Sebastian Thrun, the engineer behind Google's self-driving program that later became Waymo, announced on Tuesday that he is launching a new robotics company called Dulo.

Thrun mentioned the venture only briefly at the end of his keynote at Actuate, a robotics conference held in San Francisco. He named the company but shared no further details. "I am not speaking about the company yet," he said, according to Business Insider. "It's under stealth, it's very small. But it's in robotics."

He offered no information about funding, products, or a launch date. As of this week, almost nothing about Dulo is public, and the Business Insider article remains the only detailed report on the company.

A clue from a Stanford webpage

The clearest indication of what Dulo may do comes from a simple webpage hosted by Stanford. It states that Dulo builds "foundation models for hardware design" and aims for "manufacturing at lightspeed." Foundation models are large, general-purpose AI systems that have already changed how text, images, and code are created. Dulo's concept is to apply these same techniques to the design and production of physical machines and their parts.

That framing places Dulo in a part of robotics and industrial AI that has attracted growing attention: not just building machines that move in the real world, but also using AI earlier in the pipeline to help design and manufacture them. If the brief description is accurate, the company would sell to those who build machines rather than to end users.

Dulo team includes alumni from Waymo, Google Brain, and SAIL

For now, the team's background is the main source of information. The Stanford page, as reported by Business Insider, says Dulo's team includes leaders from Waymo, Google Brain, and Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Thrun led SAIL earlier in his career and helped start Google Brain. These three organizations are central to the recent history of autonomy and machine learning.

Thrun is launching Dulo at a time when investors are eager to fund companies working with physical machines. Physical AI companies, those building machines that operate in real environments, raised a record $16.3 billion across 492 deals in the first quarter of 2026, according to PitchBook. Lower hardware costs, labor shortages, and efforts to bring manufacturing back onshore are fueling this growth.

Dulo is drawing attention because of Thrun's track record, even though the company has no product yet. In 2005, Thrun's Stanford team completed a 132-mile desert course without a driver and won a major autonomous-vehicle race, according to Business Insider. After that, Google co-founder Larry Page hired him to lead the self-driving project that became Waymo, now the most well-known robotaxi company in the US. That history helps explain why even a stealth announcement from Thrun is likely to be watched closely by robotics and AI circles.