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Bakar Labs for Energy and Materials: rendering as seen from Oxford St to the east

Construction begins on Bakar Labs incubator for energy-efficient startups

UC Berkeley has begun construction on the Bakar Labs for Energy and Materials facility, which will be designed as a business incubator for startups working on innovating the energy and materials science industries. The incubator is a partnership between Bakar Labs, Turner Construction Company and campus. Architecture firm Gensler, as well as engineering and design services company A Squared Solutions, also collaborated with Turner on the facility. The planned five-story, 145,000-square-foot building will provide lab and office space for up to 75 early-stage companies with specialized equipment and support. It is intended to maximize UC Berkeley’s mission of providing long-term societal benefit. Read post
A group of people pose with shovels in a construction site

Turner Breaks Ground on Bakar Labs for Energy + Materials at UC Berkeley

“Turner is honored to partner with everyone on the Bakar Labs for Energy + Materials project," said Manu Garg, Project Executive, Turner Construction Company. “This collaboration reflects our shared commitment to excellence and innovation in delivering complex research facilities. We look forward to contributing our expertise to a project that exemplifies the power of collaboration in advancing research and innovation.” Read post
Three scientists look at a laptop in a lab

A playbook for university-driven climate innovation

From an op-ed on the investing site Impact Alpha, authored by Director Dave Schaffer & Director of Partnerships Shilpi Kumar: "Climate tech has matured, with dedicated funds, corporate commitments, and government programs helping the sector grow stronger than it was just a few years ago. The next step is ensuring the most technical, early-stage ventures can thrive within that ecosystem. Universities are showing how this can be done – by blending research, education, and entrepreneurship into a single model that supports founders over the long term. The Berkeley case demonstrates that public institutions can take equity in startups, reinvest returns into their mission, and provide the resources private markets alone cannot. The broader lesson is that universities can act as launch pads and long-term partners for climate ventures, helping ideas move from the lab into the marketplace." Read post
The Terranova caterpillar-tread robot

How one founder plans to save cities from flooding with terraforming robots

Parts of San Rafael, a city just north of San Francisco, are sinking about half an inch per year. That might not sound like much, but altogether, it has meant that some neighborhoods — like the Canal District that borders the bay — have sunk three feet, placing them at greater risk of flooding from sea-level rise. San Rafael isn’t alone. Cities around the world are threatened by rising sea levels, with 300 million people at risk of routine flooding by 2050. The cost of building seawalls to hold the waters back could top $400 billion in the U.S. alone. A new startup is proposing an alternative: raise the city instead. Read post
Seven men standing in dirt field holding shovels spray-painted gold

Golden Shovels, Green Vision: A Collaborative Effort Breaks Ground on the Future Home of Bakar Labs for Energy and Materials

The facility, scheduled to open in 2028 and located on the west side of campus (Oxford Street at University Avenue, in the new Berkeley Innovation Zone), will feature state-of-the-art labs, offices, and collaboration spaces designed to accelerate commercialization of clean energy, advanced materials, and sustainable technologies. Bakar Labs is central to the university’s efforts to enable solutions to one of society’s most vexing challenges and opportunities: the global transition to advanced energy systems. Read post
Six scientists wearing white lab coats

FutureBio startup to make completely recyclable plastic cost-competitive

Biotech startup FutureBio, the first tenant of UC Berkeley’s Bakar Labs for Energy and Materials, hopes to produce and recycle a new kind of durable, biorenewable plastic at a lower cost than regular plastic. Its plastic is made from green materials, unlike petroleum-based plastic. It can be depolymerized, meaning it can be broken down into its building blocks or monomers and then recombined to make new plastic. This means FutureBio’s plastic is completely recyclable, whereas only small portions of petroleum-based plastic can be reused after it undergoes mechanical recycling. Read post
Six scientists wearing white lab coats

‘We want to change the world:’ Company says it is creating a new kind of plastic

FutureBio is tackling the problem of plastic pollution head-on by creating what its co-founder describes as a new kind of plastic. Different from both the petroleum-based and the biodegradable ones now in use, it is not only durable but also bio-renewable and easier to recycle, said Zilong Wang. “It proposes a different and a novel plastic, which is different from all other kinds of plastic,” he said. Worldwide, only about 9% of today's plastic is actually recycled. Most of the rest, millions of tons, goes to landfills or ends up in the environment. Even the plastic that is recycled is sent to landfills or incinerators after one or two cycles because the quality of the material degrades. Read post
Joshua James

From Chemistry at Chevron to Investing in Clean Energy at BEVC, a Natural Progression for Joshua James

The instinct to roll up his sleeves rather than simply write checks is exactly drew James to BEVC. Founded by Risa Stack, Rowan Chapman, and Widya Mulyasasmita, the fund’s model is unusually immersive: it sits at the crossroads of Berkeley’s research depth and Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial speed. BEVC doesn’t just invest in companies; it helps form them, often spinning out startups directly from university labs. For investors like James, who combine scientific rigor with venture savvy, it’s a rare ecosystem — a place where they can stay close to the science while still driving real-world impact. Read post

University Hall Demolished For UC Berkeley Innovation Zone, Downtown Berkeley

Phase one will see the completion of Bakar Labs for Energy & Materials, a five-story academic facility designed by Gensler. The structure will contain a mix of wet laboratories and spaces for the purpose of supporting “startups rooted in chemistry, material sciences, and rapid instrument prototyping, propelled by artificial intelligence and machine learning,” according to UC Berkeley Capital Strategies’ press release. Read post

AIMATX Co-Founder Omar Yaghi Shares 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Omar Yaghi, a Jordanian-American chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry today, sharing it with Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan. The scientists were cited for creating “molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow. These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.” Yaghi is the 28th UC Berkeley faculty member to win a Nobel Prize and the fifth winner in the past five years. Yesterday, John Clarke shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2021, David Card shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, while in 2020, Jennifer Doudna shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Reinhard Genzel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Read post

“Better, Faster, Cheaper, Greener”: Tenant Spotlight on AIMATX and Their New Materials to Save the Planet

AIMATX is a materials innovation company that’s using AI to design not only remarkable new materials, but also more practical, efficient paths to synthesize them. Co-founder Jennifer Chayes — who also serves as the Dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley — describes AIMATX as a “materials on demand” type of operation. “It starts with a customer saying, ‘I want a material with this, that, and that property,’” Chayes said. “I want a sneaker with this property. I want a face cream with this property. I want something that can transport a drug that would have been destroyed in the stomach down to the small intestine without being disrupted so it can be absorbed there. I want something to have very, very particular properties, and I’m not really happy with anything I find in online catalogs. So then you’d go to AIMATX to have the material made.” Read post
In Levitree’s warehouse facility, 4th St., Berkeley. L-R: Co-founder & COO Laurence Allen; co-founder & CEO Trip Allen; CCO Nick Rajkovich. The robot pictured to the right is autonomously controlled and injects the wood slurry underground. Photo: Jim Block

Levitree: Lifting Cities out of Flood Danger with Robots

“San Rafael has the Bay Area’s largest flood problem,” Laurence Allen explains. “It’s a city of about 60,000 people facing a $500 to $900 million flood problem. When you run the math on that, the protection is just unaffordable.” Laurence hopes to help San Rafael and other coastal cities lift themselves out of flood danger using technology developed by Levitree, a Bakar Labs company of which he is COO. In short, Levitree uses robots to lift a property, and everything built on it, by injecting wood slurries deep beneath the surface, where it’s prevented from decomposing back into carbon dioxide. “Reshape the World” is their motto. Read post
The Gigacrop team. L-R: Senior Scientist Michael Dougherty, CEO Chris Eiben, Head of Protein Engineering Juhan Kim, Associate Scientist Victor Vela, Scientist II Rahman Pour. Photo by Jim Block.

GigaCrop’s Chris Eiben wants to improve photosynthesis. Here’s how he’s doing it.

“The thing holding plants back today is the enzyme Rubisco,” Eiben says. “It’s the first enzyme a plant uses to take CO2 and start turning it into a sugar. But the enzyme is slow, and it has a tendency to use oxygen instead of CO2 . Which is incredibly costly for the plant to fix. I don't have a clever way to make Rubisco better; land plants have been trying to improve it for 450 million years, which is a long time. Doing better than that is tough. So GigaCrop is inserting a parallel photosynthesis pathway into plants. “If a plant were an airplane, what we are doing is installing a more efficient engine. The trick is we have to do it while the airplane is flying. Plants must have a working engine at all times” he says. “Rubisco is part of a larger cycle called the Calvin-Benson cycle. Our pathway can exist next to the Calvin-Benson cycle, and they can both operate. But the plants will benefit because our pathway is faster and more energy efficient.” Read post

Recap: Symposium on AI and Climate Technology During SF Climate Week

Climate change is becoming more real with every season. We need to leverage as many tools as possible to solve this global challenge and mitigate the damage in the years to come. Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can advance the discovery, translation, and impact of technologies needed to combat climate change at the speed we need. That’s why this past Wednesday and Thursday (April 23-24, 2025), during SF Climate Week, Bakar Climate Labs partnered with UC Berkeley’s Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP) to hold the inaugural “AI and Climate Symposium,” with the important subtitle “From Cutting-Edge Research to Commercialization.” Our goals were to highlight opportunities for AI to advance the discovery and ultimate translation of climate technologies – and to connect researchers, founders, and investors across both AI and climate tech. Read post