Dulo, a San Francisco startup co-founded this year by Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun, has raised $130 million. The funding was first reported on 29 October, and Aoun confirmed it in a post on X. Some outlets call it a seed round; no valuation or lead investor has been disclosed.
Backers include Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram, Marc Benioff and John Doerr, alongside more than half a dozen startup funds. Other named investors are Yuri Milner, Construct Capital, Lowercarbon Capital and DST Global. Dealroom says the sum is above the 99th percentile of US robotics seed rounds by size.
Image used by Digital Today for its August report on Thrun's stealth startup
Image: Digital Today
Dulo says it is developing foundation models for hardware design, and its bare one-page site promises "manufacturing at lightspeed". It has not said which kinds of hardware it targets or when a product will ship. Thrun first mentioned the company on 18 August at a robotics conference, describing it as small and still in stealth.
About Dulo
Dulo is a San Francisco startup co-founded in 2026 by Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun to build foundation models for hardware design. Its one-page website, hosted by Stanford, says little beyond its aim of "manufacturing at lightspeed" and a claim that its team includes leaders from Waymo, Google Brain and the Stanford AI Lab.
Before the funding news, Thrun had named the company publicly only once, at the end of a robotics conference keynote in August 2026, where he described it as in stealth, very small and working in robotics. Neither funding nor a product had been disclosed at that point.
Thrun co-founded Google X, led the project there that became Waymo and helped found Google Brain, while Aoun sold his startup Wavii to Google. A rival, Prometheus, co-led by Jeff Bezos, raised $12 billion earlier this year to apply AI to complex hardware such as robots. SiliconANGLE guesses Dulo may aim at engineering simulation, though the company has not said.
Sources · 3