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Jeff Dean spent 27 years helping to build Google. Now, the renowned Google engineer is in talks to fund his own startup, Discovery Loop. The company is seeking $1 billion (€866 million) in capital. This could value the company at around $10 billion (€8.6 billion), according to insiders.
Discovery Loop is currently one of the most talked-about startups from Silicon Valley. The trigger was Dean’s announcement that he was leaving Google, where he is considered a legend.
While Dean hasn’t publicly disclosed details about the fundraising, and a spokesperson declined to comment, he has openly posted about the startup Discovery Loop’s goal: to be a non-profit organization, as he wrote on X. The mission is to “automate machine learning, science, and technology to accelerate discovery and progress.”
Google invests in Discovery Loop
The company aims to solve some of the most difficult problems in science and technology by “conducting thousands of experiments in parallel”.
As Discovery Loop announced on August 5, its first funding round is led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital are also participating. According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet is a founding investor and cloud partner.
The other founders of Discovery Loop bring decades of experience. They were involved in the development of some of Google’s most important products. Sanjay Ghemawat worked with Dean for many years. He joined Google in 1999 and developed key technologies for distributed computing.
Quoc Le was one of the founding members of Google Brain. He became a leading researcher in the field of deep learning and large neural networks. He also contributed to advancements in language models and other foundational models. Oriol Vinyals, in turn, was a senior researcher at Google DeepMind. His work focuses on sequence modeling and reinforcement learning.
Dean posted a pitch deck on X. A former Google product manager described it as “one of the most impressive presentations ever created.”
One slide showcases products the founding team has worked on, including Google Search, Ads, Gemini, and Gmail. Another slide highlights the founders’ academic achievements, showing Google Scholar rankings where Dean, Le, and Vinyals are among the most cited AI researchers.
Former Google developers found startups
The Discovery Loop team is the latest example of how former Google employees are raising enormous sums of money for new AI startups.
Former DeepMind researcher David Silver raised $1.1 billion (€952 million) this year for his new AI lab, Ineffable Intelligence. The company was valued at $5.1 billion (€4.4 billion). Ineffable Intelligence develops AI that learns from experience. Meanwhile, former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou reportedly achieved a valuation of $25 billion (€21.6 billion) for their startup, Reflection AI, even before a funding round.
Periodic Labs, founded by former Google Brain researcher Ekin Dogus Cubuk and former OpenAI researcher Liam Fedus, raised several hundred million dollars. Sakana AI, founded by former Google researchers Lion Jones and David Ha, was valued at $2.65 billion (€2.3 billion) last year.