Sebastian Thrun Raises $130 Million for AI Engineering Startup Dulo

Sebastian Thrun, the computer scientist who pioneered several AI projects at Google, has co-founded a new startup focused on creating AI models for engineering, according to a person with knowledge of the project.

Thrun and co-founder Adrian Aoun started the company, Dulo, earlier this year in San Francisco, and in recent days closed a seed funding round of $130 million, the person said. Investors in the round include former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Kleiner Perkins Chairman John Doerr, as well as venture firms DST Global, Construct Capital and Lowercarbon Capital.

Thrun founded Google’s X moonshot division, co-founded its early AI initiative Google Brain and started the self-driving project that became Waymo. Aoun has invested in hundreds of startups, including Dulo, and founded several before Dulo, including Torch, an AI health startup that OpenAI acquired earlier this year. Aoun also founded robotics companies Foundational, which creates automated factories, and Seneca, which creates firefighting drones. Carl Bass, the former CEO of Autodesk, is advising Dulo.

Dulo is developing AI models that can automate the process of design and validation for engineering. For example, a user could prompt one of these models to design a plane or a car with some specifications, and the model could create a valid design. Dulo will leave it to others to actually manufacture those designs. The startup’s website describes it as developing “foundation models for hardware design.”

Dulo already faces competition from startups seeking to automate engineering tasks. Jeff Bezos’ Prometheus, for example, is working on AI for engineering and manufacturing. Larry Page’s Dynatomics is working on large language models to design planes and flying cars.

Models from leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are also improving at mechanical engineering. For example, when OpenAI released its model GPT-6 Astra, users quickly found that it excelled at modeling mechanical parts using engineering software, such as creating a computer-aided design, or CAD, model of a traffic light based on an image.

Still, models such as Astra are a long way from the ability to design a new vehicle from scratch, which means there is an opportunity for new entrants such as Dulo to catch up by focusing their efforts on their AI models’ engineering capabilities.