Published: August 14, 2026 | Category: Venture Capital

Chief scientist’s science-automation startup lands backing from Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures as Alphabet reshuffles its AI leadership

Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and its 30th employee, is leaving the company after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop, an AI startup aimed at automating scientific experimentation. Alphabet, Google’s parent, is both a backer of the new venture and the loser of four of its most senior AI researchers in a single announcement.

Discovery Loop’s first funding round was co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital also participating, the company said Wednesday. Alphabet itself put money into the round and separately signed a long-term cloud and compute partnership with the startup. The size of the raise was not disclosed by the company or its investors.

Dean is joined as a co-founder by three other departing Google veterans: Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and one of the architects of Google’s core search infrastructure; Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a vice president at Google DeepMind. Dean is expected to serve as chief executive, according to the New York Times.

Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation. It says it will use AI systems to run large numbers of scientific and engineering experiments in parallel, a process it calls automating “complete experimental loops,” with the aim of compressing years of trial-and-error research into a shorter cycle.

“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 departures are the most visible piece of a wider reorganization of Alphabet’s AI leadership. Demis Hassabis is stepping back from day-to-day management of Google DeepMind to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to run Isomorphic Labs, the company’s drug-discovery unit. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer, has been promoted to senior vice president of Google DeepMind and will report directly to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai, overseeing Gemini model development going forward.

Alphabet shares fell roughly 5% on the news, according to Bloomberg and CNBC, before paring some of the loss. The stock remains up sharply for the year to date on the strength of the broader AI trade.

For Alphabet, the arrangement is unusual: the company is simultaneously an investor in and a customer of a startup founded by researchers it just lost, rather than a clean competitive break. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures have both been early backers of foundation-model and AI-infrastructure companies over the past three years; Khosla’s Vinod Khosla said the potential impact of Discovery Loop “could be larger than the impact that Google had when we backed them in 1998 at Kleiner,” a reference to Kleiner Perkins’ early investment in Google.

Discovery Loop’s emergence adds to a run of senior-researcher spinouts from the largest AI labs over the past year, as investors continue to back small teams of veteran scientists at high valuations even as questions mount over the financing of the broader AI infrastructure buildout.