For decades, UC Berkeley has played a critical role in the technology and startup ecosystem. The trend has only accelerated in the AI era, with alumni having founded some of the most consequential startups of this generation, including OpenAI, Databricks, Perplexity, Skild AI, Reflection, and Physical Intelligence.
In fact, according to the latest data from PitchBook, the university’s undergrad alumni have launched more VC-backed startups than any other campus globally.
Against this backdrop, and amid National Science Foundation (NSF) changes, Lightspeed and Sky Lab are launching the first formal venture capital partnership in Sky Computing Lab’s history. Lightspeed has made $500k founding contribution to the partnership, whose goal is to sustain pivotal research and translate it into market-ready products and services that address enterprise needs.
Sky Computing Lab’s enduring impact
In 2022, the university’s Sky Computing Lab opened its doors as the next chapter of five-year, high-impact research labs. That lineage, including RISELab and AMPLab, has powered companies like Databricks, Opaque, Ponder, and Anyscale, and produced field-defining work in systems, databases, and machine learning. Sky Computing Lab exists to push technological progress across research and software development, while preserving the Berkeley culture and tradition of open publication and open source software.
Some of the lab’s core focus areas to date include:
- Distributed systems, machine learning, security, and programming languages
- Building infrastructure to decouple services from specific cloud providers
- Enabling applications to run on any or multiple clouds without friction
A new research landscape
Incredible, industry-shaping work still begins within academic institutions, but the funding landscape is shifting. For instance, in the FY 2024 budget, the NSF’s enacted funding fell to $9 billion, a 5-8% reduction from the year prior, depending on the baseline. And, the FY 2026 budget request would reduce NSF funding by an estimated 56% to about $3.9 billion. Multiple analyses warn of continued pressure and ripple effects across university research programs.
The impact is already visible: fewer grants, slower timelines, and heightened urgency to commercialize promising work faster so it can sustain itself.
This partnership is built for exactly this environment.
Announcing the first formal venture partnership with Sky Computing Lab
Now, in the first formal venture capital partnership in the history of Sky Computing Lab, Lightspeed is pledging capital alongside entrepreneurship resources and our network of founders and operators, to the Sky community of faculty and researchers, from undergrad through postdoc.
In partnering with Sky Computing Lab’s entrepreneurially-minded professors, including Ion Stoica (with whom Lightspeed partnered with on Arena Intelligence, Dawn Song (with whom Lightspeed partnered with on Virtue AI), and Joey Gonzalez, our goals are to:
- Accelerate the transformation of cutting-edge research into market-ready products.
- Provide emerging founders with both technical and business resources from day one.
- Ensure that Berkeley’s next wave of entrepreneurs has the platform and partners to build industry-defining companies.
“This partnership departs from traditional models, reflecting a response to a new reality,” says Ion Stoica, Professor at UC Berkeley, Director of the Sky Computing Lab, and Co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale. One that demands durable bridges between frontier research and company creation, without compromising the lab’s commitment to open science. It establishes a new model for university-venture collaboration in the AI era.
“Berkeley’s history proves that when groundbreaking research meets visionary entrepreneurship, world-changing companies are born,” says Stoica. “This partnership between Sky and Lightspeed seeks to ensure the university’s next generation of innovators will not only participate in the future of artificial intelligence. They’ll help define it.”
The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. The views expressed here are those of the individual Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. (“Lightspeed”) personnel and are not the views of Lightspeed or its affiliates; other market participants could take different views.
Unless otherwise indicated, the inclusion of any third-party firm and/or company names, brands and/or logos does not imply any affiliation with these firms or companies.
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