Former Google chief scientist's AI start-up is targeting $50B valuation
What's the story
Jeff Dean, the former chief scientist at Google, is looking to raise funds for his new artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, Discovery Loop. The company is said to be targeting a whopping $50 billion valuation in its latest funding round, as per Business Insider. This comes just weeks after it was reported that Discovery Loop was raising $1 billion at a valuation of around $10 billion.
Company goals
Discovery Loop aims to automate scientific discovery
Discovery Loop, which describes itself as "automating discovery to accelerate science and engineering for the world," hopes to solve some of the toughest problems in these fields through "parallel execution of thousands of experiments."
The company was co-founded by Dean after he spent 27 years at Google.
Dean has said that he and his co-founders "might make decisions that are not in the company's financial interest but are in the broader societal good."
Investment details
Funding round backed by several prominent investors
Discovery Loop's first funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital also participating.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that Alphabet was a founding investor and cloud partner for the company.
Along with Dean, the start-up's other co-founders are Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, all of whom have extensive experience in building some of Google's key technologies.