Google X Co-founder Sebastian Thrun Raises $130M for AI Engineering Startup Dulo
AI engineering startup Dulo, co-founded by Google X pioneer Sebastian Thrun, secured $130M to develop foundation models for hardware design, backed by Eric Schmidt and other tech leaders.
Dulo Inc., an AI engineering startup co-founded by prominent artificial intelligence researcher Sebastian Thrun, has raised $130 million in funding. The Information first reported the investment on Thursday, October 29, 2026, and Dulo co-founder Adrian Aoun confirmed the news via a post on X. The round did not disclose the company's valuation.
Thrun, known for co-founding Google’s X research lab and leading the program that became Waymo, joined forces with Aoun, who previously sold natural language processing startup Wavii to Google for over $30 million. The financing attracted notable backers including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, venture capitalist John Doerr, and Ram Shriram, one of Google’s earliest investors.
According to its website, Dulo is developing foundation models optimized for hardware design tasks, aiming to facilitate "manufacturing at lightspeed." In August, Thrun indicated robotics as a key focus area, suggesting the AI may accelerate the development of industrial robots and autonomous vehicles. This positions Dulo in a competitive landscape alongside other funded startups like Vinci4D and PhysicsX, as well as Jeff Bezos-backed Prometheus, which recently raised $12 billion.