Dulo Inc., an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, has raised $130 million in funding. The Information first reported the investment on Thursday, and Dulo co-founder Adrian Aoun confirmed it in a post on X. The company did not disclose its valuation.
Thrun and Aoun launched Dulo earlier this year. Before that, Aoun sold an early natural language processing startup called Wavii Inc. to Google LLC for more than $30 million, and he has invested in companies including Pinterest Inc. Thrun co-founded Google's X research lab, led the X program that later became Waymo, and helped establish Google Brain, a precursor to Google DeepMind.
The round drew contributions from former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram, one of the search giant's first investors, along with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, venture capitalist John Doerr and more than a half-dozen startup funds. Dulo's one-page website says the company is developing foundation models optimized for hardware design tasks. In August, Thrun listed robotics among its focus areas.
It is possible Dulo's AI is intended to speed up the development of industrial robots and autonomous vehicles, though it is unclear which hardware design tasks its models will automate. One possibility is that the startup hopes to optimize engineering simulations, which hardware teams use to check product designs for flaws before manufacturing. Dulo's website says it is looking to facilitate "manufacturing at lightspeed."
Several other engineering-focused AI startups are also working to optimize simulations. Vinci4D Inc., a recently funded player, has built a platform that automates the meshing phase of simulation projects, in which engineers turn a product's blueprint into a collection of small, three-dimensional shapes to reduce the hardware needed to run simulations. Other AI startups are working to speed up partially differentiated equations, which simulators rely on to predict how hardware systems behave under real-world conditions.
Dulo's most prominent venture-backed rival is Prometheus Inc., an engineering AI startup co-led by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. Prometheus raised $12 billion earlier this year from Bezos and a group of financial institutions, and like Dulo it is using AI to speed up the development of complex hardware systems such as robots.
Thrun joined Google in 2007 after leading the development of Stanley, an early self-driving vehicle that helped kickstart the autonomous driving market. He later founded a flying taxi startup with financial backing from Google co-founder Larry Page.
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