A pre-seed & early stage venture capital fund for Berkeley's top alumni, faculty, and student startups.

The House Fund is the go-to source of capital and support for Berkeley alumni, faculty, and student founders. This enormous community – over 50,000 faculty, students, and researchers on campus, and another 500,000 living alumni – encompasses some of the world’s leading technologists, founders, and executives. Berkeley founders have built, and continue to build, the innovation and companies that have defined Silicon Valley and the technological revolutions of the last several decades. From iconic companies like Apple, Intel, Softbank, and Tesla, to the next generation of market leaders like Databricks, Tanium, Warby Parker, and TubeMogul, Cal founders have created and defined markets, created billions in market value and impacted over one billion lives. This is why we brought on Part-Time Partners to bring to bear the operational expertise of Berkeley’s latest wave of successful founders. At The House Fund, we focus our time and resources within this incredible talent pool to build community and real relationships at the earliest stages with the next great Cal founders. We are all in on Berkeley, limiting our investments to only companies with at least 1 Cal affiliated founder. The House Fund was founded by Berkeley community leaders and builders who for the last eight years have been helping to enable and accelerate the growth of the Berkeley ecosystem and its startups. Our fund is proudly backed by the University of California Endowment, enabling us to capture and return value to the University.

Many people know and understand that UC Berkeley is a world-class academic institution, particularly in engineering disciplines. Most, however, don’t realize just how dominant Berkeley is within computer science and artificial intelligence research. As just one case study, Science recently conducted an analysis of the most influential computer scientists globally. The #1 most influential computer scientists globally is on our team – Michael Jordan – a pioneering figure in machine learning. In the same analysis, 4 of the 10 are from UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley has more affiliates on this list than any other academic institution. Amidst this backdrop of world-leading computer science and AI talent, we have doubled down on building world-class support for AI founders by launching AI@The House and bringing onboard six leading AI faculty onto our Fund team as Faculty Partners. Our Faculty Partners are engaged in supporting our portfolio founders, sourcing and evaluating new opportunities, and more.

We partner with founders at the earliest stages. We invest early and with conviction, typically as the first investor. We like to invest in the first round of a startup's lifecycle, whether that be a Pre-Seed, Seed, or in unique cases, a Series A round. Our team invests significant time and resources into our investments to help build the foundations of these businesses. We pair them with world-class technologists and entrepreneurs for mentorship. Our portfolio support platform helps founders with recruiting, customer introductions, $500,000+ in free and discounted services, and business building best practices and relationships that help founders focus on what matters most. We support our companies over time by investing in subsequent financing rounds and support with future fundraising from other value-add investors. Our portfolio has raised over $700M in follow on financing in the last three years.