A former top researcher at Google AI division DeepMind on Monday announced a record $1.1 billion seed round for his months-old startup Ineffable Intelligence.
The startup is pursuing superintelligence and was founded in late 2025 by David Silver, a UCL professor and former head of DeepMind’s reinforcement learning team. According to the company, the seed round is the largest ever in Europe, valued at $5.1 billion.
The round was co-led by US venture capitalists Sequoia and Lightspeed, with participation from NVIDIADST Global, Index, Google and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund, among others.
Infinite Intelligence will focus on reinforcement learning, which is when AI models learn from experience as opposed to human data. This is compared to several leading AI models that are trained on Internet text.
Silver said the company’s goal is to “transcend the greatest inventions in human history such as language, science, mathematics and technology.”
“Our mission is to make first contact with a superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement.
“We are building a superlearner who draws on experience to learn everything from early motor skills to profound intellectual breakthroughs,” he said.
Big Tech brain drain fuels startup boom
Silver is one of several former top researchers at Big Tech companies who have leapt to launch their own AI labs in recent months, with investors pouring billions of dollars into the ventures.
Last week, a month-old startup called Recursive Superintelligence — founded by former Google DeepMind engineer Tim Rocktashell — was informed Up to $1 billion will be raised, according to the Financial Times. AMI Labs announced it was raising $1 billion in March, just months after its founder Yann LeCun announced he was leaving his role. metaAI chief of.
In the past year, former employees of OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic and xAI have also raised hundreds of millions of rupees from investors for months-old ventures, including AI labs Periodic Labs and Humans End.
“This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the forefront of AI with the potential to transform entire sectors, underscoring our determination to ensure the UK is not just an AI taker but an AI maker,” UK Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said in a statement.
