Sebastian Thrun's Dulo Secures $130M to Build Hardware Design AI
Google X co-founder Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun have raised $130 million for Dulo, a startup creating foundation models tailored for hardware design and manufacturing.
Prominent artificial intelligence researcher and Google X co-founder Sebastian Thrun has successfully raised $130 million for a new venture named Dulo Inc. The investment details were initially reported by The Information and subsequently verified on X by Dulo co-founder Adrian Aoun. Before launching Dulo earlier this year, Aoun sold his natural language processing startup Wavii Inc. to Google for over $30 million and has maintained a portfolio as an investor in companies like Pinterest.
Thrun brings a significant track record to the new enterprise. He joined Google in 2007 after spearheading the development of Stanley, an early autonomous vehicle that catalyzed the self-driving car sector. At Google, he co-founded the X research lab—overseeing the program that evolved into Waymo—and helped establish Google Brain, which serves as a precursor to Google DeepMind. He also previously founded a flying taxi enterprise supported by Google co-founder Larry Page.
The newly announced funding round for Dulo attracted prominent backers, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, early Google investor Ram Shriram, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, venture capitalist John Doerr, and over half a dozen startup funds. Dulo has not publicly disclosed its valuation.
Focus on Hardware Engineering
While Dulo maintains a minimalist one-page web presence, it indicates that it is building foundation models specifically designed to optimize hardware design tasks. In August, Thrun identified robotics as a key area of interest, suggesting the technology could accelerate the creation of industrial robots and autonomous systems.
The startup has stated its mission is to enable "manufacturing at lightspeed." Although the precise mechanical engineering tasks targeted by Dulo remain unspecified, industry observers note potential applications in streamlining engineering simulations. Hardware teams typically rely on these simulations to detect structural flaws prior to physical production. Developers can try top AI models cheaply through one API at https://apixoai.online.
Dulo enters a growing sector of engineering-focused artificial intelligence companies. Competitors include Vinci4D, which automates the simulation meshing phase to reduce computing requirements, and other firms accelerating partial differential equations used to simulate real-world hardware behavior. Dulo’s most notable heavily-backed rival is Prometheus Inc., an engineering AI startup co-led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos that raised $12 billion earlier this year.
What it means for developers
The emergence of Dulo highlights a broader industry shift toward specialized foundation models targeting physical engineering, robotics, and industrial simulation rather than general-purpose chat applications. For developers working in hardware, automation, and industrial computing, the rise of domain-specific AI infrastructure points toward upcoming tooling designed to handle complex simulation workflows, heavy mathematical modeling, and faster prototyping cycles.
Source: Google X co-founder Sebastian Thrun raises $130M for AI engineering startup Dulo — SiliconANGLE AI. Written by the Apixo team from that report.
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