Outside a Tudor revival house on Piedmont Avenue, just steps from the Haas School of Business, the metal chairs were still wet from the morning rain. But it wasn’t the weather that delayed Ashmita Kumar ’25 from our interview.
“That’s what happens when you’re a celebrity,” said Laura Paxton Hassner, MBA ’18, executive director of the Berkeley Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I&E). “Maybe she got pulled into someone’s office.”
The newly renovated Julia Morgan building is home of the Haas Entrepreneurship Hub, or eHub. Around here, conversations tend to run long. Since its opening in February, the center has become the go-to place for the campus’s “entreprecurious”—the growing body of students interested in participating in the bevy of programs on campus aimed at fostering business creators.
Kumar was once one of them. Now, she’s the cofounder and CEO of Code Blue, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to detect strokes.
A moment later, Hassner returned, smiling. Kumar was at her side. She wore a navy T-shirt bearing the logo of SkyDeck, Berkeley’s flagship accelerator and incubator, where Code Blue joined a select cohort of startups in the campus–to–Silicon Valley pipeline. On the back were the words “Where Visionaries Take Flight.”
Kumar insists she’s no celebrity. But, in a way, she is—a leading light in a new generation of Berkeley students for whom entrepreneurship isn’t extracurricular, but embedded in the student experience. In less than four years, the electrical engineering and computer science graduate: won the campus’s annual Big Ideas contest, where thousands of students over the years have competed for a $20,000 prize; filed a patent with the help of Berkeley Law professors; was accepted into the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps, a competitive program that trains teams to commercialize their research; and entered SkyDeck’s Pad-13 incubator and its prestigious Accelerator track, which comes with a $200,000 investment. Along the way, she was also featured on CBS and represented Berkeley at the ACC InVenture Prize, a PBS-televised pitch competition. As if all that weren’t enough, she graduated early.
While Kumar may be exceptional, she’s hardly alone. According to PitchBook’s 2025 rankings, Berkeley now leads all universities in venture-backed startups founded by undergraduate alumni: 1,804 founders and 1,650 companies. This momentum builds on the well-known roster of thriving companies spun out of the school’s faculty research, including Databricks, Covariant, and Caribou Biosciences, the latter cofounded by Berkeley Nobelist Jennifer Doudna. Berkeley also tops the list for female founders: 291 undergraduate alumnae launched 289 companies, according to PitchBook—a remarkable achievement given that just over 2 percent of global venture capital goes to businesses led by all-female founders.
Kumar attributes those numbers to Berkeley’s culture, which she says is so different from the Silicon Valley “tech bro” stereotype cultivated elsewhere. “What you’ll notice about startups that come out of Berkeley is how many of them are actually societally or mission focused,” she said. At Cal, she “learned that startups don’t need to just be B2B [business-to-business] or software-as-a-service [SaaS] tools—that they can actually create a net benefit for people or for society as a whole.”
From makerspaces to accelerators, Cal now includes more than 60 campus organizations in its I&E Council. The result, according to those in the ecosystem, is a distinctly Berkeley strain of entrepreneurship: one that purportedly ties business to the university’s mission of public service, with the campus as both sponsor and beneficiary.
Long-term societal benefit is written into the University of California mission statement, stressed Darren Cooke, M.S. ’96, interim chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer at Berkeley. That goal, he said, “is the foundation for the transformation from a socially focused university to really leaning into startups and venture creation and formation of new businesses. And that’s how we got here.”
“I have to be honest, I actually was not planning to start up and didn’t even think I would when I came here,” Kumar said.
That changed after she noticed a flyer on her way to a computer science discussion in Soda Hall. “Do you have a Big Idea? Win up to $20,000!” it read.
Her idea, at the time nothing more than a “random prototype” she had built in high school, traces its roots back to a series of family emergencies. Her grandfather had suffered strokes that left him mostly paralyzed and unable to speak or recognize his family. “He didn’t know the signs, so he didn’t seek treatment, and he ended up with a lot of long-term damage,” Kumar said.
Years later, when her father’s face began to sag on one side, she feared he too was having a stroke. It turned out to be Bell’s palsy, a temporary weakening or paralysis of the facial muscles, but the scare was enough to set her searching for a solution.
“I was just getting into AI at that time, and I was like, how do you get people to recognize the signs and go to the hospital?” She coded a facial-recognition tool that could detect facial asymmetry, one of the main indicators of a stroke, by analyzing images or short videos.
At Berkeley’s Big Ideas competition, she noticed the prototype had real potential. One of the oldest entrepreneurship programs at Berkeley, Big Ideas takes place in Blum Hall on the north edge of campus. An average of 750 Berkeley students each year develop solutions for issues ranging from climate change to workforce development to global health for up to $10,000 in funding, mentorship, and workshops—culminating in a Grand Prize Pitch Day where a handful of finalists compete for another $10,000 to turn their proposals into ventures.
It appears to be working. On the wall facing the front door of Blum Hall hangs a list of Big Ideas alumni who have made Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list.
A story like Kumar’s would have been nearly impossible just 25 years ago.
For most of the 20th century, Berkeley prided itself on keeping business at arm’s length, treating corporate dollars as a threat to academic research and a betrayal of its public mission.
After the campus announced a $500 million partnership with oil giant BP in 2007 to create the Energy Biosciences Institute, graffiti reading “bperkeley” appeared across campus overnight. Outspoken critic Ignacio Chapela, a Berkeley ecologist, called the deal Faustian and likened it to prostitution at a faculty senate forum.
Others, like Berkeley professor and physics Nobelist Steven Chu, Ph.D. ’76, defended it. As he told this magazine in 2009, “A small segment [of Berkeley faculty] doesn’t understand that moving fast is better than maintaining purity. Monasteries are good places, but they’re not good for science.”
Today, that tension has largely dissolved, in no small part due to the influence of Chancellor Rich Lyons ’82, who helped launch SkyDeck as Haas’s dean in 2012 and later became Berkeley’s first chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer. Under Lyons’s leadership, Cal’s once-disjointed innovation landscape—engineering labs, accelerators, research centers—coalesced into a coordinated ecosystem. I&E became a named campus priority, included in the $7.37 billion Light the Way campaign.
Alongside that broader shift, programs such as Berkeley Changemaker, a popular curriculum of more than 50 courses have attracted students across disciplines to pursue “new, risky, and meaningful endeavors.”
“One of the early challenges that we were trying to solve is, how do we reach more students?” said Hassner, who helped create and is now executive director of the Berkeley Changemaker coursework. “If we called a program Berkeley Entrepreneur, we would get the same narrow subset of students who see themselves as entrepreneurs when they come to campus.”
The story of this transformation is told in the new book Startup Campus from UC Press, an inside look at how “the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement has reinvented itself in ways that have advanced the university’s mission of research, education, and public service.”
As noted in the book, Cal’s startup culture has been welcomed beyond the boundaries of campus. In 2009, the City of Berkeley’s Office of Economic Development cofounded the Berkeley Startup Cluster (BSC) with UC Berkeley, the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Berkeley Association, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Its mission is to stop “innovation drain” by keeping Berkeley spinouts from relocating to other places, like Silicon Valley.
“The relationship between the campus and the City of Berkeley was often adversarial,” principal author Mike Alvarez Cohen wrote in Startup Campus. “In fact, the city sued the university in 2005 over the campus’s long-range growth plans … the BSC mended that ill will, and by the launch of the SkyDeck startup accelerator in 2012, the city–university relationship had become friendly and productive.”
This year, the mayor of Berkeley, Adena Ishii ’14—a Big Ideas alum herself—supported a plan for the city to collaborate with the university on the Berkeley Civic Engagement Challenge, a competition where, instead of students pitching startups, city staff pitch civic problems for students to solve.
Perched on the penthouse floor of a high-rise in downtown Berkeley, SkyDeck has a 360-degree view of the Bay and hills. Inside, startup teams work feverishly on laptops, most cocooned by headphones. Here, Kumar explained, is where Code Blue took shape.
SkyDeck is home to both an accelerator and an incubator. The accelerator helps founders scale products that have already proven their potential, while the incubator supports earlier-stage startups that are still testing their ideas. Backed by an affiliated venture fund, SkyDeck accepts applications from founders from around the world and offers them workspaces, weekly roundtables, workshops, and access to a network of more than 500 mentors.
Kumar’s high school prototype, a simple web app where a user had to log in to upload or take videos, is now a system that runs on cameras and microphones already built into handheld devices. Every 30 seconds, it scans facial movements and speech for signs of stroke. If it detects warning signs, the system alerts the user and, if they’re too ill to respond, calls 911. For privacy, she stressed, all data is deleted after it’s run through Code Blue’s models.
The work with SkyDeck has forced Kumar to confront what, for her, may be one of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship: leading as an introvert.
The day before our interview, she had spent about six hours at the accelerator’s Demo Day in Zellerbach Hall, pitching to engineers she hoped to recruit and investors she hoped to attract. It wasn’t easy. “I’ve frequently struggled with the fact that being CEO means I need to be the face of the company. I’m good at masking when I feel anxious or tired, but I still feel it.”
That night, too tired even to call her parents, whom she phones most days, she lay in her hotel room watching reruns.
“I’ve become more resilient and adaptable in a way that I don’t think I would be had I not started up,” she said. “I’ll never regret my choice.”
She is now piloting Code Blue’s system with doctors at UCSF and will soon seek FDA approval. After that, she hopes to start entering other markets. “There are voice biomarkers now that are being studied for dementia and Alzheimer’s… The possibilities are kind of limitless,” she said. “I’m in it for the long haul.”
Correction: A print version of this article misstated that Berkeley Changemaker received funding from the Light the Way campaign.
