Sebastian Thrun is Co-Founder of Dulo, a San Francisco startup building foundation models for hardware design with the aim of creating an Engineering Superintelligence. He co-founded the company in 2026 with Adrian Aoun.

Thrun earned his PhD in computer science and statistics at the University of Bonn in 1995, then taught at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, where he directed the Stanford AI Lab. His Stanford team's self-driving car Stanley won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Thrun co-founded Google X and led Google's self-driving car project, which became Waymo, and he also co-founded Google Brain. He co-authored the standard textbook Probabilistic Robotics and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Thrun co-founded Udacity, which was sold to Accenture in 2024, and served as CEO of Kitty Hawk, the electric aircraft company, until 2022. Dulo recently closed a $130M seed round backed by Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, DST Global, Construct Capital and Lowercarbon Capital.

Dulo's team includes leaders from Waymo, Google Brain and the Stanford AI Lab, targeting what it calls manufacturing at lightspeed. Its seed round ranks above the 99th percentile of all-time US robotics seed rounds by funding amount.