Richard Chan was hosting a Hong Kong dinner with other UC Berkeley alums when he heard a startling fact: the state of California covers just 14 percent of the public university’s budget. Chan, a serial entrepreneur and investor, decided to investigate how his skills could be of service to his alma mater.
Chan eventually settled on an innovative public-private partnership: the Berkeley Frontier Fund. The venture capital fund invests in startup companies linked to UC Berkeley and donates around 30 percent of its returns to campus. In 2024, they gave $1 million to a variety of academic initiatives, from biology to engineering to entrepreneurship. The company ultimately plans to contribute at least $25 million to UC Berkeley — a big impact at a time of tightening budgets.
“As a Berkeley MBA graduate,” said Chan, “the four Defining Leadership Principles — question the status quo, confidence without attitude, student always, and beyond yourself — have been my true north as an investor. We established the Berkeley Frontier Fund with a philanthropic mission at its core. Our aim was to develop a sustainable revenue source for Berkeley from the ground up.”
The Berkeley Frontier Fund’s reinvention of the venture capital model complements Chancellor Rich Lyons’ philosophy around entrepreneurship and innovation for social good.
“UC Berkeley has a long record of challenging the status quo, and that legacy has attracted many innovators and investors who are committed to the greater good,” said Lyons. “Not only does the Berkeley Frontier Fund supply capital for our faculty and alumni startup founders, it reinvests a portion of its profits into campus to help train the next generation of entrepreneurs. It’s an extraordinary opportunity for everyone involved, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see other universities follow in our path.”
“It is a win-win for everyone,” said Chan.
A September analysis by PitchBook found that UC Berkeley’s undergraduate alums account for more startup founders than any other university worldwide. These alums have launched 1,642 companies that have raised a combined $59.7 billion, a stunningly large amount that doesn’t even include graduate student and faculty-led startups.
Driven by a fondness for their alma mater, Berkeley alums comprise the large majority of the Berkeley Frontier Fund’s investors. Chan leverages this loyalty to campus in his pitch to Berkeley-linked company founders, who are often happy to secure additional funding for UC Berkeley by reserving a spot in their company’s investment rounds. After all, it costs the companies nothing to have a Berkeley-linked fund put up capital instead of a firm with no campus relationship.
Chan focuses on frontier technology: companies that have the potential to form industries or disrupt markets in promising areas such as biotechnology, cybersecurity, materials science, and artificial intelligence. The Berkeley Frontier Fund invests at the growth stage: series B funding rounds or later. Early-stage companies are riskier and take a long time to recoup investments.
The Berkeley Frontier Fund adopted a pragmatic, student-focused approach across its 20 different gifts to campus in 2024. The company emphasizes entrepreneurship, direct support of students, and inclusion and access for underrepresented cohorts. For example, the fund allowed the Biology Scholars Program to hire a full-time adviser and provided research stipends to two undergraduate students in the SEED (STEM Excellence through Equity and Diversity) Scholars program. Both programs aim to boost inclusion in STEM so that a wider variety of people and ideas are given a chance to succeed.
The company’s philanthropy even helped to launch new initiatives at UC Berkeley. One donation provided the seed funding for the MTx Startup Bootcamp Fund. MTx is the university’s shorthand for molecular therapeutics, an area of biology dedicated to discovering how to use new biochemical and cellular approaches, such as gene editing or stem cells, to treat diseases. The Department of Molecular and Cell Biology formally recognized the growing field by establishing a new academic division last year.
Rich Lyons and Richard Chan in Hong Kong during the June 2024 Light the Way campaign closing ceremony
A Berkeley Frontier Fund dinner reception in Hong Kong
The MTx Startup Bootcamp creates a curriculum that trains students to form companies to develop new medical treatments. These students have the opportunity to interact directly with faculty and industry experts to gain real-world insights. The division hopes to create a collaborative environment to prepare students for biotech careers that leverage Berkeley’s scientific excellence to develop new therapeutic modalities.
Julia Schaletzky is an adjunct professor of molecular therapeutics and the executive director for the Molecular Therapeutics Initiative. The program unites an interdisciplinary community of UC Berkeley researchers, academic institutes, pharmaceutical companies, and venture capital partners to reveal new pathways for medical treatments. Schaletzky expects the division’s startup training program will prove fruitful for health research.
“The Berkeley Frontier Fund aligns with our vision that students can be innovators,” said Schaletzky. “The MTx Startup Bootcamp Fund allows us to train the next generation of drug discovery scientists, giving students sought-after opportunities for hands-on engagement with industry-leading technologies. It’s important to make the training broadly available to aspiring entrepreneurs and changemakers.”
UC Berkeley dedicates significant resources to research and development, and its labs often focus on discovering breakthroughs that end up spawning dozens of companies. By boosting research and entrepreneurship on campus, the Berkeley Frontier Fund hopes to galvanize another wave of Berkeley-linked startups and create a virtuous cycle that benefits the broader UC Berkeley community.
To learn more about the Berkeley Frontier Fund, visit berkeleyfrontier.com.
Julia Schaletzky with students who completed a 2024 drug discovery workshop
