Jeff Dean Leaves Google to Launch Discovery Loop AI Startup

Former Google executive Jeff Dean has left the technology company to launch Discovery Loop, an artificial intelligence startup focused on accelerating scientific research through AI-driven experimentation.

Dean, one of Google’s longest-serving engineers and a leading figure in the company’s AI efforts, is joined by several former colleagues, including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals. Dean is expected to serve as the company’s chief executive.

Discovery Loop has been established as a public benefit corporation and aims to develop AI systems capable of designing, running and refining large numbers of scientific experiments simultaneously. The company believes automating parts of the research process could reduce the time required to test ideas and accelerate scientific discovery.

The startup is also exploring how AI can improve the development of future AI systems by reducing the amount of manual experimentation required during model design and testing.

Backed by Alphabet and Venture Investors

Discovery Loop has secured backing from Alphabet, Google’s parent company, alongside an initial funding round co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital also participated in the investment.

The founding team said the company aims to help researchers move beyond using AI primarily to answer questions by developing systems that can contribute to scientific and engineering discoveries.

Dean joined Google in 1999 as the company’s 30th employee and played a central role in building Google’s search infrastructure, including its crawling, indexing and query-serving systems. More recently, he contributed to the development of Google’s AI technologies, including its Gemini multimodal models.

The company is focusing on scientific and engineering research, where experiments often require repeated testing before producing reliable results. Discovery Loop believes AI can automate much of that process, allowing researchers to evaluate more ideas in less time.