Capital injection: AI startup of an ex-deepmind researcher raises $1.1 billion

As head of Deepmind’s reinforcement learning team, David Silver has been a leader in the development of programs like Alphazero in Google’s AI factory in recent years. These programs beat professional players in games like chess or Go. They learned the rules of the game and the best strategies primarily through trial and error.

1.1 billion just months after launch

According to a Fortune report, Silver left Deepmind in January 2026 to found his own AI startup and raise seed capital. With success, as it turns out. Because Silver’s British startup Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion in its first round of financing, as CNBC writes.

According to Ineffable Intelligence, this was the largest seed round for such a young startup in Europe. Right off the bat, the valuation shot up to 5.1 billion. The US venture capital firms Sequoia and Lightspeed took part in the financing round. In addition, Nvidia and Google, among others, also invested money in the new company.

Focus on reinforcement learning

Like Silver at Deepmind, Ineffable Intelligence will focus on so-called reinforcement learning when developing new AI models. Unlike most of the currently leading models, the intention is to deliberately avoid feeding in human data, as CNBC says. Instead, the AI ​​tools should learn from experience, i.e. through trial and error.

Silver explained that his company’s goal is to “exceed the greatest inventions in human history, such as language, science, mathematics and technology.” The mission of Ineffable Intelligence is to “make the first contact with a superintelligence,” said Silver.

Several top AI researchers are founding AI startups

The former Deepmind researcher is now just one of several top experts from large tech companies who have founded their own AI startups in recent months and raised billions of dollars from investors. Tim Rocktäschel, who also previously worked at Deepmind, was only promised up to one billion dollars for his startup Recursive Superintelligence in mid-April 2026.

Other AI startups that were founded in recent months by former high-ranking employees of Deepmind, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic or xAI include AMI Labs, Periodic Labs and Humans&. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also founded an AI startup, Project Prometheus, in mid-November 2025.