Jeff Dean, one of Google's most influential long-time leaders, is leaving the company to build a new AI startup focused on accelerating scientific progress. He is joined by several prominent researchers and engineers from Google, including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals.
The new venture, Discovery Loop, is structured as a public benefit corporation and aims to use advanced AI systems to speed up experimentation across science and engineering. The company's approach centers on running thousands of experiments in parallel, with the goal of making research faster, broader and more efficient.
Discovery Loop also plans to explore AI systems that can help improve future AI models, a direction often described as recursive self-improvement. The founders say this could reduce the time between ideas, testing and results, opening the door to a new era of automated discovery.
The startup has attracted backing from Alphabet, along with support led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital also joined the funding round.
Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as employee number 30, played a major role in shaping search infrastructure, AI research and Gemini's multimodal capabilities. With Discovery Loop, the team is betting that AI can move beyond answering questions and become a tool for generating breakthroughs. If successful, this model could redefine how innovation unfolds in the years ahead.
