Jeff Dean, who resigned as chief scientist from Google last month, is raising again for his new AI startup, Discovery Loop, this time seeking a valuation of around $50 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
It was only a few weeks ago that Discovery Loop was raising $1 billion dollars at around a $10 billion valuation, Business Insider reported. But in this white-hot fundraising market where VCs’ voracious appetite for top AI talent such as Dean is matched only by the enormous expense of building an AI lab, it seems it is never too soon to raise funding again.
A spokesperson for Discovery Loop declined to comment. Dean did not respond to a request for comment. Terms of the deal could change, and there is no guarantee Discovery Loop will be able to raise a round of funding at that valuation.
Discovery Loop describes itself as “automating discovery to accelerate science and engineering for the world.”
The company hopes to tackle some of science and engineering’s hardest problems through the “parallel execution of thousands of experiments.”
“Our goal is to build AI that acts as a genuinely positive, empowering force for humanity: not just a tool, but a partner in solving the problems that matter most,” Discovery Loop says on its careers page, where it is hiring just one role.
Dean said at a talk last month that he and his cofounders “might make decisions that are not in the company’s financial interest but are in the broader societal good.”
A Discovery Loop press release from last month said that the company’s initial funding round was being led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital. Alphabet was a founding investor and cloud partner, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Dean, who was regarded as a legend inside Google, has gotten most of the attention. But Discovery Loop’s other three founders bring decades of experience in their own right, building some of Google’s most important products.
Sanjay Ghemawat, a longtime collaborator of Dean who joined Google in 1999, helped develop foundational distributed-computing technologies. Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, became a prominent researcher in deep learning and large-scale neural networks, contributing to advances in language models and other foundation models. Oriol Vinyals, meanwhile, was a leading researcher at Google DeepMind whose work spans sequence modeling and reinforcement learning.
Dean shared a pitch deck on X that one former Google product leader called “one of the most stacked pitch decks ever made.”
One slide lists products the founding team worked on, including Google Search, Ads, Gemini, and Gmail. Another slide focuses on academic credentials, showing Google Scholar rankings placing Dean, Le, and Vinyals among the most highly cited AI researchers.
“This team can redefine how research in engineering and science is done. If successful, the impact won’t be measured in software features, or benchmarks but in new science to improve billions of lives,” venture investor Vinod Khosla posted last month, comparing Discovery Loop to his early investment in OpenAI.
Other new AI labs, such as Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines Lab, have raised staggering sums at eyepopping valuations before they had products. It is something that would have seemed inconceivable in previous fundraising cycles but reflects investors’ conviction that a small number of elite technical teams could become the next generation of frontier AI companies.
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