Jeff Dean

Jeff Dean is an American computer scientist and one of the most influential systems engineers of his generation. After joining Google in 1999, he co-designed foundational infrastructure including MapReduce, Bigtable and Spanner, co-founded the Google Brain team that launched the company's deep-learning era, and co-created the TensorFlow framework. His reputation inside engineering circles is near-legendary, and he remains a Google Senior Fellow.

In 2023, following the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain, Dean was appointed Chief Scientist of Google, a role spanning both Google Research and Google DeepMind, where he helps steer the Gemini model program. Across a 25-year career he has shaped the systems that made large-scale machine learning practical.

Alongside his Google role, Dean has quietly become one of AI's most prolific angel investors, typically backing companies at the earliest stages as they spin out of research labs. Dealroom tracks an unusually broad portfolio that includes Perplexity, World Labs, Harvey, Periodic Labs, Function Health and Astranis. Notably, some of these compete with Google's own products — underscoring how independently he invests — and his technical judgment makes him a high-signal backer wherever he appears. Reporting in 2025 put his tally at roughly three dozen startups, among them DatologyAI, Sakana AI and Roboflow.