THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Dulo has raised $130 million in seed funding, a round first reported by The Information on October 29 and announced the same day by co-founder Adrian Aoun, according to TokenPost.
  • Backers named in reports include Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Construct Capital and Lowercarbon Capital; the valuation and lead investor were not disclosed.
  • The company says it builds foundation models for hardware design, but has disclosed no product, customers or timeline.

Dulo, the San Francisco startup co-founded this year by Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun, has raised $130 million in seed funding. The Information first reported the financing on October 29, and TokenPost says Aoun announced it the same day. Dulo describes its work as building foundation models for hardware design.

Who is backing it

Reports of the round differ slightly on the investor list. TokenPost names individual backers Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Marc Benioff, Yuri Milner and Ram Shriram, alongside firms including Construct Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Bling Capital, BoxGroup, SV Angel, Haun Ventures and Scribble Ventures. A funding roundup from Tech Startups, citing The Information, also lists DST Global. Neither the valuation nor a lead investor has been disclosed.

From stealth to a nine-figure seed

Dulo first surfaced in August, when Thrun mentioned it at the end of a talk at the Actuate robotics conference in San Francisco, according to The Next Web, which relied on an earlier Business Insider report. At the time, the company's sparse website promised "manufacturing at lightspeed" and said its team included people from Waymo, Google Brain and Stanford's AI lab, which Thrun once directed. No funding or product had been announced.

Thrun founded Google's self-driving car project, now Waymo, co-founded Google Brain and Udacity, and later ran the flying-car company Kittyhawk, which has since shut down.

The idea behind Dulo is to apply the large-model approach that reshaped text and code to the design of physical products. Startups working on physical AI have drawn heavy investment this year: Business Insider, cited by The Next Web, pointed to PitchBook data showing a record $16.3 billion raised across 492 deals in the first quarter of 2026.

What remains unknown

Dulo has not said which kinds of hardware its models will target, how they will be trained, or when a product might ship. It has also not named customers or published benchmarks. Tech Startups notes that a seed round of this size is unusual for a newly formed company. Until Dulo shows a product, the round mainly reflects investor confidence in its founders rather than proven technology.