A former core researcher from Google's DeepMind announced on Monday that his new AI laboratory has secured a record-breaking $11 billion in seed funding. The new company, Ineffable Intelligence, has received backing from Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, NVIDIA, Google, and other institutions, concluding its stealth operation phase with a post-investment valuation of $51 billion. David Silver has become one of the latest top scientists to depart major tech firms in recent months to establish independent AI labs.
A former core researcher from Google's artificial intelligence unit DeepMind announced this Monday that his startup, Ineffable Intelligence, founded just months ago, has completed a seed funding round of $11 billion, setting an industry record. The company was established in late 2025 by David Silver, a University College London professor and former head of DeepMind's reinforcement learning team, with the core objective of developing superintelligent AI. The company stated this funding round represents the largest seed financing in European history, valuing the enterprise at $51 billion. This investment was co-led by US venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from NVIDIA, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK National Sovereign AI Fund, among other institutions. Ineffable Intelligence will primarily focus on the reinforcement learning approach: enabling AI models to learn autonomously through their own experiences rather than relying on human-annotated data. This stands in sharp contrast to the current mainstream approach of training large models on vast amounts of internet text. Silver stated the company's vision is to "transcend the boundaries of all great inventions in human history, including language, science, mathematics, and technology." He declared in a statement: "Our mission is to be the first to reach and achieve superintelligence." "We are building super autonomous learners that, from basic action capabilities to high-level cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, will explore and acquire all knowledge entirely through their own experiences."
The brain drain from tech giants is fueling an AI startup boom. In recent months, numerous top AI talents from major technology companies have left to establish independent laboratories, with capital continuously flowing into such startups, often involving single funding rounds of billions of dollars. Silver is a representative figure in this trend. Just last week, the Financial Times reported that Recursive Superintelligence, an AI company founded just months ago by former DeepMind engineer Tim Rocktäschel, was raising up to $10 billion. In March this year, AMI Labs completed a $10 billion funding round; its founder is Yann LeCun, who resigned as AI chief from metaverse giant Meta Platforms, Inc. Over the past year, core team members from OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI have departed to establish new AI laboratories such as Periodic Labs and Humans &, with fundraising typically reaching hundreds of millions of dollars in short periods.
UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall commented on this investment round: "This investment in Ineffable Intelligence will support the development of this company at the forefront of artificial intelligence, whose technology has the potential to reshape entire industries. It also demonstrates the UK's strategic determination: not merely to passively apply AI technology, but to become a global hub for core AI research, development, and innovation output."
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