Daniel Gross

Daniel Gross co-founded Greplin, a search engine for a person's own online accounts, through Y Combinator in 2010. Renamed Cue, it was bought by Apple in October 2013, and Gross spent the next years at Apple as a director working on machine learning, including features that pulled contact details out of email into iOS apps. In January 2017 Gross became a Y Combinator partner and that March announced YC's first industry track, for AI startups, with cloud GPU credits and office hours with machine learning researchers.

As an investor, usually alongside former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Gross backed companies including Perplexity, Character.ai and ElevenLabs. In 2023 the two built the Andromeda Cluster, about 2,500 Nvidia H100 GPUs that they rented to startups in their portfolio. TIME put Gross on its first list of the 100 most influential people in AI that September.

In June 2024 Gross co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy and served as its CEO. Announcing the 1 billion dollar round in September 2024, Gross said the mission was "to make a straight shot to safe superintelligence and in particular to spend a couple of years doing R&D on our product before bringing it to market." In June 2025 CNBC reported, citing unnamed sources, that Meta had tried to buy SSI, that Sutskever had refused, and that Mark Zuckerberg then recruited Gross and Friedman, with Meta taking a stake in their fund. Gross's last day at SSI was 29 June 2025. Gross wrote that the company's "future is very bright, and I expect miracles to follow." Sutskever gave his side in November 2025: "Meta came in and offered to acquire us, and I said no. But my former cofounder in some sense said yes." In January 2026 Zuckerberg named Gross co-leader, with Santosh Janardhan, of Meta Compute, with responsibility for long-term capacity planning, supplier strategy and the business modeling of Meta's data centers.