{"id":423523,"date":"2026-04-29T14:22:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/423523\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T14:22:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:22:23","slug":"ex-google-ai-scientist-wins-1-1-billion-for-new-london-start-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/423523\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Google AI scientist wins $1.1 billion for new London start-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

A four-month-old London-based AI start-up has completed Europe\u2019s largest seed funding round at a valuation of $5.1 billion.<\/p>\n

Ineffable Intelligence, founded by David Silver in January, has raised $1.1 billion to pursue its ambition of creating a \u201csuperlearner\u201d<\/a> that can learn for itself rather than rely on human data.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s new Sovereign AI Fund has backed the company alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed, Nvidia and EQT. The British Business Bank also participated in the funding round.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Silver is a professor at University College London and a former lead of Google DeepMind\u2019s<\/a> reinforcement learning team.<\/p>\n

Reinforcement learning is a method for training AI systems through trial and error, where the model learns to achieve a goal by receiving rewards or penalties for its actions in a structured environment. Using this technique, Silver led the development of Alpha Go, the first AI system to defeat a world champion at the game Go.<\/p>\n

Ineffable Intelligence, which is pre-revenue, hopes to develop an AI model that will be able to learn purely from its experiences, unlike other AI models which are trained on enormous sets of human-generated data.<\/p>\n

Silver said: \u201cWe are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis superlearning capability \u2014 the ability to endlessly discover knowledge and skills, without relying on human data \u2014 will be driven by the world\u2019s most powerful reinforcement learning algorithms. The superlearner is expected to rediscover and then transcend the greatest inventions in human history, such as language, science, mathematics and technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Silver has also committed to give away all the money made from his equity stake in Ineffable via Founders Pledge, a charity that encourages entrepreneurs to donate a portion of their proceeds to charity. This is likely to amount to multiple billions, the company said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

David Goldberg, Founders Pledge\u2019s president and founder, said: \u201cThis is the largest pledge in Founders Pledge\u2019s history and a powerful example of what\u2019s possible when founders engage with philanthropy at scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ineffable Intelligence\u2019s funding round is the latest example of leading AI researchers starting their own ventures outside of big tech firms. Tim Rockt\u00e4schel, a former DeepMind researcher, recently launched Recursive Superintelligence which raised $500 million this month. Yann LeCun, formerly Meta\u2019s chief AI scientist, announced a $1 billion raise for his new venture AMI Labs in March.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ineffable Intelligence is the second company to receive investment from the Sovereign AI Fund, which was launched this month to invest in British AI companies.<\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9phine Kant, head of ventures at the Sovereign AI Unit, said: \u201cIneffable is being built in the UK \u2014 and that matters. Our job at Sovereign AI is to make sure founders with this level of ambition never have to choose between it and their home \u2014 backing them with the speed of venture and the strength of a nation, and standing behind them for the long term as they build category-defining companies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, said: \u201cThis 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 that the UK isn\u2019t just an AI taker but an AI maker.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A four-month-old London-based AI start-up has completed Europe\u2019s largest seed funding round at a valuation of $5.1 billion.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-423523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}