Waymo Pioneer Sebastian Thrun Is Building a New Robotics Startup

He revealed the new venture at the end of a keynote speech at Actuate, a robotics conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. Few details about the company are publicly available.

A bare-bones Stanford-hosted website says Dulo is developing "foundation models for hardware design" with the goal of enabling "manufacturing at lightspeed." The site says its team includes leaders from Waymo, Google Brain, and Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL, which Thrun previously directed. Thrun.

What Happened

Google cofounder Larry Page subsequently recruited him to lead the company's self-driving-car project, which later became Waymo. Thrun also co-founded Google Brain, Google X, and online education company Udacity.

• Physical AI startups — companies building machines that can act in the real world — raised a record $16.3 billion across 492 deals in the first quarter of 2026, according to PitchBook.

• Thrun came to Google's attention in 2005 after his Stanford team won a landmark autonomous-vehicle race by completing a 132-mile desert course without a human behind the wheel.

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Key Details

He later led the now-defunct flying-car startup Kittyhawk.

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What Reports Say

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