UC Berkeley SkyDeck Deepens Air & Space and Quantum Expertise Ahead of Demo Day
New track chairs Leah Walker and Claire Cramer join SkyDeck to support founders in air and space and quantum BERKELEY,
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New track chairs Leah Walker and Claire Cramer join SkyDeck to support founders in air and space and quantum
BERKELEY, CA / ACCESS Newswire / September 22, 2026 / The next generation of companies emerging from UC Berkeley SkyDeck will take center stage on September 30, when its Batch 22 founders pitch to the venture community at Demo Day. With SkyDeck alumni having now raised more than $4 billion, the event will offer investors an early look at the latest startups coming through UC Berkeley’s largest accelerator.
Demo Day will conclude SkyDeck’s five-month accelerator program, followed by the Startup Expo and Demo Night, giving founders further opportunities to connect with investors and the wider SkyDeck community. See a full list of participating companies here.
This year’s event comes as SkyDeck deepens its expertise in air and space and quantum, two fields in which UC Berkeley is expanding its research and commercialization work. SkyDeck has appointed two Berkeley leaders to bring that expertise directly to founders.
“SkyDeck thrives on connecting world-changing founders with the immense power of UC Berkeley’s ecosystem,” said Caroline Winnett, executive director of UC Berkeley SkyDeck. “Track chairs are the ultimate force multipliers for our startups as they bring a deep rolodex and invaluable experience to help build industry-defining companies,”
The Berkeley Air and Space Center is developing a 36-acre campus at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, designed to advance aerospace research, instruction and entrepreneurship. Leah Walker, director of research and strategic initiatives at the Berkeley Air and Space Center, has joined as Air and Space Track Chair. Walker brings a background in national security policy and defense analysis, with experience spanning nuclear policy, complex systems failure, defense innovation and industrial policy. Before joining the center, she spent three and a half years as executive director of the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab, where her work focused on the intersection of emerging technology and national security.
“There are a lot of exciting ideas emerging in air and space, but building a successful company requires more than promising technology,” said Walker. “Founders need access to capital, infrastructure and talent, as well as a strong understanding of where there is a genuine need for what they are building. Berkeley has an incredible concentration of those resources and SkyDeck gives us an opportunity to bring them together around the companies with the greatest potential.”
Berkeley Quantum, a new campus initiative leveraging UC Berkeley’s technical expertise to nucleate a thriving quantum ecosystem, is building a powerful bridge between UC Berkeley’s world-class quantum research ecosystem and the commercialization of breakthrough quantum technologies. Claire Cramer, executive director of Berkeley Quantum, has joined SkyDeck as Quantum Track Co-Chair as the accelerator explicitly welcomes more quantum and quantum-adjacent startups. Cramer holds a Ph.D. in atomic physics and brings an unusually broad background across quantum science and federal research policy. Cramer held scientific and policy roles at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Office of Management and Budget, and National Science Foundation before joining the U.S. Department of Energy. During eight years at DOE, she established its first quantum computing hardware program and grew the annual research portfolio she managed from $3 million to more than $75 million.
At Berkeley, Cramer leads campus strategy for quantum information science and also serves as executive director of the NSF-funded Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation. Through Berkeley Quantum, participating founders can gain curated introductions to technical expertise, research resources, talent, events and industry connections across UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. SkyDeck complements those resources with accelerator programming, experienced advisors, customer and industry connections and access to the venture ecosystem.
“Quantum is attracting enormous interest, but this is an area where deep technical expertise matters,” said Cramer. “We need to ask what will be transformative, when it will be transformative and who will use it. SkyDeck brings the ambition and pace of the startup ecosystem together with the scientific expertise at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That can help promising companies make better-informed decisions and give Berkeley’s quantum community a stronger connection to entrepreneurship.”
Demo Day will also anchor the first day of SkyDeck’s two-day Academic Entrepreneurship Summit, which will bring together nearly 50 leaders from more than 30 universities across North America, Europe and Asia, including Harvard, Stanford, Cornell and Johns Hopkins. Participants will exchange ideas on strengthening university innovation programs and helping more academic research reach the market.
The new chair appointments and Batch 22 Demo Day come amid continued momentum for Berkeley’s startup community. UC Berkeley retained its position as the world’s leading university for producing venture-backed startup founders for the fourth consecutive year in PitchBook’s 2026 university rankings. Berkeley ranked No. 1 with 2,380 undergraduate founders responsible for 2,155 venture-backed companies. It also ranked No. 1 for female undergraduate alumni founders, with 345 women having founded venture-backed companies included in the rankings.
Batch 22 Demo Day will take place on September 30 at Zellerbach Hall, and is open to accredited investors, with advance registration required.
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About UC Berkeley SkyDeck
UC Berkeley SkyDeck is a leading accelerator and the global hub for entrepreneurship. As UC Berkeley’s largest and most prominent accelerator, SkyDeck combines hands-on mentorship with the vast resources of its research university. SkyDeck is the only accelerator of its kind that offers the value of a dedicated investment fund alongside the resources and network of a top university. To date, SkyDeck startups have raised more than $4.5 billion in aggregate. Participating startups have access to SkyDeck’s over 1,000 advisors, 70 industry partners, and a network of more than 613,000 UC Berkeley alumni. For more information, see skydeck.berkeley.edu.
Media contact
Songue PR for UC Berkeley SkyDeck
skydeck@songuepr.com
SOURCE: Berkeley SkyDeck
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