Ex-DeepMind David Silver raises $1.1 billion for AI startup Ineffable
DeepMind, a former senior researcher at Google’s AI division, announced Monday that it has raised a record $1.1 billion seed round for its months-old startup Ineffective Intelligence.
The startup is pursuing superintelligence and was founded in late 2025 by UCL professor and former leader of DeepMind’s reinforcement learning team, David Silver. According to the company, the seed round is the largest in Europe with a valuation of $5.1 billion.
The round was co-led by US venture capitalists Sequoia and Lightspeed and NvidiaDST Global, Index, Google and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund, among others.
Ineffective Intelligence will focus on reinforcement learning, where AI models learn from experience rather than human data. This compares with many leading AI models trained on Internet texts.
Silver said the company aims to “surpass the greatest inventions in human history, such as language, science, mathematics and technology.”
“Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement.
“We are creating a super learner who discovers all knowledge from his own experience, from basic motor skills to deep intellectual breakthroughs,” he added.
Big Tech talent exodus fuels startup boom
Silver is one of several former top researchers at Big Tech companies that have moved 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 was launched, founded by former Google DeepMind engineer Tim Rocktäschel. reported It will be raised to $1 billion by the Financial Times. AMI Labs announced a $1 billion raise in March, months after founder Yann LeCun announced he was stepping down. MetaAI chief.
Last year, former employees of OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors for months-old startups, including AI labs Periodic Labs and Humans&.
“This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the cutting edge of AI that has the potential to transform entire sectors and underlines our determination to ensure the UK becomes an AI producer, not just a buyer of AI,” UK Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said in a statement.
