Waymo pioneer Sebastian Thrun is building a new robotics startup

Aug 19, 2026 02:35 AM - 1 hour ago 3

Sebastian Thrun, 1 of the pioneers of the self-driving industry, is moving connected a caller robotics startup called Dulo.

He revealed the caller task astatine the extremity of a keynote reside astatine Actuate, a robotics convention successful San Francisco connected Tuesday.

"I americium not speaking astir the institution yet," Thrun said. "It's nether stealth, it's very small. But it's successful robotics," he told an assemblage of robotics founders and employees.

Few specifications astir the institution are publically available. A bare-bones Stanford-hosted website says Dulo is processing "foundation models for hardware design" pinch the extremity of enabling "manufacturing astatine lightspeed." The tract says its squad includes leaders from Waymo, Google Brain, and Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, aliases SAIL, which Thrun antecedently directed.

Thrun came to Google's attraction successful 2005 aft his Stanford squad won a landmark autonomous-vehicle title by completing a 132-mile godforsaken people without a quality down the wheel. Google cofounder Larry Page subsequently recruited him to lead the company's self-driving-car project, which later became Waymo.

Thrun besides co-founded Google Brain, Google X, and online acquisition institution Udacity. He later led the now-defunct flying-car startup Kittyhawk.

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Rya is simply a elder newsman astatine Business Insider covering beingness AI and robotics. She writes astir mill automation, humanoid robots, and the title to cod the real-world information needed to bring AI into the beingness world. She antecedently worked astatine The San Francisco Standard, wherever she reported connected tech civilization and autonomous vehicles. She has a bachelor’s grade successful history and authorities from Pomona College and a master’s successful history from the University of Cambridge. Rya lives successful San Francisco. Contact her astatine [email protected] aliases connected Signal astatine rjetha.07. Use a individual email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device. Here's our guideline to sharing accusation securely.