Waymo pioneer Sebastian Thrun is building a new robotics startup

• Sebastian Thrun announced he is building a stealth robotics startup called Dulo.
• Dulo is building foundation models for hardware design.
• It includes veterans of Waymo, Google Brain, and Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

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 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 also led the now-defunct flying-car startup Kittyhawk.

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