BERKELEY, Calif. — Pitchbook recently released the 2026 rankings of universities by how many startups their graduates have founded. UC Berkeley tops the list for the fourth consecutive year, even as Silicon Valley has recently taken a darker turn.
“Berkeley is home to some of the greatest innovation in America,” Richard Lyons remarked at a press event. “And Berkeley is home to some of the most innovative startups, from one that uses AI to track DNA samples of political asylum seekers to another that uses cloud infrastructure to operate space-based nuclear missiles.”
Govern.ai was founded by Xavier Xu (‘25) and is one of Berkeley’s most promising startups. According to Mr. Xu, “Dictatorships and democratic figures who have dictatorial inclinations currently have to navigate a complex technical landscape of poorly connected online and offline services and difficult regulation to carry out their plans. That is why I founded Govern.ai. Users can compare tactics of previous dictators, supercharging their workflows and 10x-ing productivity with scalable AI integration. On the blockchain.”
Free Peach reporters reached out to Antony Saltman (‘29) and asked what motivated him to found Iceberg.ai. “Oil and gas companies are limited,” Saltman told us, “in the amount they can pollute. That is why my AI B2B SaaS is revolutionizing workarounds to climate change regulation. Iceberg is the Uber of loophole-finding. And it seamlessly integrates into all of your devices for data-driven decision making.”
Saltman claims he vibe-coded his start-up with SpaceXAI’s AI agent Grok, as other agents including Claude would not write code for him due to content safety restrictions. “The hardest part was cleaning all of the illegal deepfakes out of the code base.”
At press time, UC President James Milliken reaffirmed the University of California’s commitment to innovation. He also pointed out that the University of California has filed the most patents of any university in the country, including one for the design of AI robots that wield automatic machine guns.