Jeff Dean is raising $1 billion at a ~$10 billion valuation for Discovery Loop, with Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures leading the round.
Alpha Score of 75 reflects strong overall profile with moderate momentum, moderate value, strong quality, strong sentiment.
Jeff Dean spent 27 years at Google. Now he's trying to raise $1 billion for a new AI startup, Discovery Loop, at a valuation around $10 billion, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
Dean, a legendary engineer at Google, announced his departure last week. The financing details could still shift. A representative for Dean declined to comment.
Dean has been open about the startup's mission. On X, he described Discovery Loop as a public benefit corporation "whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress." The company plans to run thousands of parallel experiments to tackle hard problems in science and engineering.
A Discovery Loop press release from Aug. 5 said the initial funding round is being led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital are also participating. Alphabet is a founding investor and cloud partner, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
The founding team includes three other longtime Googlers. Sanjay Ghemawat, a collaborator since 1999, helped build foundational distributed-computing technologies. Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, did pioneering work in deep learning and large-scale neural networks. Oriol Vinyals, from Google DeepMind, contributed to sequence modeling and reinforcement learning. Dean posted 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 team worked on: Google Search, Ads, Gemini, and Gmail. Another shows Google Scholar rankings placing Dean, Le, and Vinyals among the most highly cited AI researchers.
Discovery Loop is the latest ex-Google AI startup to command a big valuation. Former DeepMind researcher David Silver raised $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion valuation for Ineffable Intelligence. 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, raised hundreds of millions. Sakana AI, cofounded by former Google researchers Llion Jones and David Ha, was valued at $2.65 billion last year.
Alphabet is a founding investor in Discovery Loop and will serve as its cloud partner, Pichai said.
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