Discovery Loop, the new AI startup launched by longtime Google engineer Jeff Dean, has been in talks to raise $1 billion at a valuation of around $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Business Insider. The company is structured as a public benefit corporation and says its mission is to automate machine learning, science and engineering to speed up discovery through the parallel execution of thousands of experiments. An August 5 press release said the startup’s initial funding round is being led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins and Doerr Capital, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Alphabet is a founding investor and cloud partner. Discovery Loop’s founding team also includes Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, all of whom helped build major Google technologies and AI research efforts. The fundraising talks underscore how former Google and DeepMind talent is attracting large pools of capital as investors back a new wave of AI labs outside established tech giants.