Dulo

AI Engineering · Hardware Design · Robotics

Funding

Sebastian Thrun's Dulo reportedly raises $130M seed for hardware AI

Investors bet nine figures on founder pedigree alone, since the startup has disclosed no product, customers, or valuation yet.

• Dulo, co-founded by Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun, raised a $130 million seed round with no lead investor named, backed by Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Marc Benioff, DST Global, Construct Capital and Lowercarbon Capital.
• The San Francisco startup says its models can design and validate engineering work such as planes and cars from a written prompt, planning to sell designs while leaving manufacturing to other firms.
• Dulo emerged from stealth in August 2026 with a team drawn from Waymo, Google Brain and Stanford's AI Lab, but disclosed no product, funding or launch timeline until this round.
• At $130 million, the seed ranks above the 99th percentile of all-time US robotics seed rounds, and is roughly seven times the size of rival Circuit Mind's $18.5 million Series A for a live product.
• Dulo's design-only approach places it alongside other high-profile engineering-AI bets like Jeff Bezos' Prometheus and Larry Page's Dynatomics, as well as funded rivals Vinci4D and Circuit Mind.
• The round shows investors are now willing to write outsized seed checks for engineering-AI founders with pedigree alone, well before any product or paying customer exists, underscoring how competitive the physical-AI investing race has become.