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AI Minute Newsroom
2026-08-08
Jeff Dean published his startup's pitch deck — and Alphabet is one of the investors
Days after announcing he was leaving Google after 27 years, Jeff Dean posted slides from the deck he and three colleagues used to raise money for Discovery Loop, a company built to automate scientific research. His co-founders are Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals. One slide lists what this team helped build at Google: Search, Ads, Gmail, the Gemini models and the TPU chips. Another maps former colleagues who now run Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Mistral and Moonshot AI. Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures are co-leading the first round, with Alphabet itself among the investors. Neither the amount raised nor the valuation has been disclosed.
Why it mattersA pitch deck is normally a private document, and publishing one is a recruiting move rather than a fundraising one. The slide showing where former colleagues ended up is the argument: this group trained a large share of the industry's current leadership, and it wants the next tier of researchers to notice. The detail worth watching is Alphabet's money. Google just lost four of its most senior researchers and is now a shareholder in the company they left to build.
✓ Verified · 4 sources
▶ Related video: Google's Great AI Cleanse: Jeff Dean Leaves, Demis Steps Aside
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