Daniel Gross (entrepreneur)

Daniel Gross is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Cue, led artificial intelligence efforts at Apple, served as a partner at Y Combinator, and is a notable technology investor in companies like Uber, Instacart, Figma, GitHub, Airtable, Rippling, CoreWeave, Character.ai, Perplexity.ai, and others.

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.

Time 100 has listed Gross as one of the "Most Influential People in AI".

Career
Gross was born in Jerusalem, Israel in 1991. In 2010, Gross was accepted into the Y Combinator program. At the time, he was the youngest founder ever accepted. Gross launched Greplin (later renamed Cue).

In 2011 Forbes named Gross one of "30 Under 30" in the "Pioneers in Technology" category. In 2011, Business Insider named Gross one of the "25 under 25" in Silicon Valley, and in 2014, the site named him one of "30 under 30 Influential Young People in Tech".

Cue
In 2010, Gross launched Greplin, a search engine 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.

In 2012 the company renamed itself to "Cue" and launched additional predictive search features. In 2013, Apple acquired Cue for an undisclosed amount reported to be between $40 million and $60 million.

Y Combinator
In 2017, Gross joined Y Combinator as a partner, where he focused on artificial intelligence, creating a dedicated "YC AI" program.

Pioneer
In August 2018, Gross created Pioneer, an early-stage, remote startup accelerator and fund, focused on finding talented and ambitious people around the world.

AI Grant & Andromeda
In 2021, Gross and Nat Friedman started making significant investments in the AI space, as well as running a program that gives $250,000 in funding to AI-native companies called AI Grant. In 2023, they deployed the Andromeda Cluster, a supercomputer cluster consisting of 2,512 H100s GPUs for use by startups in their portfolio.