WORLDTECHDulo, co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, raises $130 million for hardware AI
Dulo Inc., a startup co-founded by artificial intelligence researcher Sebastian Thrun, has raised $130 million, according to a report by SiliconANGLE. Co-founder Adrian Aoun confirmed the report in a post on X.
Who is backing the round
The Information broke the news of the investment on Thursday. Among the participants are former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram, one of the search company's first investors. Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff and venture capitalist John Doerr also joined, alongside more than a half dozen startup funds.
Founders' earlier work
Thrun co-founded Google's X research lab, where he led the program that later became Waymo, and he helped establish Google Brain, a forerunner of Google DeepMind. He joined Google in 2007 after leading the development of Stanley, an early self-driving vehicle. Aoun previously sold a natural language processing startup, Wavii Inc., and has invested in companies including Pinterest Inc. The pair launched Dulo earlier this year.
A focus on hardware design
Dulo's one-page website says the company is developing foundation models for hardware design tasks and describes its goal as manufacturing at lightspeed. In August, Thrun listed robotics among the company's focus areas. The facts do not say which products the models will serve, though one possibility is that they speed up the development of industrial robots and autonomous vehicles.
One possible route is optimizing engineering simulations, which hardware teams use to check product designs for flaws before manufacturing. Other AI startups are pursuing similar work. Vinci4D Inc., a recently funded player, has built a platform that automates meshing, the step that turns a product blueprint into a collection of small three-dimensional shapes.
Competition from Prometheus
Dulo's most prominent venture-backed rival is Prometheus Inc., an engineering AI company that Amazon.com Inc. co-leads. Prometheus raised $12 billion earlier this year from Jeff Bezos and a group of financial institutions. Like Dulo, it applies AI to accelerate the development of complex hardware systems such as robots.
Open questions
- Which products or customers are Dulo's models intended for?
- How much of the $130 million did each investor contribute?