berkeley-startup
(11)
LeadGenius
LeadGenius is a Berkeley-based B2B contact-data and buyer-intelligence company that blends machine learning with a globally distributed team of human researchers to build custom, compliance-first datasets for revenue teams. Rather than reselling a static database, it sources contact and account data on demand for each client, verifying every record before delivery, and layers in signals like role changes, technographics and buying-committee mapping. Spun out of the crowdsourcing startup MobileWorks in Y Combinator's 2011 class, the company pairs its data business with a social mission: it was the first crowdsourcing firm to tie worker pay to local living wages.
Boomy
Boomy is a Berkeley-based generative-music company whose web app lets anyone create original songs with AI in about 30 seconds - pick a style, hit generate, tweak the result, and optionally release it to Spotify, Apple Music and 40+ platforms while collecting royalties. Founded in 2018 by Alex Mitchell and Matthew Cohen Santorelli, Boomy says its users have created more than 20 million tracks, making it one of the most-used AI music tools and a lightning rod in the debate over what AI-made music means for streaming.
Jitsu
Jitsu is a tech-enabled, vertically integrated last-mile delivery company that helps e-commerce brands get parcels to the doorstep quickly, cheaply, and with unusually few lost packages. Formerly known as AxleHire, the Berkeley, California company built its own warehouse management, sortation, routing, and driver software so every system talks in real time, and it now covers 23 of the 25 largest U.S. metro areas with same-day, next-day, and two-day options at rates competitive with traditional ground shipping.
AirMyne
AirMyne is a Berkeley, California climate-tech company building liquid-based direct air capture (DAC) systems that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at industrial scale. Founded in 2022 by chemical-industry veterans Sudip Mukhopadhyay and Mark Cyffka, the company designs a low-temperature, energy-flexible capture process - regenerating its solvent at roughly 100-130 C so it can run on waste heat, geothermal energy, or electricity rather than the high-temperature furnaces most DAC rivals require. Backed by Y Combinator and, more recently, a strategic investment from Japanese energy giant ENEOS, AirMyne is moving from kilogram-per-day prototypes toward a commercial pilot and demonstration plant.
Ditto
Ditto is a Berkeley-born AI matchmaker that skips the swiping. Students text their preferences, and every Wednesday Ditto sends one curated match over iMessage - with the time, place, and coffee-date logistics already handled. Founded by UC Berkeley students Allen Wang and Eric Liu, it went viral through sorority group chats, grew to roughly 100,000 users across about ten campuses, and raised a $9.2M seed led by Peak XV. Its bet: dating apps optimize for time-on-app, but people actually want a good date in real life.
Opticore
Opticore is a photonic computing startup building optical processing units (OPUs) - chips that run AI workloads with light and waveguides instead of electrons. Spun out of research at MIT, USC and UC Berkeley, the company claims its photonic chips are up to 100x more energy efficient and offer roughly 25x the computing density of leading GPUs, using time-multiplexed computing to encode as many as a trillion parameters on a single chip. Opticore has raised about $14.5M to date to attack the energy and 'memory wall' bottlenecks of AI data centers.
Sonera
Sonera (Sonera Magnetics) is a Berkeley, California deep-tech company building chip-scale magnetic field sensors that read the body's own biomagnetic signals without touching the skin. Its flagship S1 chip performs magnetic muscle sensing (magnetomyography) at room temperature and in wearable form factors, aiming to make neural and neuromuscular data as easy to capture as a heart rate. Applications range from silent-speech interfaces in earbuds and glasses to gesture control for XR, plus clinical uses like portable brain imaging and neurodegenerative biomarker tracking. Spun out of UC Berkeley research and backed by an $11M seed round, Sonera is turning a lab-grade magnetics breakthrough into a scalable sensing platform.
ThoughtForge AI
ThoughtForge AI is a Berkeley-based robotics software company building what it calls Universal Robotic Intelligence: an Active Inference control platform that lets existing industrial robots, drones, and crawlers adapt in real time to messy, unpredictable environments. Its lightweight models run on a single CPU at the edge, claim over 99% accuracy on tasks as designed, and reportedly require roughly 90,000x less training data than conventional deep learning. Founded by veterans of Microsoft's Bonsai AI team, ThoughtForge sells to manufacturing, energy, aerospace, and logistics operators who want to upgrade the robots they already own rather than replace them.
Clarity Movement Co.
Clarity Movement Co. is a Berkeley-based climate-tech company that builds solar-powered, internet-connected air quality sensors and pairs them with a cloud analytics platform sold as 'Sensing-as-a-Service.' Founded by UC Berkeley graduates in 2014, Clarity makes it cheap and easy for governments, schools, communities, and companies to measure pollutants like PM2.5 and NO2 at street level - data that has historically come from a handful of expensive, sparse reference stations. Its flagship Node-S device has been deployed across 250+ cities in 85+ countries, powering networks like Breathe London and Open Air Chicago.
Kintsugi
Kintsugi is a Berkeley-based AI company that built voice biomarker technology able to flag signs of clinical depression and anxiety from roughly 20 seconds of free-form speech. Founded in 2019 by Grace Chang and Rima Seiilova-Olson, it sold an API-first platform into call centers, telehealth, and remote patient monitoring before winding down operations in early 2026 and releasing its models, methods, and research into the public domain.
Bettani Farms
Bettani Farms is a Berkeley, California food company making protein-rich, dairy-free cheese that melts and stretches like the real thing. Its patented Caseed protein, derived from the seeds of regenerative crops, mimics dairy casein without the dairy, nuts, soy, or carbon footprint. Formerly Climax Foods, the company rebranded to Bettani Farms in October 2025, named former Califia Farms CFO Sandeep Patel as CEO, and closed an initial $6.5M of its Series A led by S2G Investments to scale mass-market cheeses like mozzarella and feta.