Dean's $1B Bet on AI-Powered Discovery

Jeff Dean, a Google AI legend who spent 27 years helping build the tech giant, has raised $1 billion in seed funding for his new startup, Discovery Loop. The company is valued at around $10 billion and aims to automate parts of the scientific process using AI.

Discovery Loop was founded by Dean along with fellow former Google researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals. The startup wants to apply AI to problems in machine learning, engineering, medicine, and materials design by running thousands of experiments in parallel.

The company has secured funding from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital, with Alphabet as a founding investor and cloud partner. While the initial round's amount is undisclosed, people familiar with the matter say Discovery Loop has been discussing $1 billion in financing at a valuation of around $10 billion.

Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, allowing it to pursue its goals alongside financial returns. This move by Dean and his team marks one of the latest examples of senior Google AI talent leaving the company to build a new lab.