Google's Sanjay Ghemawat Exits After 27 Years, Co-Founds Discovery Loop

Sanjay Ghemawat, co-founder of Discovery Loop and former Google Senior Fellow

Sanjay Ghemawat has left Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, a venture built to automate scientific and engineering research.

Departure: Senior Fellow, Systems Infrastructure Group at Google, after 27 years
New venture: Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation, co-founded with Jeff Dean, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le
Focus: Automating machine learning and scientific research to speed technological breakthroughs
Backers: Alphabet (strategic computing and cloud partner), Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital
Career highlights: Co-built the Google File System, MapReduce, Bigtable and Spanner with Jeff Dean; elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009; won the ACM Prize in Computing in 2012

A Reshuffle Across Google And DeepMind

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed the departure in a note to staff, saying it had been "a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay" and that Google would remain involved with Discovery Loop "as a founding investor and Cloud partner." The exit lands alongside a broader reshuffle at Google DeepMind, where Demis Hassabis is stepping back from day-to-day operations to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, with Koray Kavukcuoglu stepping up as SVP of Google DeepMind.