Dulo, a startup founded earlier this year by Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun, has raised $130 million in seed funding to pursue what it calls an Engineering Superintelligence, Pulse 2.0 reports, citing The Information. The company builds foundation models aimed at hardware design rather than text or code.
Aoun confirmed the round on LinkedIn, describing the company's mission as creating "an Engineering Superintelligence, building foundation models for hardware design."
Who is backing it
The seed round drew a long list of well-known names. According to Pulse 2.0, investors include Salesforce chief Marc Benioff, venture capitalist John Doerr, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram and Yuri Milner, along with firms such as Construct Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Bling Capital, BoxGroup, SV Angel, Haun Ventures and Scribble Ventures.
Thrun is known for building and commercializing emerging technologies, while Aoun is an entrepreneur and investor. For a company that is only months old, a seed round of this size is unusually large.
Why hardware is different
Foundation models, the large general-purpose AI systems behind chatbots and coding tools, have reshaped language and software work. Dulo wants to bring the same approach to the physical world. That brings a different set of problems: hardware design has to respect physical tolerances, material properties, manufacturability, simulation results and the ways parts fail.
Pulse 2.0 notes that Dulo is aiming at the design process itself, not at adding a productivity layer for office workers. The bet reflects growing investor interest in specialized AI models for science and engineering.
What to watch
The company has not published technical details or a product timeline. The size of the round gives it room to train its own models; the next signals will be its first customers and whether its systems can handle real engineering constraints rather than digital output alone.