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Sebastian Thrun, the engineer who founded and led Alphabet Inc.‘s Google‘s self-driving-car project before it became Waymo, is developing a new robotics venture called Dulo.
Stealth Startup Targets Hardware Design
Thrun confirmed the venture to attendees at the Actuate robotics conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Business Insider reported. “I am not speaking about the company yet,” he said. “It’s under stealth, it’s very small. But it’s in robotics.”
A Stanford-hosted webpage states that Dulo is developing “foundation models for hardware design” aimed at enabling “manufacturing at lightspeed.” The site says the team includes alumni from Waymo, Google Brain and Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), which Thrun previously directed.
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Thrun’s move comes amid a robotics boom. Physical AI startups raised a record $16.3 billion across 492 deals in the first quarter of 2026, PitchBook data shows. The surge is fueled by falling hardware costs, labor shortages and pressure to reshore manufacturing.
Thrun became well known in 2005 after his Stanford team won the DARPA autonomous vehicle race. He later joined Google, where he led the company’s self-driving car project. He also co-founded Google X and Udacity and previously headed the flying car startup Kittyhawk.
Thrun has a history of leaving established academic roles to chase new ventures.
In 2013, he stepped down as a tenured Stanford professor to focus full-time on Udacity, an online education startup he founded after a free AI course he offered drew 160,000 students worldwide, far exceeding initial expectations.
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In a 2025 post on X, Thrun said he was hiring engineers for “an exciting agentic AI startup” in San Francisco.
Looking for engineers for an exciting agentic AI startup in San Francisco. Contact me at sthrun@gmail.com
— Sebastian Thrun (@SebastianThrun) September 29, 2025
Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
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