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Daniel Gross

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Daniel Gross (born 1991) is an Israeli-American entrepreneur and venture investor who co-founded the AI laboratory Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy in June 2024 and served as its first chief executive before joining Meta's Superintelligence Labs in July 2025.[4][6] He is also known for founding the personal-search startup Greplin (later renamed Cue), which Apple acquired in 2013 for a reported $40 million to $60 million; for leading machine-learning teams at Apple between 2013 and 2017; for serving as a partner at Y Combinator where he launched the firm's first dedicated artificial-intelligence track; for founding the global online accelerator Pioneer; and for co-managing the AI-focused investment partnership NFDG with former GitHub chief executive Nat Friedman.[1][2][3][12]

As SSI's chief executive Gross helped raise more than $3 billion: a $1 billion round in September 2024 at a $5 billion valuation, followed by a $2 billion round in April 2025 led by Greenoaks Capital that valued the company at $32 billion, despite SSI having shipped no product and employing roughly 20 people.[5][20] He stepped down from SSI on 29 June 2025, with Sutskever becoming chief executive and Levy president, and joined Meta Platforms' newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs as part of a wider arrangement under which Meta took a stake in NFDG.[6][7][8]

Through NFDG and personal angel investments dating back to the early 2010s, Gross has backed many of the most prominent technology and artificial-intelligence companies of his generation, including GitHub, Uber, Instacart, Figma, Airtable, Rippling, CoreWeave, Character.AI and Perplexity AI.[1][9] He was named to the inaugural TIME 100 list of the most influential people in AI in 2023.[9]

Key facts

Born1991, Jerusalem, Israel[1]
NationalityIsraeli-American[1]
EducationY Combinator (Summer 2010); did not attend university[2][10]
Known forCue / Greplin; Apple ML leadership; Y Combinator partner; Pioneer; NFDG; Safe Superintelligence; Meta Superintelligence Labs[1]
Investment fundNFDG (with Nat Friedman), $1.1 billion debut vehicle launched 2023[7]
Spouse / familyNot publicly disclosed
HonorsTIME 100 AI (2023); Forbes "30 Under 30" Technology Pioneers (2011); Forbes "30 Under 30 Influential Young People in Tech" (2014)[1][9]

Early life

Daniel Gross was born in 1991 and grew up in Jerusalem in an Orthodox Jewish family.[1] As a teenager he taught himself to program, built software projects independently, and was an active user of the early-2000s Israeli developer and hacker communities online. Several profiles published in subsequent years describe him as having begun building software for the web as a young teenager and as an autodidact who never completed a conventional formal education in either Israel or the United States.[1][2][10][11]

Rather than completing the conventional Israeli educational path that culminates in mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces, Gross applied to the American seed-stage accelerator Y Combinator while attending a mechina, a pre-military preparatory program.[1] He was accepted into the Summer 2010 batch at age 18 or 19, and at the time was described as the youngest founder Y Combinator had then admitted.[1][2][10]

Gross moved to the United States to participate in Y Combinator and did not return to Israel for compulsory military service; he also did not attend university, becoming one of a small group of high-profile Silicon Valley founders whose careers began in their teens.[2][10] He later took U.S. citizenship and is typically described in U.S. and Israeli media as Israeli-American.[1][10]

What was Greplin and Cue?

The company Gross founded with Robby Walker, originally called Greplin, launched out of Y Combinator's Summer 2010 demo day. Greplin offered a personal search engine that indexed a user's content across web services such as Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Dropbox, allowing users to search their own data from a single interface.[1][11]

In 2011 the company raised approximately four million dollars in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from a group of well-known angel investors.[1][11] Forbes named Gross to its inaugural "30 Under 30" list of Technology Pioneers that year, and Inc. magazine profiled him in a March 2011 piece headlined "How 19-Year-Old Daniel Gross Is Taking on Google with Greplin."[11] Business Insider also placed him on its "25 Under 25" list.[1]

In 2012 the company rebranded as Cue and pivoted toward a predictive personal-assistant product that surfaced relevant information (meetings, contacts, locations) before the user had to search for it. Cue raised approximately ten million dollars from Index Ventures that year.[1]

On 3 October 2013 AllThingsD reported that Apple had acquired Cue for an amount "between $40 million and $60 million," figures that have since been widely repeated, including by The Times of Israel, which described the buyer as paying around forty million dollars for the application of "a 21-year-old Israeli."[12][1] Apple confirmed the acquisition with its standard non-statement that it "buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."[1] Cue was shut down shortly after the transaction closed, and its technology contributed to Apple intelligence features later integrated into iOS and macOS.[2]

Apple machine-learning leadership (2013-2017)

Following the Cue acquisition Gross joined Apple, where he became a director focused on machine learning and search.[2][3] During his tenure he oversaw work on intelligence features in Apple's operating systems, including the contact and event extraction that powered systems such as Apple's "proactive" suggestions in Mail, Contacts and Spotlight.[2] In a December 2017 interview with Recode he described the period as one in which Apple was actively integrating machine learning into iOS and macOS at scale.[2]

In 2014 Forbes included Gross on its "30 Under 30 Influential Young People in Tech" list, recognizing his role at Apple.[1] He left Apple in late 2016, and his departure was first reported in January 2017.[3]

Y Combinator partner and Pioneer

On 10 January 2017 TechCrunch reported that Gross had joined Y Combinator as a partner, returning to the institution that had accepted him as a teenage founder seven years earlier.[3] Gross told the publication that he had felt he "almost owed it to this institution that very much gave me my career."[3] At YC he focused on artificial intelligence and created a dedicated YC AI program, the firm's first vertical track explicitly oriented around AI startups, organized around themes like applied machine learning, autonomous systems and natural-language interfaces.[1][3]

In August 2018 Gross launched Pioneer, an early-stage, fully remote startup accelerator and fund. Pioneer used a "tournament" model: rather than admitting traditional batches, applicants from anywhere in the world competed by logging weekly progress on projects of their own choosing on Pioneer's website, with the top performers each month earning small grants, mentorship and the option of follow-on investment from Pioneer's fund.[13] Pioneer received backing from Stripe and from Andreessen Horowitz, among others, and over its lifetime funded more than 150 companies across some 50 countries.[13]

Gross described the program as an attempt to build "a city on the internet," an institution that would identify and support ambitious founders working outside the established geographic clusters of Silicon Valley, New York, London or Beijing.[13] He structured Pioneer's standard investment as roughly twenty thousand dollars at a five-percent equity stake, plus an additional one percent of equity for participation in the one-month remote programme; in some cases Pioneer made follow-on investments of up to one million dollars.[13] Founders who completed the programme received non-cash benefits including approximately one hundred thousand dollars in cloud-services credits, help with incorporation, expert mentoring and a trip to San Francisco.[13]

Pioneer-backed companies included the remote-collaboration tool There, the desktop-application toolkit ToDesktop, and the software search engine Metacode, among others.[13] Pioneer stopped making new investments in 2024 as Gross's attention shifted to NFDG and the founding of Safe Superintelligence.[13]

NFDG (with Nat Friedman)

Around 2020-2021 Gross began co-investing with Nat Friedman, the former chief executive of GitHub. The two formalized their partnership in 2023 by launching NFDG, named for the initials of its founding partners (Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross). NFDG's debut fund raised approximately one and a tenth billion dollars in committed capital, an unusually large vehicle for a first-time partnership and one focused on artificial-intelligence startups and infrastructure.[7][14]

NFDG's portfolio came to include stakes in many of the most highly valued private AI companies of the early 2020s, among them Perplexity AI, the AI voice startup ElevenLabs, the AI search startup Character.AI, Andromeda, Granola, Basis and Pika.[14] John Collison of Stripe and Matt Huang of Paradigm sat on the firm's advisory board.[7]

What is the Andromeda Cluster?

In 2023, in response to severe industry-wide shortages of NVIDIA H100 GPUs, NFDG funded the construction of a private supercomputing facility known as the Andromeda Cluster. The initial configuration consisted of approximately 2,512 H100 GPUs and cost on the order of one hundred million dollars including networking, electricity and cooling, at a time when individual H100 chips sold for roughly $30,000 to $40,000 when available at all.[14][21] NFDG made compute time on Andromeda available to its portfolio companies as a competitive advantage during a period when commercial GPU capacity was effectively unobtainable on short timelines. By 2024 the cluster had grown to more than 4,000 GPUs spanning H100, H200 and B200 generations, and was later spun out as a standalone company, Andromeda, which raised $60 million at a reported $1.5 billion valuation with backing from NFDG and Paradigm.[14][22]

By mid-2025 NFDG was reported to have deployed roughly half of its fund, about $550 million, at a paper portfolio value of approximately $2.2 billion, a roughly fourfold appreciation.[7]

Safe Superintelligence (June 2024 - June 2025)

On 19 June 2024 Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, announced on X that he was starting a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. (Safe Superintelligence) with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher.[4] The founding announcement framed the venture around a single mission, stating: "We will pursue safe superintelligence in a straight shot, with one focus, one goal, and one product."[23] The company added that "our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures," a deliberate contrast with the productized strategies of OpenAI, Anthropic and other frontier laboratories.[23][4][5]

SSI established offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. Gross took the role of chief executive officer; Sutskever served as chief scientist and Levy as principal scientist.[4] In September 2024 SSI announced that it had raised approximately one billion dollars from a syndicate including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, SV Angel and NFDG itself, at a valuation reported as five billion dollars.[5][24] In April 2025 the company reached a valuation of approximately thirty-two billion dollars in a two-billion-dollar financing led by Greenoaks Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and DST Global returning, a roughly sixfold revaluation within months.[5][20]

SSI was an unusual frontier-AI startup in two respects. First, it adopted a deliberately small headcount, reported at roughly 20 employees, relying on what Sutskever and Gross described as an exceptionally selective hiring bar focused on a small number of senior researchers and engineers.[4][20] Second, the company committed publicly to not releasing intermediate commercial products, even though most of its peers in the frontier-AI sector funded their compute and research expenses through hosted models, application programming interfaces or consumer products. As CEO, Gross was the executive most regularly identified in press coverage as the public-facing operator of SSI, while Sutskever served as the scientific lead and Levy as a principal researcher.[4][5]

Why did Daniel Gross leave SSI?

In the first half of 2025 Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg approached Sutskever about acquiring SSI outright. Sutskever declined, writing in a public message: "You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us. We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through. We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence."[6][5] After the acquisition was rebuffed Meta turned to recruiting Gross directly, in parallel with separate negotiations to take a position in NFDG.[6][15][17]

On 29 June 2025 Gross departed SSI. Sutskever assumed the chief-executive role and Daniel Levy became president.[6][15] In a public message Gross wrote: "Ilya and Daniel have assembled an incredible team and I'm honored to have been able to assist in getting SSI off the ground. The company's future is very bright, and I expect miracles to follow."[16]

Meta Superintelligence Labs (2025- )

Gross's departure from SSI coincided with his recruitment into Meta's newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a unit Zuckerberg established in 2025 as the centerpiece of an aggressive push to assemble a frontier AI organization at Meta.[6][15] Nat Friedman joined Meta in the same arrangement, and the two were reported as working under Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI co-founder whom Meta had installed as chief AI officer after taking a 49 percent stake in Scale earlier in June 2025.[15][17] Bloomberg reported that Gross would "work on AI products for the superintelligence group at Meta."[25]

As part of the deal, Meta launched a tender offer to purchase up to 49 percent of NFDG's limited-partner positions at full net asset value, a structure that gave NFDG's investors an unusual chance to take liquidity at par on a portfolio that had quadrupled on paper, while granting Meta exposure to NFDG's AI holdings without governance rights over portfolio companies, including SSI.[7][17] The deal was announced on or around 5 July 2025 and was reported to be valued at more than one billion dollars in total.[7][17] Coverage in Bloomberg, Wired, the Wall Street Journal and The Information described it as an unusual "acqui-hire" of an entire venture partnership.[7][17]

The arrangement was part of a broader Meta talent push in mid-2025 that included reported individual compensation packages in excess of one hundred million dollars to attract senior AI researchers and engineers.[15] In parallel with the NFDG transaction, Meta paid approximately fourteen billion dollars for a 49-percent stake in the data-labeling company Scale AI and recruited Scale's co-founder Alexandr Wang to serve as Meta's chief AI officer, anchoring Meta Superintelligence Labs in San Francisco around a combination of new external hires and existing FAIR researchers.[15][17]

Detailed coverage of Gross's specific scope of work inside Meta Superintelligence Labs has been limited, with Meta and the principals declining to disclose titles or reporting lines as of late 2025; press accounts have generally described him and Friedman as senior operators within MSL working under Wang on frontier-model research and infrastructure.[15][17]

Investments and notable angel positions

Outside of Pioneer, NFDG and his operating roles, Gross has been one of the most active individual technology investors of his generation. He began angel investing in 2011, shortly after Greplin's Series A.[1] His personal and NFDG-era portfolio is reported to include:

  • GitHub (acquired by Microsoft, 2018)[1]
  • Coinbase (public, 2021)[1]
  • Instacart (public, 2023)[1]
  • Uber (public, 2019)[1]
  • Figma[1]
  • Pinterest (public, 2019)[1]
  • Cruise[1]
  • Airtable[1]
  • Rippling[1]
  • CoreWeave (public, 2025)[1]
  • Character.AI[1]
  • Perplexity AI (NFDG led a founding round in 2022 and reportedly led a subsequent round in 2024)[1][9]
  • ElevenLabs[14]
  • Granola[7]
  • Basis[7]
  • Pika[14]
  • Pulse (a $3.9 million investment with Friedman, February 2025)[1]

Through these positions and his operational career, Gross has been described by TIME and other publications as a central node of the early-2020s AI investment ecosystem, in part because of NFDG's combination of capital, private compute (the Andromeda Cluster) and unusually direct access to the founders of frontier model laboratories.[9][14] He has also been credited, alongside Friedman, with helping to popularize the practice of "venture compute," VC firms acquiring physical GPU resources and making them available to portfolio companies, a strategy subsequently adopted in various forms by other AI-focused investors as GPU supply tightened in 2023 and 2024.[14]

Gross announced a personal angel-investment vehicle, AI Grant, as a joint initiative with Nat Friedman around 2022. AI Grant offered approximately $250,000 cash investments and compute credits to small teams building AI-native products.[14][26] AI Grant's first two batches were absorbed into NFDG's broader operations as the partnership institutionalized.[1]

Public profile and media

Gross has appeared frequently as a commentator on artificial-intelligence trends, most prominently in a recurring interview series with Nat Friedman on Ben Thompson's Stratechery podcast, where the two discuss the economics of foundation models, compute scarcity and AI strategy at the major laboratories.[18] Their Stratechery episodes have covered topics including the diffusion-model landscape and the launch of products such as GitHub Copilot, the open-source image model Stable Diffusion, DeepSeek's reasoning models, and the OpenAI-SoftBank Stargate compute partnership.[18] He and Friedman have also appeared together at industry events such as Stripe Sessions, where they were interviewed jointly by Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison.[19]

Gross is also active on X (formerly Twitter), where he comments frequently on AI research and startup strategy and is regarded as one of the more widely read individual voices in the technical-investor community. He has not, as of 2026, been publicly associated as a host of any podcast of his own; coverage that has occasionally conflated him with the venture investor Sarah Guo's No Priors podcast is inaccurate.[9]

He was named to TIME's inaugural 2023 list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence, in the "Thinkers" category, and has since been profiled in publications including Bloomberg, Forbes, The Information and The Wall Street Journal in connection with NFDG, SSI and the Meta transaction.[9][7][17]

See also

References

  1. "Daniel Gross (businessman)." *Wikipedia*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gross_(businessman) ↩
  2. Kafka, Peter. "Full transcript: Y Combinator Partner Daniel Gross on Recode Decode." *Recode*, 18 December 2017. https://www.recode.net/2017/12/18/16792200/daniel-gross-y-combinator-partner-recode-decode-startup-funding-apple-cue-greplin-ai-founder ↩
  3. Constine, Josh. "Daniel Gross of Apple leaves to become Y Combinator's newest partner." *TechCrunch*, 10 January 2017. https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/10/daniel-gross-of-apple-leaves-to-become-y-combinators-newest-partner/ ↩
  4. "Safe Superintelligence Inc." *Wikipedia*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Superintelligence_Inc. ↩
  5. Wiggers, Kyle. "Ilya Sutskever will lead Safe Superintelligence following his CEO's exit." *TechCrunch*, 3 July 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-will-lead-safe-superintelligence-following-his-ceos-exit/ ↩
  6. Field, Hayden. "Ilya Sutskever becomes CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta poached Daniel Gross." *CNBC*, 3 July 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-is-ceo-of-safe-superintelligence-after-meta-hired-gross.html ↩
  7. "NFDG: The $1.1B VC Fund That 4X'd in Two Years, Then Got Acquired by Meta." *SaaStr*, July 2025. https://www.saastr.com/the-1-1b-vc-fund-that-4xd-in-two-years-then-got-acquired-by-meta/ ↩
  8. "Meta tried to buy Safe Superintelligence, hired CEO Daniel Gross." *CNBC*, 19 June 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/meta-tried-to-buy-safe-superintelligence-hired-ceo-daniel-gross.html ↩
  9. "Daniel Gross: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023." *TIME*. https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6310591/daniel-gross/ ↩
  10. "Apple pays $40m. for Israeli 21-year-old's app." *The Times of Israel*, October 2013. https://www.timesofisrael.com/apple-pays-40-m-for-israeli-21-year-olds-app/ ↩
  11. Boorstin, Julia. "How This 19-Year-Old Is Taking On Google." *Inc.*, March 2011. https://www.inc.com/articles/2011/03/how-19-year-old-daniel-gross-is-taking-on-google-with-greplin.html ↩
  12. "Apple pays \$40m. for Israeli 21-year-old's app." *The Times of Israel*, October 2013. https://www.timesofisrael.com/apple-pays-40-m-for-israeli-21-year-olds-app/ ↩
  13. Constine, Josh. "Ex-YC partner Daniel Gross rethinks the accelerator." *TechCrunch*, 19 February 2020. https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/19/ex-yc-partner-daniel-gross-rethinks-the-accelerator/ ↩
  14. "Andromeda Cluster: 10 Exaflops* for Startups from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross." Hacker News discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312385 ↩
  15. Mehta, Ivan. "Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross joins Meta's new AI lab." *SiliconANGLE*, 3 July 2025. https://siliconangle.com/2025/07/03/safe-superintelligence-ceo-daniel-gross-joins-metas-new-ai-lab/ ↩
  16. "'I expect miracles': Gross hails Safe Superintelligence's future as he joins Meta." *Calcalist (CTech)*, July 2025. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/4oj53t7pf ↩
  17. "Meta in talks to partially acquire VC fund NFDG, hire Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross for AI shakeup." *Data Center Dynamics*, June 2025. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/meta-in-talks-to-partially-acquire-vc-fund-nfdg-hire-nat-friedman-and-daniel-gross-for-ai-shakeup/ ↩
  18. Thompson, Ben. "Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross." *Stratechery* (topic page). https://stratechery.com/topic/nat-friedman-and-daniel-gross/ ↩
  19. "A conversation with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman." Stripe Sessions 2026. https://stripe.com/sessions/2026/a-conversation-with-daniel ↩
  20. "OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence reportedly valued at $32B." *TechCrunch*, 12 April 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/openai-co-founder-ilya-sutskevers-safe-superintelligence-reportedly-valued-at-32b/ ↩
  21. "Billion-Dollar AI Venture Fund Offers Elusive Nvidia Chips to Win Deals." *The Information*. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/former-github-ceos-novel-investment-offer-to-ai-founders-rare-server-chips ↩
  22. "AI Compute Startup Andromeda Raises $60M At $1.5B Valuation." *Upstarts Media*. https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/andromeda-ai-compute-startup-raises-60m ↩
  23. "Safe Superintelligence Inc." Official announcement, ssi.inc, 19 June 2024. https://ssi.inc/ ↩
  24. "The never-ending AI funding boom: Ilya Sutskever's SSI raises $1B+ as Nvidia invests in two startups." *SiliconANGLE*, 4 September 2024. https://siliconangle.com/2024/09/04/ilya-sutskevers-ssi-raises-1b-nvidia-invests-two-ai-startups/ ↩
  25. "Meta Adds Startup Founder Gross to New AI Superintelligence Lab." *Bloomberg*, 3 July 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-03/meta-hires-researcher-gross-to-join-new-ai-superintelligence-lab ↩
  26. "Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman's AI Grant Approach, Explained." *Capitaly*. https://www.capitaly.vc/blog/daniel-gross-nat-friedman-ai-grant-approach ↩

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