Sebastian Thrun Raises $130M Seed Round for AI Hardware Design Startup Dulo

Quick Facts

• Dulo raised $130 million in seed funding, one of the largest seed rounds ever recorded in U.S. robotics.
• Investors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr, DST Global, Lowercarbon Capital, and Marc Benioff.
• Dulo is building foundation models for hardware design, aiming to automate engineering design and validation for products like aircraft and automobiles.

Sebastian Thrun and co-founder Adrian Aoun have closed a $130 million seed round for Dulo, a San Francisco startup applying large-scale AI to physical engineering design. No valuation was disclosed.

Thrun and Aoun founded the company earlier this year. The round was first reported by The Information on October 29, and Aoun confirmed it in a post on X.

Who Is Behind Dulo

Thrun built his career on physical AI. He led the Stanford Racing Team to victory in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, then ran Google X, where he oversaw Google Brain, Wing, and Google Glass. He later led the Google Chauffeur Project, which became Waymo.

Aoun brings his own track record. He founded Wavii, a natural language processing startup acquired by Google in 2013, after which he ran special projects reporting to Larry Page. He later founded Torch, which was acquired by OpenAI this year. His X profile lists investments in more than 40 unicorns.

Former Autodesk CEO Carl Bass is advising the company. The team also includes alumni from Waymo, Google Brain, and Stanford's AI Lab.

What Dulo Is Building

Dulo describes its mission as building foundation models for hardware design. The goal is to let users input parameters and receive viable engineering designs for complex products, automating work that now requires large teams of engineers.

Aoun wrote in his X post confirming the round: "Earlier this year Sebastian Thrun and I co-founded Dulo on a mission to create an Engineering Superintelligence, building foundation models for hardware design."

Thrun first mentioned Dulo publicly at the Actuate robotics conference in San Francisco in August, offering few details. "I am not speaking about the company yet. It's under stealth, it's very small. But it's in robotics," he told attendees at the time.

Dulo's website states it is developing foundation models optimized for hardware design tasks. The company says it aims to handle design and validation while leaving manufacturing to others.

A Massive Bet at the Seed Stage

The $130 million figure places this round above the 99th percentile for all-time seed rounds in U.S. robotics by funding amount. The company has not yet disclosed a product, timeline, or commercial customers.

The investor list reads like a who's who of Silicon Valley. Alongside Schmidt and Doerr, Aoun thanked Yuri Milner, Ram Shriram, Rachel Holt at Construct Capital, Chris Sacca and Clay Dumas at Lowercarbon Capital, Bling Capital, BoxGroup, SV Angel, and Haun Ventures.

A Crowded Race for Physical AI

Dulo enters a market drawing serious capital. Its most prominent rival is Prometheus Inc., an engineering AI startup co-led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, which raised $12 billion earlier this year from Bezos and a group of financial institutions.

Most physical AI investment has focused on robots and humanoids that interact with the world. Dulo is targeting a step earlier in the process: the design and validation of hardware before it is ever built. That distinction may define where the company wins or loses against better-funded competitors.