Former Deepmind star lands $1.1bn backing for AI startup
An ex-Google DeepMind researcher has secured one of Europe’s largest AI funding rounds, as investors race to back a new generation of frontier labs beyond large language models (LLMs).
David Silver has raised $1.1bn (£880m) for his London-based startup Ineffable Intelligence at a valuation of $5.1bn, in a round led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with backing from Nvidia, Google and Index Ventures.
The deal has been secured amid growing investor appetite for so-called “neolabs”, AI startups founded by leading researchers aiming to push beyond current models into more advanced forms of machine intelligence.
Silver, who has also been shortlisted for entrepreneur of the year at the CityAM Awards, is one of several high-profile figures leaving established labs to launch independent ventures.
‘Beyond Chatgpt’
His new company is focused on reinforcement learning, a method where AI systems learn through trial and error rather than relying on large datasets of human-generated content.
“Human data is like a kind of fossil fuel that has provided an amazing shortcut,” Silver said. “You can think of systems that learn for themselves as a renewable fuel – something that can just learn and learn and learn forever.”
This approach contrasts with the dominant strategy behind models such as ChatGPT and Gemini, which are trained on vast amounts of human text.
“I think of our mission as making first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said, adding that such systems could eventually “discover new forms of science or technology or government or economics for itself.”
The startup plans to develop ‘superlearners’, which are AI agents trained in simulated environments capable of developing new capabilities independently of human input.
Ravi Mhatre, partner at Lightspeed, said Silver’s career “is basically a single, coherent argument for being able to scale intelligence without human priors.”
Sonya Huang, partner at Sequoia, added: “There’s only a very, very small number – less than a handful of people – who have done truly foundational work. Dave [Silver] is one of them.”