# Jeff Dean and Top Google AI Researchers Launch Discovery Loop Startup

> One of the most consequential names in modern computing is leaving Google. Jeff Dean, who joined in 1999 and helped build the search infrastructure and later Gemini, is departing to start Discovery Loop, and he is bringing heavyweight company: Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals are co-founders, with Dean as CEO. The new venture is a public benefit corporation with an audacious mission, to automate and scale scientific discovery itself. The idea is to use AI to run and iterate on experiments far faster than human researchers can, compressing the loop of hypothesis, test, and result that underlies most science. Initial funding is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Alphabet itself backing the spinout. That last detail is telling. Losing a figure like Dean is a blow to Google, but by investing, Alphabet keeps a foot in the door of a bet that, if it works, could change how research gets done across biology, chemistry, and materials science.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechCrunch · Published Thursday, August 6, 2026_

## Wortins' read

One of the most consequential names in modern computing is leaving Google. Jeff Dean, who joined in 1999 and helped build the search infrastructure and later Gemini, is departing to start Discovery Loop, and he is bringing heavyweight company: Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals are co-founders, with Dean as CEO. The new venture is a public benefit corporation with an audacious mission, to automate and scale scientific discovery itself. The idea is to use AI to run and iterate on experiments far faster than human researchers can, compressing the loop of hypothesis, test, and result that underlies most science. Initial funding is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Alphabet itself backing the spinout. That last detail is telling. Losing a figure like Dean is a blow to Google, but by investing, Alphabet keeps a foot in the door of a bet that, if it works, could change how research gets done across biology, chemistry, and materials science.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/jeff-dean-and-other-top-ai-researchers-are-leaving-google-to-launch-their-own-startup)

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