Announcing The House Fund II: Home for The Unstoppable
Today we are thrilled to announce The House Fund II, a $44M pre-seed and early stage fund dedicated to startups from the remarkable 600,000 person Berkeley network, based in Berkeley and around the world.
UC Berkeley is one of the most renowned institutions globally. And we are here to amplify its founders and startups far and wide.
We’re also placing an even larger emphasis on Artificial Intelligence with this fund because AI not only has the potential to be the next century defining technology, but the best minds doing breakthrough work are also on our very own campus. With top UC Berkeley AI researchers / entrepreneurs on our co-founding team, and proximity and access to leading AI research, The House Fund is uniquely situated to back the next generation of AI companies shaping the future.
We’re excited to have more resources to invest in and support Berkeley startups at Day 1. Our focus will not change. We are all-in on Berkeley — investing in startups that have at least one alumni, faculty, or affiliate on the co-founding team. We have already invested in over 10 Berkeley startups in Fund II.
Built by Berkeley
We’re proud to build on a legacy that has produced iconic companies like Apple, Intel, and Tesla (all three founded by Berkeley alums) and today consists of a growing list:
- 20 Unicorns and counting with companies like Flexport, Databricks, DoorDash, Warby Parker, and Nextdoor
- 5 Recent IPOs including Redfin, Coupa, Life360, Cloudera, and Tilray
- 20 Recent Notable Exits including tbh (acq. by Facebook), TubeMogul (acq. by Adobe), MyFitnessPal (acq. By UnderArmour), Kabam (acq. by Netmarble), and Caviar (acq. by Square, then DoorDash)
And this is only the beginning. By being directly in the epicenter of Berkeley, The House Fund will help the best founders build and scale companies that matter.
Where We Came From
We started our journey as student entrepreneurs on campus in 2010, launching five clubs with our friends that sparked 50 new startups that raised $50M in Seed funding by the time we graduated.
In 2016, we saw the opportunity to create a community-first fund for Berkeley’s most promising alumni, faculty, and recently graduated (or dropped out) founders — both on campus and across the country.
We engaged the community at large, and the 50 startups we invested in went on to raise over $2B in follow-on financing from over 100 funds and angels, with 10 exits including to Apple, Google, and Facebook.
We are proud investors in startups like Flexport, Superhuman, tbh (acquired by Facebook), Dyndrite, and others we anticipate will become household names in the near future.
AI@The House
Berkeley has a unique opportunity to be the epicenter of AI activity in the US.
Some of the top research on Artificial Intelligence is happening at UC Berkeley, and we’ve brought six of the world’s top AI researchers into our team to build Berkeley into a center of gravity for AI startup activity.
AI@The House is our initiative to bring together the best AI research, talent, startups, and corporates, to provide everything startups need to build industry-defining AI businesses.
With our six new partners (including the world’s most influential computer scientist, and the founder of Databricks, the $6B largest AI-First Unicorn), we believe there is a right way to build AI startups and that The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet, so with our efforts, we can have a meaningful influence on how the revolution takes shape.
We have partnered with several of the world’s biggest tech companies on the forefront of AI in order to provide an unfair advantage to our startups, by giving them access to the resources and scale these partners provide. We will be announcing more exciting AI initiatives soon.
Let’s Get To Work
As all founders know, once you raise money, the real work begins. We have our work cut out for us, like all of the startups we’ve backed. What motivates us is the idea that by pairing the best Berkeley founders with their ideal ecosystem, we can help them be unstoppable.
We will continue to invest in enterprise and consumer software startups across any industry, and not just those leveraging AI. For the majority of our investments, we will invest first with conviction at the Pre-seed stage — writing up to $500K checks and really rolling up our sleeves with founders. We will also follow a lead investor in Seed rounds, co-investing in seasoned founders with top-tier investors — writing up to $1M checks and providing access to our full suite of resources.
With more capital, we have grown our team including 5 of us full-time (we are hiring!) and 3 operators who have built and sold startups that mentor our CEOs, in addition to our Faculty Partners who mentor our CTOs. We also have a deep bench of LP advisors, including the founders of recent Berkeley breakouts such as Nextdoor, DoorDash, Warby Parker, and MyFitnessPal.
This deeper commitment to Berkeley and capacity to write bigger checks lets us focus more of our time on what we love: building Berkeley startups at the earliest stages.
We believe there is no one-size-fits-all solution for startup support. We have built tools and resources to activate the best of Berkeley and Silicon Valley, tailored to an individual startup’s needs, including opening up access to suitable investors, customers, mentors, technical talent to hire, and more.
All that said, no support matters more than the 3am brainstorm with founders, which we wouldn’t trade for the world. We are typically the first call or text for our founders and have found ourselves activating in just about every way you can imagine.
What Comes Next
Our team was grown from the same community we serve, so we are uniquely entwined with it. Most VCs start as capital-first and try to build a community around their fund. We started by helping Berkeley entrepreneurs build startups with better resources. We are community-first. One might say our firm started backwards, but we think that’s what makes it so special.
UC Berkeley’s ethos has long been based on the idea of opening up knowledge for all and diversity of both people and ideas. We’re the venture firm for the people of Berkeley.
We are helping to foster this ecosystem through our support of The House Foundation, a non-profit clubhouse for the brightest students within Berkeley’s expanding entrepreneurial and technology community that provides free space and resources for clubs and student projects. Since inception, our Funds have contributed carry back to The House Foundation, establishing a pioneering model to support University entrepreneurship.
As we look toward the future, Berkeley will become the undisputed biggest University producer of VC-backed startups — that contribute to the global economy and make the world a better place for us all.
For founders, we are your peers, sitting side-by-side with you in the trenches. We call each other when shit hits the fan, because it does. We pick each other up. We keep each other going. And we are hungry to build greatness together.
This is The House. Welcome home.
Jeremy & The House Fund Team
We’re Hiring! Read more about our current open positions here.
This post is dedicated to Rob Chandra, a true believer in Berkeley, people, and potential. There are many thanks — to Terry Garnett and Jeff Brody for being the first to believe in us and have the vision; Our Portfolio Founder Family who welcomed us onboard their startup journeys; Our Limited Partners in Fund II for giving us the chance to capitalize on our opportunity; The generous Donors to The House Foundation; Our VC advisors, including those mentioned, as well as Bobby Yazdani and Chris Farmer; Brett Wilson and John Hughes of TubeMogul, Ion Stoica, Ali Ghodsi, and the Databricks founders, and Nikita and the tbh founders (our first investment), for building big and truly Berkeley startups that inspired this new Berkeley wave; The alums who went above and beyond: Vivek Sodera, Kim Polese, Niket Desai, Craig Walker, Prakash Janakiraman, David McIntosh, James Lin, Andy Chou, Danny Shader, Rich Chen, Josh Hannah, Kai Huang, Andy Rogers, Jerry Fiddler, Tuff Yen, Zack Hargreaves, Jeremy Edberg, Holly Liu, Amit Kumar, Ankit Jain, Patrick Lee, and honorary alums Steve Berger, Don Hutchison, Maurice Werdegar, Ross Glasser, and George Rzepecki; Our campus friends who saw something in a handful of wide-eyed students: Scott Shenker, Amy Herr, Ken Singer, Sara Beckman, Carol Mimura, Dee Dee Mendoza, Jill Malko, Maura O’Neill, Paul Alivisatos, and our Faculty Partners; All of the now Berkeley alums who have supported our mission as part of our team along the way: Keyan Sarrafzadeh, Jason Wang, David Bloom, Wing Vasiksiri, Vincent Sun, JJ Gozun, Christine Cheung, Sarah Sarkissan, George Heibel, Claire Rosenfield, Folake Dosu, Jimmy Liu, Kirtan Upadhyaya, Zuhayeer Musa, Lukas Schwab, Lauren Hanlon, Eric Liu, Rick Ling, Sean Linehan, Shawn Park, Elizabeth Lin, Taner Dagdelen, Anand Kulkarni, Connor Landgraf, Harshil Goel, and Alex Kern; Those provided feedback on drafts of this post Hadley Wilkins, Eva Frye, Alex Fiance, and Cameron Baradar; This list merely scratches the surface…Thank you to all who helped along the way!
The House Fund: The House Fund is a pre-seed and early stage venture capital fund focused on the boldest Berkeley startups. Cal has some of the most brilliant minds and daring businesses in the world. Tesla. Apple. Intel. But it has never had a place to unite its entrepreneurs, until now. Started in 2016, with 50+ investments, $2B in follow-on funding, and 10 exits later, The House Fund has become a thriving ecosystem for the boldest Berkeley startups to grow. Follow us on Twitter @TheHouseVC.
Jeremy Fiance: Jeremy Fiance started The House Fund in 2016 after graduating from UC Berkeley. There, Jeremy proved the campus’ startup potential, co-launching several initiatives, including Kairos Society Berkeley and Free Ventures, student groups that increase access to entrepreneurial resources, which sparked over 50 startups that raised $50M by the time he graduated. Before The House Fund, Jeremy was an investor at CrunchFund, Dorm Room Fund SF, and Keiretsu Forum. As an entrepreneur, Jeremy co-founded a health data science startup called Dropsense. Outside of the technology and startup world, Jeremy is a black belt in Tang Soo Do, table tennis gold medalist, amateur cartoonist, live music enthusiast, and die hard Cal fan. Go Bears! Follow him on twitter @jfiance.
The House Fund and UC Berkeley are separate and independent legal entities. An affiliation with one entity does not imply an affiliation with the other. The content of The House Fund on Medium is not created, controlled, maintained, owned or endorsed by UC Berkeley or its affiliates, trustees, officers, employees, or students.
