20 UC Berkeley alumni, students and faculty shine on Forbes 30 Under 30 list

In fields ranging from AI to health care to Hollywood and beyond, 20 UC Berkeley students, faculty and alumni have been recognized for their achievements on this year’s edition of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list.

Featuring 46 UC-affiliated honorees overall, the annual list highlights rising stars in 20 categories across the arts, technology and social impact. To make one of the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 lists, candidates must evaluated by Forbes staff and a panel of independent, expert judges on a variety of factors, including (but not limited to) funding, revenue, social impact, scale, inventiveness and potential — along with being 29 or younger as of December 31, 2024.

Peruse the list of UC Berkeley honorees below, with descriptions lightly edited from Forbes.

Arman Jaffer (Education)

A virtual Swiss Army knife for teachers, Arman Jaffer’s education tool called Brisk Teaching uses AI to generate lesson plans, help with report cards and create pop quizzes. “Something that would normally have taken you maybe 20 minutes could be done in 2 minutes,” he says. His free product (a premium version is available from $10 per month) launched in 2023 and is already used by 700,000 educators worldwide.

Dan Hendrycks (Artificial intelligence)

Dan Hendrycks is the executive director of the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), a nonprofit he cofounded in 2022 to accelerate the field of AI safety research and policy. CAIS engages public and private entities to prevent catastrophic AI outcomes and recently cosponsored California’s landmark AI bill, S.B. 1047. In 2022, OpenPhilanthropy recommended a $5.1 million grant in support of CAIS. Hendrycks received a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley and is an advisor to Elon Musk’s xAI. He has also contributed a series of AI activation functions, benchmarks and methodologies to the AI field.

Matan Grinberg of Factory (Artificial intelligence)

When Matan Grinberg was a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley in 2023, he cold emailed venture capitalist and Sequoia partner Shaun Maquire to chat about string theory. A little over a week later, Grinberg dropped out of school to develop Factory, a platform to automate software engineering that uses AI to automate tasks like testing, refactoring, migrations, code review, documentation and debugging. The company has raised $20 million.

Alex Yu (Artificial intelligence)

UC Berkeley alum Alex Yu cofounded video generation AI startup Luma AI in 2021 and recently launched Dream Machine, an AI model that creates high-definition, hyper-realistic videos from text and images. His company now has 10 million users and has raised about $70 million.

Clare Kim (Finance)

UC Berkeley Class of 2017 grad Clare Kim serves as a director with BC Partners Credit, investing in various industries including health care, technology and business services.

Sunny Aggarwal and Dev Ojha (Finance)

UC Berkeley alums Sunny Aggarwal and Dev Ojha built Osmosis, a decentralized exchange that lets users trade across 100+ blockchains while keeping full control of their assets. Since its 2021 launch, Osmosis has processed $35 billion and raised $36 million from top investors. Aggarwal also co-founded Blockchain at UC Berkeley, a leading university blockchain group, and helped launch one of the first blockchain courses, still taught today.

Gökçe Güven (Marketing and advertising)

Inspired by moneymaking marketing programs like United Airlines’ MileagePlus, Gökçe Güven’s startup Kalder embeds cash-back and rewards programs directly into the websites of clients like chocolatier Godiva. “If you look at giants, what they did great for the past decade is they built financial technology capabilities inside their marketing machines,” says the UC Berkeley alum. Kalder charges 60 cents monthly (and a small processing fee) for each customer who links their credit card to its programs, plus a half-cent per dollar on every transaction made with that same card at one of 25,000 partnering merchants. The company brought in $1.5 million in revenue last year.

Adam Uliana (Green tech)

The metal mining industry, reliant on energy-intensive refining processes, accounts for up to 7 percent of global GHG emissions and 44 percent of U.S. toxic chemical pollution. UC Berkeley chemical engineering Ph.D. Adam Uliana’s startup ChemFinity is inventing new metal recovery systems that show record performances for recovering over 20 different minerals from wastes, such as platinum from spent catalytic converters or copper from solar panels. ChemFinity was selected for Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Fellows program.

Jessica Jung (Games)

UC Berkeley alum Jessica Jung is the lead producer at Niantic Games, where she leads product development, game monetization and partnership initiatives for the company’s original franchise, “Peridot,” an AR-first mobile game with over 1 million plays, shipping over 100 updates with new game content. Jung launched Niantic’s first in-game donation activation with the Transgender Law Center in support of Pride Week, resulting in over $40K+ donated and record engagement from player community platforms.

Jasmin Brooks Stephens (Health care)

UC Berkeley psychology professor Jasmin Brooks Stephens is a clinical psychologist who focuses on suicide and racial trauma prevention, as well as eliminating mental health disparities for Black communities.

Yue Clare Lou (Health care)

Yue Clare Lou is the cofounder of Sift Biosciences, a startup using artificial intelligence and high-throughput screening to create next-gen immune boosters based on her Ph.D. research at UC Berkeley. The company spun off of the Women In Enterprising Science program at UC Berkeley with a $1 million grant.

Max Cao and Lars Berscheid (Manufacturing and industry)

Along with over-30 cofounder Yahav Avigal, Max Cao and Lars Berscheid launched Jacobi Robotics to build software that makes robot arms faster and easier to program. The three met at the UC Berkeley AI Research Lab and started the company in 2022 based on their research in motion planning. The startup has raised $6.2 million and signed customers that include robotic solutions provider Formic as well as electronics makers and consumer products companies.

Christina Seong (Manufacturing and industry)

Christina Seong, a Korean immigrant with an economics degree from UC Berkeley, started Versable to use AI to help automotive retailers and manufacturers better understand their product data. Seong began working in private equity after graduation to pay off her student loans, a path that led her to entrepreneurship. The Los Angeles–based startup has raised $2.6 million with a customer base that includes automotive suppliers Forvia Hella, Mighty Auto and Zeder Corp.

Sonia Yang (Retail and ecommerce)

Treet is helping startups — and fashionistas — clean out their closets. UC Berkeley alum Sonia Yang cofounded the company in 2021 to help brands reduce waste and inventory costs by setting up sites that enable customers to purchase pre-owned pieces directly from retailers. That allows companies to get in on the fast-growing $43 billion used-clothing market, much of which is currently sold on peer-to-peer market-places like Depop and Poshmark. “These transactions are going to happen whether you like it or not,” Yang says, “so why not lean into it? Own those customers and be a part of a more sustainable future.”

Alice Ma (Media)

UC Berkeley alum Alice Ma is a cofounder of Mad Realities, which creates original, social-first shows reaching millions of viewers across various platforms including YouTube, TikTok and its own site, Madrealities.tv. Its first original series, the dating show “Proof of Love,” became a social media hit, ending with a sold-out live finale at New York City’s Webster Hall. Its latest series, “Shop Cats,” went viral in 2024, with each episode garnering an average of 2.8 million views and more than 400,000 followers across multiple platforms. In total, Mad Realities has received more than 150 million views.

Justin Bui (Science)

Justin Bui is using electrochemical technologies to help decarbonize the world. His research contributed to the development of Captura’s carbon removal plant, which now removes 100 tons of carbon dioxide from the ocean every year, and his work on seawater electrolysis is helping make hydrogen fuel from the ocean at sHYp. Bui received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley, was an NSF and NDSEG graduate research fellow at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab and is an incoming assistant professor at New York University.

Stephan Peng (Social impact)

Stephan Peng launched Redbloom Health after being inspired by his own battle with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a disorder that affects roughly 15 percent of Americans. Launched in 2023, the biotech company clinically treats IBS using what UC Berkeley MBA grad Peng calls “a medicinal food formulation delivered through a delicious gut-healthy chili crisp with a clinical protocol.”

Taha Ziaee (Venture capital)

UC Berkeley alum Taha Zaiee was the first in his family to attend college after moving to the U.S. from Pakistan. Now, Ziaee is a principal at BOND, where co-leads software, consumer internet and emerging markets investment efforts, overseeing more than $400 million in deployments and managing investments valued at $15 billion–plus.