Sebastian Thrun's Dulo raises $130 million for AI robotics engineering

The Information reports that Sebastian Thrun's new startup Dulo has closed a $130 million seed round. Thrun and co-founder Adrian Aoun started the company earlier this year in San Francisco, the outlet says.

The named investors are the hook. The Information lists Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google. John Doerr, chairman of Kleiner Perkins. The venture firms DST Global, Construct Capital and Lowercarbon Capital are also named in the round.

Who Sebastian Thrun is

Thrun led the Stanford team that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a self-driving race across the desert. He then ran Google's self-driving car project, which became Waymo. He also founded the online learning company Udacity.

The Information describes Dulo as a startup focused on creating AI models for engineering. The outlet does not say more about the product in the excerpt outside the paywall. Earlier coverage from other outlets, published in August, placed the company in robotics hardware.

Adrian Aoun is less widely known. He founded Forward, a technology-driven primary care company. He also worked at Google.

What the paywalled report does not say

The excerpt names no customers. It names no revenue. It names no product release date. It names no benchmark number. It does not say what size of robot or what customer segment Dulo is aiming at. It does not state the exact post-money valuation. The round is called a seed, but the amount is far larger than most seeds.

What the report does establish is the money and the investor list. For a seed round this is unusual. The round is the news on its own.

What this changes for other founders

Any founder pitching an AI robotics or AI engineering company this quarter will meet one of two reactions. Investors who passed on Dulo will defend the pass by naming the ways robotics has disappointed them. Investors who want to back the next Dulo will ask how your round compares to this one. Neither answer puts the pitch in a comfortable place.

Both reactions change what you have to argue. Prepare for both. Have a one-sentence answer to the question of what Dulo buys with this money that your company does not need. The honest answer is probably compute and senior hires, not market reach.

For a buyer of AI engineering tools, this round changes nothing today. Dulo has no product in the hands of users that is public. The time to read Dulo as a vendor is when it releases something a customer can measure.

Source

Sebastian Thrun Raises $130 Million for AI Engineering Startup Dulo, The Information. The article is paywalled; this item cites what the excerpt outside the paywall states.