Discovery Loop aims for $50 million after raising $1 million recently

Jeff Dean's startup, Discovery Loop, is reportedly seeking to raise around $50 billion, according to sources. Just a few weeks earlier, a $1 billion funding round at a valuation of approximately $10 billion was reported. The initial round cites Alphabet as a founding investor and brings together several leading funds. The upcoming operation could still evolve, with no guarantees on the targeted valuation.

Pre-product rounds and uncertain valuation

Other AI labs, such as Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines Lab, have raised significant amounts at high valuations even before launching products. For Discovery Loop, there is no guarantee that the new funding round will achieve the envisioned valuation, and the terms of the deal could change. A few weeks ago, Discovery Loop raised $1 billion at a valuation of around $10 billion, according to a source. The company is now looking to raise funds at a valuation of about $50 billion, according to sources close to the matter. A spokesperson for Discovery Loop declined to comment, and Jeff Dean did not respond to inquiries.

Involved investors and founders' stated position

The initial funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital. Alphabet is listed as a founding investor and cloud partner, according to Sundar Pichai. Vinod Khosla compared Discovery Loop to his early investment in OpenAI, believing that the team could transform the way research is conducted in engineering and science. Last month, Jeff Dean stated that the founders might make decisions that do not serve the financial interests of the company but align with societal good.

Claimed scientific capability and Google-derived team

Discovery Loop positions itself as a company that automates discovery to accelerate science and engineering, relying on the parallel execution of thousands of experiments and aiming to create a positive and partner-like AI for humanity. Jeff Dean left Google after 27 years, where he was regarded as a major figure, and resigned from his position as chief scientist last month. The other three founders of Discovery Loop have extensive experience with major Google products: Sanjay Ghemawat, who joined in 1999, contributed to distributed computing; Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, excelled in deep learning and large-scale neural networks; Oriol Vinyals led work on sequence modeling and reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind. A slide from the pitch deck shared by Dean highlights the team's contributions to Google Search, Ads, Gemini, and Gmail, as well as Google Scholar rankings that place Dean, Le, and Vinyals among the most cited AI researchers. A former product leader at Google described this pitch deck as one of the most impressive ever created.