
Discovery Loop, co-founded by Jeff Dean, is backed by seed funding from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others; Google also has a stake in the company
THE SO WHAT
Top research talent spinning out with Google retaining a stake points to a hybrid model — frontier science happening outside the mothership but still wired into its ecosystem. If you partner with big labs, expect more of your breakthrough tooling to come via their alumni startups, not just internal product lines.
READ THE SOURCE
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