed to sell a Mew  card for £100. This felt massive at the time! If this post is correct, I should have held onto that card instead of trotting to the nearest sweet shop.

Summary by the #️⃣ & 💰:

• 6 Berkeley-founded companies funded

• $1.23B of capital raised from the 8th Sept to 14th Sept

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Closed Rounds

🖥️ Databricks. $1B Series K 🇺🇸 Data & AI platform. 💰 Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Avenir Growth Capital

🐻 Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO. Professor. Article

🔍 Perplexity. $200M 🇺🇸 AI search platform. 💰 Accel, NEA, B Capital

🐻 Aravind Srinivas, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD Computer Science. Article

🤖 micro1. $35M Series B 🇺🇸 AI talent vetting. 💰 O1 Advisors, Antler, Companyon Ventures

🐻 Ali Ansari, Founder & CEO. BS CS & Math. Article

⚛️ Deep Fission. $30M PIPE 🇺🇸 Underground nuclear energy. 💰 Montrose Capital Partners

🐻 Richard Muller, Co-Founder & CTO. PhD Physics. Article

🚁 Paladin Drones. $17M 🇺🇸 Emergency drones dispatch. 💰 1517 Fund, Gradient Ventures, Toyota Ventures

🐻 Divyaditya Shrivastava, Founder & CEO. BS Eng. Article

🌱 Heritable Agriculture. Undisclosed 🇺🇸 Programmable agriculture biotech. 💰 FTW Ventures, Mythos Ventures, SVG Ventures

🐻 Bradley Zamft, Co-Founder & CEO. PhD & MA Physics. 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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