Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun's Dulo Raises a $130M Seed to Build Foundation Models for Hardware Design
Dulo, a startup co-founded this year by Google X co-founder Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun, has raised a $130 million seed round, Aoun confirmed on X after The Information reported it. Aoun says the company is building foundation models for hardware design on the way to what he calls engineering superintelligence. Backers he named include Marc Benioff, John Doerr, Eric Schmidt and Lowercarbon. The valuation and any product details were not disclosed.
Dulo's $130 million seed round arrives with few details: the company's one-page website says it is developing foundation models for hardware design, and SiliconANGLE reported that it is unclear which hardware design tasks those models will automate. Adrian Aoun said on X on October 29 that he and Sebastian Thrun co-founded Dulo earlier this year "on a mission to create an Engineering Superintelligence, building foundation models for hardware design," and confirmed The Information's report of a $130 million seed round.
Who is backing it#
Aoun named Marc Benioff, John Doerr, Eric Schmidt, Yuri Milner and Ram Shriram among the investors, along with Rachel Holt at Construct Capital, Chris Sacca and Clay Dumas at Lowercarbon, Ben Ling at Bling Capital, David Tisch at BoxGroup, Topher Conway at SV Angel, Katie Haun at Haun Ventures, and Kevin Weil and Elizabeth Weil at Scribble Ventures, "and many others." SiliconANGLE reported that Dulo did not disclose its valuation.
What it says it is building#
Dulo's website says it is developing foundation models for hardware design and aims to enable "manufacturing at lightspeed," SiliconANGLE reported, adding that Thrun listed robotics among Dulo's focus areas in August. The company has not said which design tasks its models will handle or when a product will ship.
Thrun co-founded Google's X lab and led the X program that later became Waymo, SiliconANGLE noted. Aoun previously sold the natural-language startup Wavii to Google. SiliconANGLE named Prometheus, an engineering AI startup co-led by Jeff Bezos that it says raised $12 billion this year, as Dulo's most prominent venture-backed rival.
Other hardware-engineering AI companies have raised large rounds this month, including the chip-simulation startup Vinci, with a $250 million Series B, while formal-verification startup &Truth came out of stealth with a $70 million seed.
Limits#
- The round size comes from The Information's report as confirmed by Aoun; we have not seen a filing or a company announcement beyond his post.
- Dulo has not described a product, customers or a release date.
- "Engineering superintelligence" is the company's stated aim, not a description of anything it has built.