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Daniel Gross (businessman)

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Daniel Gross
דניאל גרוס
Gross in 2018
Born1991 (age 33–34)
Jerusalem
OccupationBusinessperson
Known forCue (search engine), AI Grant, Andromeda
Websitedcgross.com

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]

Career

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2010-2016 - Cue and Apple

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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

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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

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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]

References

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  1. ^ Seibel, Michael (January 10, 2017). "Welcome Daniel, Nicole, Stephanie, Steven and Tatyana!" (Press release). Y Combinator. Retrieved October 12, 2018.
  2. ^ Cowen, Tyler (September 1, 2022). "A Conversation on Talent".
  3. ^ a b Clark, Kate (June 20, 2023). "Billion-Dollar AI Venture Fund Offers Elusive Nvidia Chips to Win Deals". The Information. Retrieved 2023-11-23.
  4. ^ CoreWeave (December 4, 2023). "CoreWeave Announces Secondary Sale of $642 Million". PR Newswire. Retrieved 2024-01-30.
  5. ^ a b "Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist, launches new AI company". TechCrunch. 19 June 2024. Retrieved 19 June 2024.
  6. ^ a b c d "TIME100 AI 2023: Daniel Gross". Time. September 7, 2023. Retrieved 2024-06-20.
  7. ^ a b "Daniel Gross: Catalyzing Success". Farnam Street. Retrieved 2020-05-30.
  8. ^ Shamah, David. "Apple pays $40m. for Israeli 21-year-old's app". www.timesofisrael.com. Retrieved 2025-07-10.
  9. ^ a b Yasmine, Fatema (4 March 2011). "Greplin Founder Daniel Gross on his amazing story behind building the company [Interview]". The Next Web. Retrieved 12 October 2018.
  10. ^ a b These are 30 of the most successful early-stage startup investors in the world, according to a proprietary AI model known as 'Moneyball for VC', Business Insider, January 17, 2004, retrieved March 30, 2025
  11. ^ a b Shamah, David (October 8, 2013), Apple pays $40m. for Israeli 21-year-old's app, The Times of Israel, retrieved March 30, 2025
  12. ^ Barret, Victoria (December 21, 2011). "30 Under 30: Technology". Forbes.
  13. ^ Shontell, Alyson (October 18, 2011). "25 And Under: 25 Hot Young Stars In Silicon Valley Tech". Business Insider.
  14. ^ Gannes, Liz (June 18, 2012). "Greplin Recasts Itself as Cue, an Intelligent Personal Assistant App". AllThingsD.
  15. ^ a b Tsotsis, Alexia (October 3, 2013). "Apple Buys Cue For Over $40M To Compete With Google Now". TechCrunch. Retrieved 12 October 2018.
  16. ^ Mannes, John (January 10, 2017), Daniel Gross of Apple leaves to become Y Combinator's newest partner, TechCrunch, retrieved March 30, 2025
  17. ^ Barret, Victoria (May 2, 2014). "30 Under 30: Technology". Business Insider.
  18. ^ Kolodny, Lora (March 19, 2017). "Y Combinator has a new AI track, and wants startups building 'robot factory' tech to apply". TechCrunch.
  19. ^ Lohr, Steve (August 9, 2018). "Wanted: 'Lost Einsteins.' Please Apply". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-10-12.
  20. ^ "nfdg". nfdg.com. Retrieved 2023-11-22.
  21. ^ "Andromeda Cluster". June 20, 2023.
  22. ^ Barr, Alistair (June 13, 2023). "Nvidia GPUs are so hard to get that rich venture capitalists are buying them for the startups they invest in". Business Insider.
  23. ^ Cai, Kenrick (February 14, 2024), "AI Investors Are Wooing Startups With Massive Computing Clusters", Forbes
  24. ^ Sullivan, Mark (April 23, 2024), Perplexity becomes an AI unicorn with new $63 million funding round, Fast Company, retrieved March 30, 2025
  25. ^ "Safe Superintelligence Inc". SSI. 19 June 2024. Retrieved 19 June 2024.
  26. ^ "Daniel Levy". Stanford. 19 June 2024. Retrieved 19 June 2024.
  27. ^ Davalos, Jackie (2024), OpenAI Co-Founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence Raises $1 Billion, Bloomberg, retrieved March 30, 2025
  28. ^ Russell, Melia (2025), A startup has raised $3.9 million from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to solve AI's unstructured data bottleneck, Business Insider, retrieved March 30, 2025
  29. ^ ""I expect miracles": Gross hails Safe Superintelligence's future as he joins Meta". ctech. 2025-07-04. Retrieved 2025-07-10.
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