On April 27, 2026, David Silver, former lead researcher at Google DeepMind, announced that his AI lab Ineffable Intelligence has raised $1.1 billion in seed funding, setting a new record for European seed rounds. The funding values the company at $5.1 billion.

Ineffable Intelligence was co-founded by Silver in late 2025. Silver previously led DeepMind’s reinforcement learning team and was a core researcher behind milestone projects including AlphaGo. The round was co-led by U.S. venture capital firms Sequoia and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the U.K.’s Sovereign AI Fund.

The company will focus on reinforcement learning — training AI models to learn from experience rather than human-curated data. This contrasts sharply with the dominant approach of training large language models on internet text. Silver stated: “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence. We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.”

Silver added that the company aims to “transcend the greatest inventions in human history, such as language, science, mathematics and technology.”

Ineffable Intelligence’s massive raise is part of a broader exodus of top AI researchers from Big Tech. In recent weeks, Recursive Superintelligence — founded by former DeepMind engineer Tim Rocktäschel — has reportedly been raising up to $1 billion. In March, AMI Labs, founded by Yann LeCun after he stepped down as Meta’s AI chief, announced a $1 billion raise. Former staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI have also raised hundreds of millions for new ventures in the past year.

U.K. Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall issued a statement: “This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors, underlining our determination to ensure the UK isn’t just an AI taker but an AI maker.”

Analysts note that Ineffable Intelligence’s emergence signals the accelerating trend of brain drain from established AI labs to founder-led ventures, with investors willing to deploy unprecedented capital at the seed stage in pursuit of artificial general intelligence.

Source: CNBC, Reuters