Dulo Inc., a startup co-founded by noted artificial intelligence researcher Sebastian Thrun, has raised $130 million in funding.
The information broke news of the investment on Thursday. Dulo co-founder Adrian Aoun confirmed the report in a post on X
Before Aoun launched Dulo with Thrun (pictured) earlier this year sold an early natural language processing startup called Wavii Inc. to Google LLC for over $30 million. He has also invested in companies like Pinterest Inc. Thrun, in turn, was a co-founder of Google’s X research laboratory. He led the X program, which later became Waymo, and helped found Google Brain, a precursor to Google DeepMind.
Dulo’s round included contributions from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram, one of the search giant’s early investors. They were joined by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, famed venture capitalist John Doerr and more than half a dozen startup funds. Dulo did not disclose his rating.
The company’s one-page website claims to develop basic models optimized for hardware design tasks. In August, Thrun listed Robotics is one of Dulo’s main focuses. The company’s AI may be intended to accelerate the development of industrial robots and autonomous vehicles.
Thrun joined Google in 2007 after leading the development of Stanleyan early self-driving vehicle that helped boost the autonomous driving market. He later founded an air taxi startup with financial support from Google co-founder Larry Page.
It’s unclear what hardware design tasks Dulo’s models will automate. One possibility is that the startup wants to optimize engineering simulations that hardware teams use to check their product designs for errors before manufacturing. Dulo’s website states that they want to enable “manufacturing at the speed of light”.
Several other AI startups focused on engineering are also working on optimizing simulations. One recently funded The player Vinci4D Inc. has developed a platform that automates the so-called networking phase of simulation projects. Meshing is a process in which engineers transform a product’s design into a collection of small, three-dimensional shapes. This arrangement reduces the amount of hardware required to run simulations.
Other AI startups are Work to speed up partially differentiated equations. Simulators rely on such equations to predict the behavior of hardware systems under real-world conditions.
Dulo’s most prominent venture capital-backed competitor is Prometheus Inc., a tech AI startup co-led by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. The company educated $12 billion in funding earlier this year from Bezos and a group of financial institutions. Like Dulo, Prometheus uses AI to accelerate the development of complex hardware systems such as robots.
Photo: JD Lasica/Wikimedia
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