Jeff Dean, one of Google’s longest-serving executives and its 30th employee, announced in August 2026 that he is leaving the company to launch an AI startup focused on accelerating scientific research.
Dean is joined by three co-founders, all departing from Google: Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and top engineer; Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean is set to serve as CEO.
The venture, named Discovery Loop, is structured as a public benefit corporation. It aims to use AI to run thousands of experiments simultaneously, partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which scientific experimentation can be conducted. The company also intends to explore recursive self-improvement — using AI to help develop more powerful AI systems, removing human iteration from that loop entirely.
“While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck,” the company said in a press release.
Discovery Loop has secured funding from several investors. The initial round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. Google’s parent company Alphabet is also among the financial backers.
Dean joined Google in 1999 and contributed to core search infrastructure, including its crawling, indexing, and query-serving systems. He also played a leading role in the company’s early AI research and had significant involvement in the development of Google’s Gemini multimodal models.
“We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,” Dean told the New York Times. “You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”
The departure of Dean and his co-founders marks a notable shift of senior AI talent away from one of the field’s largest institutions, with the group now directing their efforts toward automating the scientific process through a dedicated independent venture.
Source: TechCrunch