AI TRENDS | Sebastian Thrun’s Dulo Raises $130 Million for Engineering AI

Dulo, an engineering AI startup co-founded by computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, has raised $130 million in a seed round. According to Sina Finance, citing people familiar with the matter, Thrun and co-founder Adrian Oren established the company in San Francisco earlier this year. Investors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Kleiner Perkins Chairman John Doerr, DST Global, Construct Capital, and Lowercarbon Capital. Thrun founded Google X, co-founded Google Brain, and launched the self-driving project that later became Waymo. Oren has invested in hundreds of startups and previously founded several companies, including AI healthcare firm Torch, which OpenAI is reportedly seeking to acquire for about $100 million, as well as robotics companies Foundational and Seneca. Former Autodesk CEO Carl Bass is an adviser to Dulo. Dulo is developing AI models to automate engineering design and verification. Users can enter parameters and ask a model to design an airplane or car; the model then produces a feasible design, while other companies handle manufacturing. The company describes its work as developing a foundational model for hardware design. Dulo faces competition from Prometheus, which is developing AI for engineering and manufacturing, and Dynatomics, which is building a large language model for hardware engineering. OpenAI and Anthropic models are also advancing in mechanical engineering. After OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, users found it could work with engineering software to create a computer-aided design model of a traffic light from an image. However, general-purpose models such as Astra remain far from designing a new vehicle completely from scratch, leaving room for specialized companies like Dulo to develop engineering capabilities.