Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean to Raise $10B Valuation for New AI Startup
Synopsis
Jeff Dean’s new AI startup Discovery Loop is reportedly seeking $1 billion in funding at a potential $10 billion valuation, with Alphabet as a founding investor.
Key Highlights
- Jeff Dean, Google’s former chief scientist, is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion for his new AI startup, Discovery Loop.
- The company could reach a valuation of around $10 billion.
- Discovery Loop is developing AI systems to automate work across science, engineering and machine learning.
- Alphabet is backing the startup as a founding investor and cloud partner.
Jeff Dean, who spent 27 years at Google, is reportedly seeking around $1 billion in funding for his new AI company, Discovery Loop, at a potential valuation of about $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The terms of the potential funding round could still change, while a representative for Dean declined to comment.
Dean has described Discovery Loop as a public benefit corporation that aims to use AI to automate work in machine learning, science and engineering, with the broader goal of speeding up scientific discoveries.
Discovery Loop’s AI Focus
The startup plans to address complex scientific and engineering challenges by running thousands of experiments simultaneously.
According to a Discovery Loop press release dated August 5, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are leading its initial funding round, with additional backing from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins and Doerr Capital.
Alphabet is also a founding investor and cloud partner, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Former Google Team Behind Startup
The founding team at Discovery Loop is made up of several former Google researchers and engineers who contributed to some of the company’s major technologies.
Sanjay Ghemawat joined Google in 1999 and worked on foundational distributed-computing technologies. Quoc Le, a former Google Brain researcher, played an important role in advancing deep learning and large-scale neural networks.
Oriol Vinyals, another former Google DeepMind researcher, focused on areas such as sequence modelling and reinforcement learning.
Together, the founding team has contributed to technologies and products such as Google Search, Ads, Gemini and Gmail.
Discovery Loop is part of a growing wave of AI startups being launched by former Google and DeepMind researchers.
Former DeepMind researcher David Silver raised $1.1 billion this year for Ineffable Intelligence at a $5.1 billion valuation. Meanwhile, former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou have reportedly raised funding for Reflection AI at a $25 billion pre-money valuation.
Periodic Labs, co-founded by former Google Brain researcher Ekin Dogus Cubuk and former OpenAI researcher Liam Fedus, has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Sakana AI was valued at $2.65 billion last year.
Source: Reuters
At Inspirepreneurs Magazine, covering entrepreneurship, business failures, and the human stories behind the world's most ambitious founders. She writes at the intersection of strategy and storytelling.
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