Google's Legendary Engineer Jeff Dean Is Seeking a $10 Billion Valuation for His New AI Startup

Jeff Dean, who spent 27 years at Google and became something of a legend inside the company as an engineer, is now pitching investors on a different project: his new AI startup, Discovery Loop. According to Business Insider sources, the company is in talks to raise $1 billion at a valuation of roughly $10 billion. Dean hasn't commented officially, but described the startup's goal on X as "automating machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discovery and progress."

According to Discovery Loop's August 5 press release, the seed round is being led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins and Doerr Capital. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Alphabet is serving as the startup's anchor investor and cloud partner.

The startup's other co-founders also bring decades of experience building some of Google's most important products: Dean's longtime colleague Sanjay Ghemawat (at Google since 1999) is one of the pioneers of distributed computing technology, Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le is a leading researcher in deep learning and large language models, and Google DeepMind's Oriol Vinyals has worked on sequence modeling and reinforcement learning.

Pitch-deck slides Dean shared on X showed the team had worked on products including Google Search, Ads, Gemini and Gmail, and that Dean, Le and Vinyals rank among the most-cited AI researchers on Google Scholar — one former Google product leader called it "one of the strongest teams I've seen on a pitch deck."

Discovery Loop is just the latest example of Google alumni launching major AI startups. Former DeepMind researcher David Silver raised $1.1 billion for his lab Ineffable Intelligence at a $5.1 billion valuation this year, while former DeepMind employees Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou reportedly raised funding for Reflection AI at a $25 billion valuation. Periodic Labs, founded by a former Google Brain researcher, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and Sakana AI, founded by former Google researchers, was valued at $2.65 billion last year.