Former DeepMind researcher founded Ineffable and completed a $1.1 billion seed funding round, with a valuation exceeding $5 billion just months after its establishment.

The former top researcher of Google's artificial intelligence department DeepMind announced on Monday that its newly established startup Ineffable Intelligence has received a record-breaking $1.1 billion seed funding. This startup is dedicated to pursuing superintelligence, founded by David Silva, a professor at University College London (UCL) and former head of the DeepMind reinforcement learning team, at the end of 2025. According to the company, this seed funding round is the largest in European history, with a valuation of $51 billion. The funding round was led by US venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed, with participation from Nvidia, DST Global, Index, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, among others. Ineffable Intelligence will focus on reinforcement learning, where artificial intelligence models learn from their own experiences rather than human data. In contrast, many leading AI models are currently trained on internet text. Silva stated, "Our goal is to 'break through' the greatest inventions in human history, such as language, science, mathematics, and technology." He added, "We are creating a 'superlearner' that can discover all knowledge from its own experiences, from basic motor skills to profound intellectual breakthroughs." AI sector sees a wave of "big factory resignations" Silva is one of several top researchers who have left major tech companies in recent months to establish their own AI labs, with investors pouring billions of dollars into these startups. Startup Recursive Superintelligence, founded by former Google DeepMind engineer Tim Rocktschel, is raising up to $1 billion in funding. In March of this year, AMI Labs announced a $100 million funding round, and just a few months ago, its founder Yann LeCun resigned from his position as Chief AI Scientist at Meta. In the past year, former employees of OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors for their newly established startups, including AI lab Periodic Labs and Humans&. UK Science and Technology Minister Liz Kendall said in a statement, "This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the forefront of AI with the potential to revolutionize the entire industry, demonstrating our determination to ensure that the UK is not just a user of AI, but a creator of AI."