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Sebastian Thrun's Dulo raises $130M for hardware AI

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Dulo, co-founded by Google X co-founder Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun, raised $130 million to build foundation models for hardware design. Eric Schmidt, Marc Benioff and John Doerr joined the round.

By: Mikola Máté Patrik · · 2 min read

Sebastian Thrun speaking on stage in a blue shirt
Image: JD Lasica / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY · CC BY 2.0 · Source

What happened

Dulo, the startup Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun launched earlier this year, has raised $130 million. The Information broke the news and Aoun confirmed it in a post on X (SiliconANGLE). Backers include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, early Google investor Ram Shriram, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, John Doerr and more than half a dozen startup funds. The valuation was not disclosed.

What Dulo is building

Its one-page website says Dulo is developing foundation models optimized for hardware design, under the tagline manufacturing at lightspeed (Dulo). In August, Thrun listed robotics among its focus areas. SiliconANGLE suggests one likely target is engineering simulation, which hardware teams use to find design flaws before manufacturing. The company has not detailed which design steps it plans to automate.

Who is behind it

Thrun led development of the Stanley self-driving car, co-founded Google's X lab, led the program that became Waymo and helped establish Google Brain. Aoun previously sold his NLP startup Wavii to Google for more than $30 million.

Why it matters

Engineering AI is becoming a strong investor theme. Dulo's best-known rival is Prometheus, co-led by Jeff Bezos, which raised $12 billion this year to use AI to speed up development of complex hardware such as robots. Dulo's round is small by comparison, but its investor list shows the old Google network is taking the space seriously.

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