Sebastian Thrun, one of the pioneers of the self-driving industry, is working on a new robotics startup called Dulo.
He revealed the new venture at the end of a keynote speech at Actuate, a robotics conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
"I am not speaking about the company yet," Thrun said. "It's under stealth, it's very small. But it's in robotics," he told an audience of robotics founders and employees.
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 has begun working on this company amid a boom in robotics, fueled by falling hardware costs, labor shortages, and pressure to reshore manufacturing. 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. 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. He later led the now-defunct flying-car startup Kittyhawk.
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Rya is a senior reporter at Business Insider covering physical AI and robotics. She writes about factory automation, humanoid robots, and the race to collect the real-world data needed to bring AI into the physical world. She previously worked at The San Francisco Standard, where she reported on tech culture and autonomous vehicles. She has a bachelor’s degree in history and politics from Pomona College and a master’s in history from the University of Cambridge. Rya lives in San Francisco. Contact her at [email protected] or on Signal at rjetha.07. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device. Here's our guide to sharing information securely.
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