Discovery Loop, the AI startup founded by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, is in the market for fresh capital at a valuation of about $50 billion, Business Insider reports.
Dean left his post at Google last month. The new target is a sharp step up from the roughly $10 billion valuation the company was seeking weeks ago, when it was raising $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The startup describes its mission as using AI to accelerate scientific and engineering discovery through the parallel execution of thousands of experiments. It has said its work will focus on some of science and engineering’s hardest problems.
Discovery Loop’s initial funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins and Doerr Capital, according to a company release cited by Business Insider. Alphabet was a founding investor and cloud partner, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.
Dean's co-founders include Sanjay Ghemawat, who joined Google in 1999 and worked on distributed-computing systems. Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, formerly a researcher at Google DeepMind, are also co-founders.
Dean shared Discovery Loop’s pitch deck on X last month. Vinod Khosla, whose firm co-led the first raise, compared the company to his early investment in OpenAI.
"This team can redefine how research in engineering and science is done," he said.