Jeff Dean, Google’s longest-serving executive and, most recently, its chief scientist, has left the company after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, a startup aiming to automate scientific and engineering research with AI. The move was announced August 5.
Four Google veterans, one new company
Dean — Google’s 30th employee — is joined by three other longtime colleagues: Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow who helped build core infrastructure including TensorFlow; Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a vice president of research at Google DeepMind who worked on Gemini. Together, the four helped shape some of Google’s most widely used AI systems, from search infrastructure to large language models.
Discovery Loop is structured as a Delaware public benefit corporation, according to the company’s own announcement. Its funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participating. Notably, Google itself joined as a “founding investor and cloud partner,” meaning the search giant is backing a startup built by researchers it just lost. The company has not disclosed the round’s size or its valuation.
What it wants to build
Discovery Loop says its goal is to automate the full “experimental loop” behind scientific progress: proposing an experiment, running it, evaluating the results, and iterating, at a pace no team of human researchers could match on their own. Its initial focus is automating machine-learning research and engineering itself, before expanding to broader science and engineering problems — the company points to medicine, clean water, and clean energy, framed around the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges.
Part of a wider Google reshuffle
The departures landed the same week Google reorganized its AI leadership, with Demis Hassabis stepping back from running Google DeepMind day to day and Koray Kavukcuoglu promoted to oversee Gemini development directly under CEO Sundar Pichai. The reshuffle and the founders’ exit both reflect the intensifying AI talent war among Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Discovery Loop has not said when any of its tools will be publicly available.