Jeff Dean Leaves Google for $10 Billion Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean Leaves Google for a New Adventure in AI

Jeff Dean, a prominent figure in artificial intelligence at Google LLC, left the company last week to launch his own startup, Discovery Loop. After dedicating 27 years to building Google's tech empire, Dean is now looking towards new horizons with the ambition of raising one billion dollars for his new venture, which could be valued at around 10 billion dollars.

Discovery Loop positions itself as an AI company dedicated to solving some of the biggest challenges in science and engineering. Drawing on his experience at Google, Dean hopes to convince investors to support this ambitious vision. The startup has already generated significant interest in Silicon Valley, especially following Dean's departure, as he is regarded as a legend in the industry.

Ambitious Goals and Ongoing Funding

Discussions around funding for Discovery Loop are underway, with a goal of raising one billion dollars. While the details of this fundraising may still evolve, the company's objective is clear. Dean has described Discovery Loop as a public utility company, aiming to automate machine learning as well as scientific and engineering processes to accelerate discoveries.

The startup plans to tackle some of the most complex challenges in science and engineering by simultaneously running thousands of experiments. According to a press release dated August 5, the initial funding round is led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with support from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital. Alphabet, Google's parent company, is also a founding investor and cloud partner, as confirmed by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google.

An Experienced Founding Team

Discovery Loop does not rely solely on Jeff Dean. The founding team includes veterans from Google who have contributed to some of the company's most influential products. Sanjay Ghemawat, a long-time collaborator of Dean, joined Google in 1999 and played a key role in the development of distributed computing technologies. Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, is recognized for his work in deep learning and large-scale neural networks. Oriol Vinyals, a former researcher at Google DeepMind, has brought his expertise in sequence modeling and reinforcement learning.

An Impressive Pitch Deck

Jeff Dean shared a pitch deck on X, which was praised by a former Google product manager as one of the most impressive ever created. This document highlights the products that the founding team has worked on, such as Google Search, Ads, Gemini, and Gmail. Another slide emphasizes the academic credentials of the founders, with Google Scholar rankings placing Dean, Le, and Vinyals among the most cited AI researchers.

A Growing Trend of Departures from Google

Discovery Loop is the latest example of Google talent leaving the company to raise significant funds for new AI startups. David Silver, a former DeepMind researcher, raised 1.1 billion dollars this year for Ineffable Intelligence, a new entity focused on learning from experience through AI. Other former DeepMind researchers, Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, have also raised funds at a pre-money valuation of 25 billion dollars for Reflection AI.

Periodic Labs, co-founded by Ekin Dogus Cubuk, a former Google Brain employee, and Liam Fedus, a former OpenAI researcher, has raised hundreds of millions, while Sakana AI, co-founded by Llion Jones and David Ha, both former Google employees, was valued at 2.65 billion dollars last year.