How A UC Berkeley Grad Turned $2,500 Into A Startup Investment Fund

The University of California, Berkeley, has a student body of 38,000, eight startup accelerators and more than a dozen top-rated programs across a wide range of disciplines. But until this week, the world-renowned university didn’t have an investment fund focused on startups it nurtured.

The House Fund, a new $6 million investment fund focused exclusively on startups coming out of UC Berkeley, is aiming to give talented entrepreneurs within the school’s vast network of students and alumni the close proximity to investment, mentorship and network support enjoyed by some peers from Stanford, MIT and other private universities.

At 24, its founder, Jeremy Fiance, may be the youngest venture capitalist ever to independently launch a fund. But as an alumnus, a dedicated advocate for startups at the school and an entrepreneur himself – as a student, he co-founded a health startup called Dropsense – he’s in a good position to give the school’s startup ecosystem a boost.

“One of the biggest complaints I experienced personally was a huge gap for this early-stage capital in the zero to $250,000 range. There was nowhere to get that first check,” he said. “So I end up creating the community that I wished had existed.”

The culmination of a five-year project, House Fund has an initial portfolio of six startups across robotics, ed-tech, digital health and artificial intelligence.

Among these is Lily Robotics, a flying drone camera conceived at a Cal robotics lab. It’s since raised $15 million and has grown to 40 employees in San Francisco’s SoMa district.

But the opportunities are as large and diverse as the school itself: There are more than 100 startups currently on campus, many still lurking “in dorm rooms or in stealth mode,” Fiance said. (That was one of the findings in Fiance’s college thesis on UC Berkeley’s startup ecosystem, which helped to prove out the fund’s concept to its supporters in Silicon Valley.)

“UC Berkeley is a hotbed of startup activity these days,” adds Terry Garnett of Garnett Ventures, who is one of the fund’s initial supporters. “As a Berkeley graduate and with my daughter in school there right now, I’m very engaged as an investor and advisor in supporting Jeremy’s efforts to make this fund very successful. I think a Cal-focused fund will be well positioned to back graduates who are starting new companies.”

As an undergraduate studying business, design and engineering, Fiance won a $2,500 grant from the school to co-found Free Ventures, a student-run accelerator program, in 2013. Thirty-four startups have since gone through the program, raising a total of $20 million dollars. In the meantime, he helped to bring the Dorm Room Fund, a national student-run fund backed by First Round Capital, to UC Berkeley for the first time.

“As a public institution, Cal has some limitations in its ability to support startups (financially),” he said. The House Fund isn’t formally affiliated with UC Berkeley, but “ultimately we hope to align very closely with Cal,” he said.

Honing in specifically on UC Berkeley’s large alumni network of 500,000 – which entailed 500 meetings in advance of launching the fund, Fiance said – is certain to turn up a large base of founders, investors and advisors ready to help one another build great companies.

And that’s reflected in The House Fund’s initial base of investors and other supporters, who are “alumni by design”: Some those include Jeff Brody (Redpoint Ventures), Shervin Pishevar (Sherpa Capital), and John Burke (True Ventures), among numerous other investors, academics and successful entrepreneurs across Silicon Valley.

“I often get asked: Why are you limiting yourself to the Cal world?” Fiance said. “But to me, it’s an unlimited opportunity.”

Source: San Francisco Business Times, Annie Gaus
Photo: Responding to an investment void in the UC Berkeley startup ecosystem, Jeremy Fiance created The House Fund, the first investment fund dedicated to Cal startups. The fund raised $6 million.