Good morning, AI reporter Sharon Goldman in for Allie Garfinkle, who is taking a well-deserved vacation!
One familiar name keeps popping up in my inbox lately—but not in the way you might expect. Amid the flood of pitches touting hot new AI startups, I keep seeing Jeff Dean. Yes, that Jeff Dean: Google’s chief scientist and longtime AI leader.
Best known for cofounding Google Brain and leading the company’s AI research since the early days of deep learning, Dean has also emerged as a prolific angel investor. Over the past two years, he’s quietly backed a whopping 37 AI startups—including Perplexity, DatologyAI, Emerald AI, Workhelix, Roboflow, Profluent Bio, Sakana AI, Latent Labs, P-1, World Labs, and Yutori. Most of his investments are early stage—often before Series A—when companies are still in stealth or just emerging from research labs. For example, Dean was involved in legal AI startup Harvey’s seed round.
Dean joined Google X in 2011 to explore the then-resurgent field of deep neural networks, went on to lead Google Brain in 2012, and in 2018 was named head of Google’s AI division. Today, he holds the title of chief scientist at both Google Research and Google DeepMind, the combined AI powerhouse formed in 2023.
But he’s no newcomer to angel investing. As early as 2016, he backed Poplar Homes, a tech-enabled property management company acquired by Evernest in early 2025. By 2022, he already had dozens of investments under his belt.
Over the past two years, though, Dean’s investment activity has taken on a clear shape—reflecting both his deep technical roots and his vision for where AI is heading. He’s backing startups building core AI tooling, particularly those focused on developer platforms, LLM infrastructure, and training efficiency. He’s also betting on a new generation of applications built natively for the LLM era, even if they are outside the Google ecosystem.
Another clear theme: AI for science. Dean has backed companies applying AI to problems in biology, chemistry, and genomics. It’s a natural extension of the “AI for scientific discovery” thread he championed during his time at both Google Brain and DeepMind—most notably with AlphaFold, DeepMind’s groundbreaking system for predicting protein structures, which has become a cornerstone of modern computational biology.
Finally, Dean is consistently backing deeply technical founding teams, often with academic pedigrees or open-source credentials. Many are led by former researchers from Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, or top universities. Yutori’s three cofounders, for example, all came from Meta but were also formerly researchers and faculty at Georgia Tech.
Interestingly, some of Dean’s bets are in areas that overlap—or even compete—with Google’s core business. Perplexity, for example, challenges Google Search. Dean, therefore, is surprisingly independent in his investing, even while he continues to hold one of the most senior AI roles inside Google.
“He’s been just incredibly active,” said Dylan Reid, a partner at Zetta Venture Partners, which has invested in three bio+AI companies with Dean. “He’s a real legend in AI, and a sort of AI guru at Google.”
That means his name brings cachet: “Having somebody like Jeff as an investor—an AI visionary on your cap table—I think it helps for sure,” Reid added. “It’s a sign that somebody in really advanced technology has looked at this and decided it’s interesting.”
