Andrew Dai spent 14 years at Google DeepMind helping build some of the foundational research that eventually informed systems like ChatGPT. Now he’s betting that the entire AI industry has been looking at intelligence through the wrong lens, literally.
His new startup, Elorian AI, just emerged from stealth with $55 million in seed funding at a $300 million post-money valuation. The round was co-led by Striker Ventures and Menlo Ventures, with Altimeter Capital, NVIDIA, and former Google Senior Fellow Jeff Dean also participating.
What Elorian actually does
Here’s the core thesis: most AI systems today, even the ones that can “see,” process visual information by first translating it into text. Think of it like someone describing a painting to you over the phone versus actually looking at it yourself. You lose spatial relationships, physical context, and the kind of intuitive reasoning that humans do effortlessly when they look at the world.
Elorian wants to build AI that reasons natively in the visual medium. No text intermediary. No lossy translation step.
