Jeff Dean spent 27 years helping build Google. Now, investors could be betting $1 billion that he can build the next big thing in AI outside it.
The legendary Google engineer has been in discussions for $1 billion in financing at a valuation of around $10 billion for his new AI startup, Discovery Loop, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
Discovery Loop has been one of the most talked-about startups in Silicon Valley over the past week, after Dean, regarded at Google as a legend, announced his departure.
Details of the round could change. A representative for Dean declined to comment.
While he has not publicly shared fundraising details, Dean has been open about the goal of the startup, Discovery Loop, describing it on X as a public benefit corporation “whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress.”
The company hopes to tackle some of science and engineering’s hardest problems through the “parallel execution of thousands of experiments.”
A Discovery Loop press release from August 5 said that the company’s initial funding round is being led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital. Alphabet is a founding investor and cloud partner, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Discovery Loop’s other founders bring decades of experience building some of Google’s most important products.
Sanjay Ghemawat, a longtime collaborator of Dean who joined Google in 1999, helped develop foundational distributed-computing technologies. Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, became a prominent researcher in deep learning and large-scale neural networks, contributing to advances in language models and other foundation models. Oriol Vinyals, meanwhile, was a leading researcher at Google DeepMind whose work spans sequence modeling and reinforcement learning.
Dean shared a pitch deck on X that one former Google product leader called “one of the most stacked pitch decks ever made.”
One slide lists products the founding team worked on, including Google Search, Ads, Gemini, and Gmail. Another slide focuses on academic credentials, showing Google Scholar rankings placing Dean, Le, and Vinyals among the most highly cited AI researchers.
Discovery Loop’s team is the latest example of Google talent leaving the company to raise huge sums for new AI startups.
Former DeepMind researcher David Silver raised $1.1 billion this year at a $5.1 billion valuation for Ineffable Intelligence, his new lab focused on building AI that learns from experience, while former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou reportedly raised at a $25 billion pre-money valuation for Reflection AI.
Periodic Labs, cofounded by former Google Brain researcher Ekin Dogus Cubuk and former OpenAI researcher Liam Fedus, has raised hundreds of millions, while Sakana AI, cofounded by former Google researchers Llion Jones and David Ha, was valued at $2.65 billion last year.
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