Thrun's Dulo raises $130 million for AI hardware design

Sebastian Thrun's track record includes leading the development of Stanley, an early self-driving vehicle, and founding Google's X research lab, which spun out Waymo and helped establish Google Brain. Adrian Aoun previously sold natural language processing startup Wavii to Google for over $30 million. Their new venture, Dulo, launched earlier this year and has now attracted a $130 million round from prominent investors including Eric Schmidt and Marc Benioff.

Dulo's focus on foundation models for hardware design places it in a growing field of engineering-focused AI startups. Vinci4D Inc. automates the meshing phase of simulation projects, while other startups work on speeding up partial differential equations used by simulators. Dulo's most prominent rival is Prometheus Inc., co-led by Jeff Bezos, which raised $12 billion earlier this year. It's possible Dulo's AI is meant to accelerate development of industrial robots and autonomous vehicles, though the company has not specified which hardware design tasks its models will automate.