The House Fund III: $115M for Berkeley, the AI epicenter
Today, we are thrilled to announce The House Fund III, a $115M pre-seed and early-stage fund dedicated to startups from the remarkable 600,000-person strong Berkeley network, based in Berkeley and worldwide.
The House Fund, launched in 2016, is the first-ever firm focused on Berkeley startups, and we remain proud to say our funds are majority Berkeley community-backed, by design.
The world’s highest-valued private AI startups, Databricks (in our portfolio) & OpenAI, both partners in our AI Accelerator, are Berkeley-founded. Berkeley is the top university globally for AI startups.
The House Fund’s primary focus since inception has been investing first in the top Berkeley-affiliated AI startups. With software continuing to eat the world, and AI unlocking incredible new possibilities for most startups, we will invest in and support Berkeley’s boldest founders, across industries, at the earliest stages.
“Berkeley founders are some of the most ambitious technologists and entrepreneurs in the world. I look forward to supporting The House Fund’s next great Berkeley founders.”
— Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO at Databricks
Same House. Going Bigger.
We remain all-in on Berkeley. If a startup doesn’t have at least one Berkeley affiliate (alumni, faculty, PhDs, postdocs, grad students, students, dropouts, or recent grad) we won’t meet with the startup.
Startups can receive investment from either our Fund or our Accelerator.
We write first checks up to $2M and reserve for follow-ons. We can write a check as small as $100K, and we are fine being the only investor.
We pride ourselves on identifying world-changing undiscovered founders, and we usually lead their Pre-Seed rounds, writing the first check into their companies (the majority of our investments).
We also lead, co-lead, and participate in Seed rounds, often investing in seasoned founders.
Same Berkeley. Getting Bigger.
When I started The House Fund in 2016, my prediction was that Berkeley would become the #1 university globally for producing VC-backed founders. That has already proved true according to our dataset.
Pitchbook’s 2023 report recently published also shows this clearly for undergrad alumni founders by volume. Berkeley will become the undisputed largest producer of venture-backed startups from a University.
Scaling AI for a Better World
We doubled down on AI in January 2018 with Fund II and our global AI initiative, AI@The House.
With this launch, we added 6 of the world’s most formidable, entrepreneurial AI researchers to our team, including Professor Ion Stoica (Databricks’ Co-Founder & Chairman), as well as luminaries Michael I. Jordan, Kurt Keutzer, Trevor Darrell, Dawn Song, and Pieter Abbeel.
We partnered with Google on this launch, and soon after, Microsoft and Amazon set up physical AI-focused offices in Berkeley.
As we turn the page to this exciting new chapter, we’re equally excited to introduce UC Berkeley AI Professor and serial entrepreneur, Ken Goldberg, as our newest Faculty Partner.
Berkeley’s legacy as a pioneer and champion of open source, free speech, and artificial intelligence for decades has made it a natural center for developing AI that can create a positive impact on society.
AI Founders Asked & We Deliver
What motivates us is the idea that by pairing the best Berkeley founders with their ideal ecosystem, we can help them be unstoppable. In supporting AI founders for the past decade, we are now able to offer a differentiated set of resources to our portfolio companies including:
- Access to top AI talent from the Berkeley campus and alumni base
- Mentorship from top AI professors
- Mentorship from top AI founders & execs
- Free and/or early access to technology
- A front-row seat to the bleeding-edge AI spinning out of Berkeley’s campus
- Introductions to potential lighthouse customers from the Fortune 2000 —as well as high-growth Berkeley startups and Unicorns—who are adopting AI today
Earlier this year, we launched The House AI Accelerator with support from Databricks & OpenAI (the world’s highest-valued private AI unicorns), the world’s biggest AI companies (Microsoft & Google), as well as the top AI research lab (Berkeley AI Research lab, aka BAIR, @UC Berkeley) and the world’s biggest university research group, the University of California system.
This is a first-of-its-kind program for AI founders, bringing together the top global AI companies, startups, and researchers.
Built By Berkeley Founders. For Berkeley Founders.
Our team of now 30-strong, including full-time and part-time team members, has been building and serving Berkeley founders for the last roughly 13 years. None of this would be possible without them.
Our tight-knit group has deep Berkeley entrepreneurial roots and was grown from within the same community we serve. We’re the venture firm for the people of Berkeley.
Welcome Home, Berkeley Founders
We are called The House Fund because we are the home for the Berkeley founder community.
We support Berkeley people in their entrepreneurial journey, whether that’s providing feedback on their ideas well before a startup forms, investing in their startup, helping them get jobs at startups, learning about startups and tech, or navigating Berkeley’s campus and alumni ecosystem.
Building an in-person community where we can collaborate and experiment is an important element of our earlier success and something we are overjoyed to enable once again. To our community, new and old, we’ve missed you and see you soon.
To our founders, incoming and current, we are your peers sitting side-by-side with you in the trenches. We call one another when axes hit the fan, because they always do. We pick each other up. We keep each other going. We are hungry to build something great, together.
If you want to support Berkeley entrepreneurship, as a founder, advisor, LP, champion, or otherwise, we welcome you to join us! Reach out here: Get Involved.
Together, we will advance Berkeley’s 150-year legacy of startup greatness and improve (perhaps even save) our world.
Welcome home,
-Fiance & The House Fund Team
TechCrunch shares more on this exciting news!
The House Fund is a pre-seed and early-stage venture capital fund — the first fund focused on Berkeley and AI.
This post is dedicated to the memories of Rob Chandra, Bill Bowes, and Alan Mendelson, true believers in Berkeley, its people, and its potential.
There are too many people to thank so I’ll instead call out some important groups — Jagdeep Singh Bachher, Jeff Brody, and Terry Garnett for being the first to believe in us and have the vision; Our Portfolio Founder Family who welcomed us onboard their startup journeys; Our incredible team who works tirelessly at all hours in support of them; My partner Cameron Baradar who I’ve been building with since the beginning; Our Faculty Partners for painting the future of AI for Berkeley and the world; Our Limited Partners for giving us the chance to capitalize on our opportunity; Our Advisors; The alums who went above and beyond over the years; Our campus friends [Chancellors, Vice Chancellors, Administrators, Professors, Program Leaders] who saw something in a handful of wide-eyed students & recent grads, and who push Berkeley entrepreneurship forward; All of the now Berkeley alums who have supported our mission as part of our team and as campus leaders and builders along the way; The University of California, UC Berkeley, & Berkeley AI Research; UC Endowment & Berkeley Endowment; The City of Berkeley; Our Corporate partners super-charging our AI startups, including but not limited to Infosys, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, S&P Global, and Databricks; Those who provided feedback on drafts of this post; This list of groups merely scratches the surface…Thank you to all who helped along the way!
We partnered with Microsoft via Microsoft for Startups & M12 and Google via their AI fund Gradient Ventures.
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.
