Daniel Gross

Daniel Gross is an Israeli-American businessman 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 such as Uber, Instacart, Figma, GitHub, Airtable, Rippling, CoreWeave, Character.ai, Perplexity AI, and others. In June 2024, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Career Cue and Apple (2010–2016) Gross was born in Jerusalem in 1991. Raised as what he describes as an Orthodox Jew, he expected to lead a traditional religious life somewhere in Israel. While attending a mechina before his IDF enlistment, he applied to Y Combinator on a whim, and at the time, he was the youngest founder ever accepted.

Gross launched Greplin, a search engine, and Business Insider named Gross one of the "25 under 25" in Silicon Valley.

In 2012 Greplin renamed itself Cue and launched additional predictive search features. The company raised $10 million in November 2012 from Index Ventures. Cue was shut down by Apple shortly after the purchase. Gross then joined Apple as a director focused on machine learning. In 2014, Forbes named him one of "30 under 30 Influential Young People in Tech".

Y Combinator and Pioneer (2017–2018) In 2017, Gross joined Y Combinator as a partner, where he focused on artificial intelligence. He created a dedicated "YC AI" program, starting Y-Combinator's AI program.

AI investing (2021–2025) 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. The project cost around $100 million, including electricity and cooling,

In 2023, Time 100 listed Gross as one of the "Most Influential People in AI". 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.

Gross and Nat Friedman also founded NFDG, a venture capital firm that by 2024 had invested in companies such as Safe Superintelligence. Gross and Friedman invested $3.9 million in the AI company Pulse in February 2025.

In July 2025 Gross left Safe Superintelligence to join Meta Superintelligence Labs.