Cal Fund highlights #1: What our founders shipped & why we’re aligned
At the California Innovation Fund ("Cal Fund" or “Cal Innovation Fund”) we back researchers, clinicians, businessmen, and engineers coming out of the UC ecosystem. Given we started at UC Berkeley, from our founder Kurt Beyer, and Cal is the #1 school for startup founders globally we also have a focus on UC Berkeley.
Then, we stay in the trenches with them. Their success is our success.
Our carry is then shared with the university, so we have a complete alignment with the founder’s, the University, and ourselves.
Why does this work? Alignement. We are Charlie Munger fans and love his line: “Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome.” We align across the board. We support founders to be successful, we share the carry with the University, and the University supports in developing founders (and so do we, just not in a specific four year program).
This is how we power the “Flywheel of innovation.”
This post is the first in a recurring series where we step back from the deal flow and simply report what our companies have built. No commentary on markets, no fund mechanics: just the milestones our founders put on the board this quarter. If you can think of a way to help or support these founders and stay aligned, let us know. We love alignment and support.
What follows is a deliberately broad slice. It spans a gene-editing paper in a leading protocols journal, an FDA clearance, a public-safety translation deployment, and a reimbursement win that could be the difference maker in letting cancer patients keep their hair. That breadth is not an accident. It is what a research university looks like when its ideas reach the world. It’s what makes Universities such a rich potential for deep tech and innovation based startups. It’s why Cal Fund exists.
Editpep
Editpep, the UC Berkeley therapeutics spinout co-founded by Dana Foss and IGI's Ross Wilson, reported one of the quarter's most significant scientific results. Its Neuro-PERC peptide-mediated CRISPR technology was published in Nature Protocols, documenting in vivo editing of mammalian neurons in both mice and pig brains, and extended survival in a Huntington's disease model.
This is delivering gene-editing machinery into the central nervous system. This is science fiction, today.
Showing a functional benefit in a model of a devastating neurodegenerative disease, is exactly the kind of hard, foundational step that turns a Berkeley discovery into a credible path toward the clinic. A peer-reviewed protocol also does something quieter but important: it lets other labs build on the work, which is how platforms earn their reputation.
We are very excited about the early progress of Editpep, and that they were a SkyDeck investment, one of our sister funds at Cal.
ResVita Bio
ResVita Bio, another UC Berkeley spinout (and recently up for #1 startup out of UC Berkeley), is turning a daily topical into a living drug factory: engineered skin bacteria that continuously produce therapeutic proteins for serious rare skin diseases. This quarter the company moved visibly closer to patients.
It released a clinical-trial interest form for the Netherton syndrome community. Netherton syndrome is a rare disease but fatal in nearly 20% of children. This is an early but concrete step toward recruitment for a disease with no approved targeted therapy, and it added dermatologist-physician John D. Doux, MD, MBA to its board to deepen clinical guidance ahead of its planned first-in-human work. For an orphan-disease program, building trust with a small, underserved patient community is real progress, and doing it in the open is the right instinct.
Eko Health
Eko Health, founded at UC Berkeley in 2013 by undergraduates Connor Landgraf, Jason Bellet, and Tyler Crouch, is reinventing the stethoscope with FDA-cleared AI. It was a landmark quarter on three fronts. The FDA cleared Eko's algorithm for earlier detection of heart failure via low ejection fraction, expanding what a clinician can catch in a routine exam. Independently, a study in the European Heart Journal validated that Eko's AI-enabled digital stethoscope detects moderate-to-severe heart disease at roughly twice the rate of a standard exam. And the company announced it has now sold 750,000 digital stethoscopes worldwide.
One of the amazing things is this AI enabled stethoscope is available in remote locations - or even at your own home. With the world’s largest database of lung and heart noises this allows AI enabled healthcare globally, not just for the utlra-wealthy. That means anyone anywhere could have AI enabled healthcare, predicting diseases and ailments before they occur and recommend relief.
Alignment.
A regulatory clearance, a peer-reviewed efficacy result, and a hard adoption number in the same window is the trifecta every medical-device founder is chasing: the technology works, the regulator agrees, and clinicians are voting with their hands.
LILT
LILT, the enterprise AI translation platform co-founded by former Google Translate researchers, including UC Berkeley associate teaching professor of computer science John DeNero, spent the quarter proving that "mission-critical" is not marketing. LILT partnered with the National Weather Service to power AI-assisted translation of life-saving weather warnings, including Spanish-language hurricane advisories now issued at scale.
On the product side, the company launched LILT Assist, an autonomous AI translation agent that moves the platform beyond human-in-the-loop co-pilots toward governed, self-directed multilingual workflows. When a startup's software sits between a hurricane forecast and a family that needs to understand it, the stakes speak for themselves, and the trust required to earn that deployment is not easily won.
Translating complicated technical and medical documents enables greater understanding and adoption of high end medical devices and technology globally. And it all started because Spence Green was struggling to install WiFi while abroad and thought there was a better way - so he got a Phd from Stanford in philosophy and computer science and partnered with a former professor to build Lilt. Brilliant.
SixMap
SixMap delivers enterprise-grade attack-surface management that needs only a company name to map an organization's entire internet-facing footprint. They have provided service and contracts to major corporations, and US agencies. Last year, the U.S. Air Force awarded the company a Phase II SBIR contract for preemptive exposure management, deepening a federal customer relationship that few security startups reach.
Late last year, the team also shipped two platform enhancements, Organization Filtering and Exposure Insights, giving enterprise security teams automatic asset attribution and continuous exposure tracking. A government milestone and real feature velocity in one quarter is the profile of a company hitting its stride.
Cooler Heads
Cooler Heads makes Amma, the only FDA-cleared portable scalp-cooling system, which helps chemotherapy patients keep their hair, founded by breast-cancer survivor Kate Dilligan. Its milestones this quarter were about access, which is the hardest part of medtech. And Cooler Heads helps provide customers with peace of mind and privacy. We love that.
The WVU Cancer Institute deployed twelve Amma units across six regional sites, extending scalp cooling well beyond flagship urban centers. And New York Medicaid began covering the CPT codes for mechanical scalp cooling, removing a financial barrier that has long kept this option out of reach for many patients. A commercialization win paired with a reimbursement win is how a good idea becomes standard of care rather than a luxury, and this one directly changes what a patient's hardest year can look like.
The through-line - UCs and changing the world
Six companies: a CNS gene-editing protocol, a living-medicine trial on-ramp, an FDA clearance backed by peer-reviewed evidence, a public-safety AI deployment, a federal security milestone, and a Medicaid coverage win for cancer patients. What connects them is not a sector; it is a posture. These are teams solving problems that are technically unforgiving and slow to yield, the kind of work a research university is uniquely built to seed and a hands-on, aligned investor is uniquely built to support.
We are proud to stand behind these founders, and prouder still that their wins this quarter belong to the people they serve, from a rural cardiology clinic to a family reading a hurricane warning in their own language. We will keep reporting the milestones as they come. That is the fund we set out to be.
Sources
Editpep · editpep.bio
Nature Protocols publication, Neuro-PERC: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40032999
ResVita Bio · resvitabio.com
Netherton syndrome trial interest form: bio.bakarlabs.org
John D. Doux appointed to board: PR Newswire
Eko Health · ekohealth.com
FDA clearance, earlier heart-failure detection: AJMC
European Heart Journal validation study: Eko published research
750,000 devices sold: Eko Health
LILT · lilt.com
National Weather Service translation of weather warnings: Illinois News Bureau
LILT Assist launch: PR Newswire
John DeNero faculty page: UC Berkeley EECS
SixMap · sixmap.io
U.S. Air Force Phase II SBIR contract: SixMap press release
Organization Filtering + Exposure Insights launch: Cyber Technology Insights
Cooler Heads · coolerheads.com
WVU Cancer Institute regional deployment: WVU Medicine
New York Medicaid CPT coverage: PR Newswire
