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Berkeley SkyDeck, a global entrepreneurship hub and accelerator, along with the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science and Society (CDSS), announced a partnership with Mayfield.
The goal is to support student entrepreneurs focused on artificial intelligence with unique access to venture capital and first-class mentorship.
Part of the Mayfield AI Garage initiative, this new program will select three winning innovations from UC Berkeley students and award them with a $25,000 stipend for each founding team member (up to $50,000 per team); entry into Berkeley SkyDeck’s highly competitive Pad-13 incubator program; acceptance into the Nvidia Inception program for startups; up to $350,000 in compute credits from Microsoft Azure; and direct mentorship from Mayfield’s team.
“Throughout Mayfield’s 55-year history, we’ve helped start-up entrepreneurs transform breakthrough ideas into iconic companies. With the advent of AI, we believe it is more important than ever to meet founders where they are on their journey. Mayfield AI Garage embodies this belief and provides the capital, mentorship and resources founders need to take their AI ideas to the next level,” Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield, said in a statement. “UC Berkeley has phenomenal AI talent and the SkyDeck accelerator program has a proven legacy of nurturing founders. The joint partnership made sense and we can’t wait to see the exciting AI-based ideas from the first cohort of applicants.”
The new program officially launches on January 22, 2025, with applications open until February 28, 2025. Three winning teams will be announced by April 15, 2025, and the first program will run from May to November 2025. As part of the Pad-13 incubator’s SkyDeck Program, founders will gain access to to SkyDeck premium workshops, a dedicated mentor from over 800 SkyDeck advisor groups, workspace in the SkyDeck penthouse in Berkeley and other perks from resource partners. Pad-13 is an important pipeline for the SkyDeck Accelerator program.
“The Berkeley SkyDeck partnership has been critical to our success and a key attraction for our accelerator companies,” said Chon Tang, founding partner of the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, in a statement. “We are delighted to be working closely with the Mayfield AI Garage team to offer students unique access to the resources necessary to create successful companies.”
UC Berkeley has long been a leader in startup founders, ranking first for male graduate founders, first for female founders, first for number of alumni-founded companies, and first for venture capital investment raised. This new program, in partnership with Mayfield, seeks to continue that tradition for AI-focused founders. To learn more, visit https://mayfield.ai/berkeley.
Mayfield works with founders from day one who see unlimited possibilities where others see limitations. Drawing on his 55-year heritage of building companies and a people-first philosophy, Mayfield brings founder-to-founder expertise to his startups. Mayfield has over 120 IPOs and over 225 acquisitions. It manages $3 billion in assets.
Last year, Mayfield launched the Mayfield AI Garage, a $100 million initiative aimed at idea-stage founders building AI Teammate companies. This program grew out of Mayfield’s 40 years of experience working with Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR). Our EIR program has been a springboard for many successful companies, and we are bringing this proven model to UC Berkeley and providing the same support and resources to student founders.
I asked Navin Chaddha, managing partner of the Mayfield Fund, why it was a good idea to start an AI business so young, when students were still in college.
“I’ve been investing for more than two decades, and I’ve noticed something fascinating: the most transformative companies often come from young founders who approach problems with a ‘beginner’s mind,’” he told GamesBeat. “History has shown that some of the most successful companies, such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook, were founded by students who were not limited by conventional thinking. In the age of artificial intelligence, it is to be a young power.”
He added: “Today’s students are growing up with AI; they build with large language models, use spreadsheets like others, and invent applications that others might dismiss as impossible. The tech talent coming out of UC Berkeley right now is extraordinary—bringing fresh perspectives to hard problems. These students are publishing papers on basic models of artificial intelligence, winning international competitions, and many are already working on projects that could be the next breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence.”
I also asked how many trades can take place at any given time.
“We are selecting three student teams to join the Mayfield AI Garage program at Berkeley, but this is just the beginning of a much larger vision,” Chaddha said. “Each team will receive a stipend and access to essential tools and resources, but more importantly, they will receive mentorship from our team and access to our entire ecosystem to help them go from an idea to a full-fledged startup.”
And he said: “Through our partnerships with Nvidia and Microsoft, these teams will get direct access to state-of-the-art AI infrastructure and technical expertise. Being a part of UC Berkeley SkyDeck’s Pad-13 program is also transformative—putting these founders at the heart of UC Berkeley’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and connecting them with SkyDeck’s other founders, faculty, and network of industry advisors.”
And I asked about competing programs and why Berkeley SkyDeck was the right choice.
Chaddha said, “Silicon Valley has a number of accelerators and incubators that provide capital and resources in exchange for equity, but we structured the Mayfield AI Garage program in Berkeley differently. Instead of a broad approach, we’re creating a startup platform for three student teams to explore whether their AI ideas can turn into a company—no strings attached. We do not accept equity or require incorporation; instead, we provide capital, mentorship from our team and access to our entire network at this stage of exploring ideas.”
He added: “Training large language models or running large-scale experiments can be prohibitively expensive. Access to resources such as Microsoft Azure compute credits or the Nvidia Inception program requires being a venture-backed company, which can be a significant barrier for students. We completely remove these obstacles. Teams will also gain access to the Pad-13 incubator program at the Berkeley Skydeck.
And he concluded by saying, “Our partnership with UC Berkeley builds on our long history of supporting successful Berkeley founders, including Poshmark, Cloudgenix, MindsDB, BigPanda, Rancher Labs and Mammoth Biosciences. UC Berkeley is a powerhouse in AI research, particularly in areas such as underlying models, data, middleware and tools, and human-AI interaction. We are excited to partner with CDSS and UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck to make the Mayfield AI Garage in Berkeley a springboard for student founders building the future of AI. “
