Google X co-founder Sebastian Thrun raises $130M for AI engineering startup Dulo

Dulo Inc., a startup co-founded by prominent artificial intelligence researcher Sebastian Thrun, has raised $130 million in funding.

The Information broke the news of the investment on Thursday. Dulo co-founder Adrian Aoun confirmed the report in a post on X.

Before launching Dulo with Thrun (pictured) earlier this year, Aoun sold an early natural language processing startup called Wavii Inc. to Google LLC for over $30 million. He has also invested in companies such as Pinterest Inc. Thrun, in turn, co-founded Google’s X research lab. He led the X program that later became Waymo and helped establish Google Brain, a precursor to Google DeepMind.

Dulo’s round included contributions from former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram, one of the search giant’s first investors. They were joined by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, famed venture capitalist John Doerr and more than a half-dozen startup funds. Dulo didn’t disclose its valuation.

The company’s one-page website states that it’s developing foundation models optimized for hardware design tasks. In August, Thrun listed robotics among Dulo’s focus areas. It’s possible the company’s AI is meant to speed up the development of industrial robots and autonomous vehicles.

Thrun joined Google in 2007 after leading the development of Stanley, an early self-driving vehicle that helped kickstart the autonomous driving market. He later founded a flying taxi startup with financial backing from Google co-founder Larry Page.

It’s unclear what hardware design tasks Dulo’s models will automate. One possibility is that the startup hopes to optimize engineering simulations, which hardware teams use to check their product designs for flaws before manufacturing them. Dulo’s website says it’s looking to facilitate “manufacturing at lightspeed.”

Several other engineering-focused AI startups are also working to optimize simulations. One recently funded player, Vinci4D Inc., has built a platform that automates the so-called meshing phase of simulation projects. Meshing is a process through which engineers turn a product’s blueprint into a collection of small, three-dimensional shapes. That arrangement reduces the amount of hardware needed to run simulations.

Other AI startups are working to speed up partially differentiated equations. Simulators rely on such equations to predict the behavior of hardware systems under real-world conditions.

Dulo’s most prominent venture-backed rival is Prometheus Inc., an engineering AI startup co-led by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. The company raised $12 billion in funding earlier this year from Bezos and a group of financial institutions. Like Dulo, Prometheus is using AI to speed up the development of complex hardware systems such as robots.

Photo: JD Lasica/Wikimedia

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