Daniel Gross (businessman)
American entrepreneur
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daniel Gross (Hebrew: דניאל גרוס) is an Israeli-American businessperson who co-founded Cue, led artificial intelligence efforts at Apple, served as a partner at Y Combinator,[1] and is a notable technology investor in companies such as Uber, Instacart, Figma, GitHub, Airtable, Rippling, CoreWeave, Character.ai, Perplexity AI, and others.[2][3][4] In June 2024, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc.[5] Time 100 has listed Gross as one of the "Most Influential People in AI".[6]
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Daniel Gross | |
|---|---|
דניאל גרוס | |
Gross in 2018 | |
| Born | 1991 (age 34–35) |
| Occupation | Businessperson |
| Known for | Cue (search engine), AI Grant, Andromeda |
| Website | dcgross |
Career
2010-2016 - Cue and Apple
Gross was born in Jerusalem in 1991.[7] Raised as what he describes as an Orthodox Jew, he expected to lead a traditional religious life somewhere in Israel. While attending a mechina before his IDF enlistment, he applied to Y Combinator on a whim, not realizing it would change the course of his life.[7][8] At the time, he was the youngest founder ever accepted.[9] He started angel investing in 2011.[10]
Gross launched Greplin,[9] a search engine,[6] in 2010 along with Robby Walker.[11] Greplin was designed to allow users to search online accounts (such as social media, email, and cloud storage) from one location without checking each individually. In 2011, Greplin raised $4 million from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. At 19, Gross was one of Sequoia's youngest founders.[citation needed] In 2011, Forbes named Gross one of "30 Under 30" in the "Pioneers in Technology" category,[12] and Business Insider named Gross one of the "25 under 25" in Silicon Valley.[13]
In 2012 Greplin renamed itself Cue and launched additional predictive search features.[14] The company raised $10 million in November 2012 from Index Ventures.[15] In 2013, Apple acquired Cue for an undisclosed amount reported to be between $40 million and $60 million.[15] Cue was shut down by Apple shortly after the purchase.[11] Gross then joined Apple as a director focused on machine learning.[16] In 2014, Forbes named him one of "30 under 30 Influential Young People in Tech".[17]
2017-2018 - Y Combinator and Pioneer
In 2017, Gross joined Y Combinator as a partner, where he focused on artificial intelligence. He created a dedicated "YC AI" program,[18] starting Y-Combinator's AI program.[10]
In August 2018, Gross created Pioneer, an early-stage, remote startup accelerator and fund, focused on finding talented and ambitious people around the world.[19]
2021-2025 - AI investing
In 2021, Gross and Nat Friedman started making significant investments in the AI space,[20] as well as running a program that gives $250,000 in funding to AI-native companies called AI Grant.[3] In 2023, they deployed the Andromeda Cluster, a supercomputer cluster consisting of 2,512 H100s GPUs for use by startups in their portfolio.[21][22] The project cost around $100 million, including electricity and cooling,[6] and as of 2024, had 4,000 GPUs.[23]
In 2023, Time 100 listed Gross as one of the "Most Influential People in AI".[6] In 2024, Gross led a founding round in Perplexity AI, an AI search company.[24] In June 2024, Ilya Sutskever announced that he was starting Safe Superintelligence Inc. along with Gross and Daniel Levy, the former head of the "Optimization Team" at OpenAI.[25][5][26]
Gross and Nat Friedman also founded NFDG, a venture capital firm that by 2024 had invested in companies such as Safe Superintelligence.[27] Gross and Friedman invested $3.9 million in the AI company Pulse in February 2025.[28]
In July 2025 Gross left Safe Superintelligence to join Meta Superintelligence Labs.[29]