Dulo
Foundation models for robotic hardware design.
The founders
ST
The company
Dulo is building foundation models for robotic hardware design — applying large-scale AI to physical engineering to compress how quickly hardware is designed and manufactured, something the company calls "manufacturing at lightspeed." The stated end goal is an AI-native humanoid robotics firm putting a robot in every home.
Robotics is drawing serious capital as hardware costs fall and reshoring pushes advanced manufacturing back onshore. Bringing generative AI to the hardware side, not just software, is the underexplored half of the physical-AI stack.
Announced in August 2026 and still in stealth, Dulo is founded by Sebastian Thrun, who led Stanford's winning 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge team, went on to spearhead Google's self-driving project that became Waymo, and co-founded Google Brain, Google X and Udacity.
Beyond Thrun, who also directed the Stanford AI Lab, the founding team includes leaders drawn from Waymo, Google Brain and SAIL — a group with a track record in autonomous systems and large-scale AI. If foundation models for hardware are winnable, this is a credible group to attempt it.
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