A leading British scientist is reportedly raising $1 billion for a company aiming to build superhuman intelligence in a deal that would be the largest ever European seed round.

David Silver, 49, a former artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind, is seeking backing for his London-based startup, Ineffable Intelligence, which aims to build AI that learns for itself to solve problems that humans cannot.

The seed round is being led by Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and would value the company at around $4 billion before the new investment, according to the Financial Times. US technology giants Nvidia, Google and Microsoft are also reportedly in talks to invest.

Technology firms are racing to build superhuman intelligence, a theoretical milestone where machines could surpass human performance.

In an academic paper co-authored by Silver last year, the scientist, who is also a professor at University College London, argued that we “stand on the threshold of a new era in artificial intelligence that promises to achieve an unprecedented level of ability”.

He argued that AI has made huge strides in recent years by training on large amounts of human-generated data. However, he wrote that in key areas such as mathematics, coding and science, the knowledge extracted from human data “is rapidly approaching a limit”.

For AI development to take the next leap forward towards superhuman intelligence, he argued, a new source of data will be required that can be achieved by allowing agents to generate new data by interacting with their environment, or, in other words, by learning continually from their own experience.

• AI voice company ElevenLabs valued at $11bn after latest fundraise

Silver was one of DeepMind’s first employees when the AI research company was founded in 2010. He met DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, now knighted, when they were both students at the University of Cambridge.

“Dave and I have got a long history together,” Hassabis told The Guardian in an interview in 2016. “We used to dream about doing this [creating powerful AIs] in our lifetimes, so our 19-year-old selves would probably have been very relieved that we got here.”

After Cambridge, Silver co-founded the video game company Elixir Studios in 1998. He later returned to academia and earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Alberta in 2009.

At DeepMind, Silver played a leading role in breakthroughs including with AlphaGo, demonstrating in 2016 that an AI programme could beat the world’s best human players at Go, the ancient strategy game. He has won a roster of awards including the Marvin Minsky Medal for outstanding achievements in artificial intelligence in 2018, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Princess Royal Silver Medal for an outstanding contribution to UK engineering and the Mensa Foundation Prize for best scientific discovery in the field of AI in 2017.

• AI can be naughty or nice, but what is it actually thinking?

Investors have shown increasing willingness to back the world’s most talented AI researchers, even before they have developed a finished product.

Other leading AI researchers who have left big technology firms to pursue superhuman intelligence with venture capital backing include Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist and founder at OpenAI, who founded Safe Superintelligence in 2024 and has raised $3 billion. The company was valued at $32 billion in April 2025.

If Ineffable Intelligence closes a funding round at $1 billion, it would be a powerful signal that London can compete with San Francisco to produce some of the most promising AI startups in the world.