Ex‑Meta and Google staff launching AI startups
- CNBC reported Tuesday that former researchers from Meta, Google DeepMind and OpenAI are leaving elite AI teams to launch startups and raise giant rounds. - David Silver’s months-old Ineffable Intelligence announced a $1.1 billion seed Monday, while Tim Rocktäschel’s Recursive Superintelligence is reportedly raising up to $1 billion. - Venture funding is surging into new AI labs founded since 2025, with $18.8 billion invested this year. (cnbc.com)
Top researchers from Meta, Google DeepMind and OpenAI are leaving big labs to start their own AI companies, and investors are writing unusually large checks. (cnbc.com) CNBC reported Tuesday that many of those startups are raising hundreds of millions of dollars within months of being founded. Dealroom data cited by CNBC says investors have put $18.8 billion into AI startups founded since the start of 2025. (cnbc.com) The most concrete example this week is Ineffable Intelligence, founded in late 2025 by former DeepMind reinforcement-learning lead David Silver. The company announced a $1.1 billion seed round on April 27 at a $5.1 billion valuation. (cnbc.com) Silver’s backers include Sequoia, Lightspeed, Nvidia, Google, DST Global, Index and the U.K. Sovereign AI Fund. Silver said the lab is building a system that learns from experience rather than mainly from human-written internet text. (cnbc.com) Another example is Recursive Superintelligence, a startup founded in December 2025 by Richard Socher, Tim Rocktäschel, Josh Tobin, Jeff Clune and Tim Shi. The Financial Times reported it raised at least $500 million at a $4 billion pre-money valuation, with GV leading and Nvidia participating. (techfundingnews.com) (the-decoder.com) Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs is another sign of the shift. TechCrunch reported in March that the startup LeCun co-founded after leaving Meta raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation to build “world models,” or systems meant to learn from real-world data. (techcrunch.com) Other young labs are also commanding high prices before shipping mature products. Bloomberg reported in March that Periodic Labs, founded by former OpenAI and DeepMind staffers, was discussing a new round at about a $7 billion valuation. (bloomberg.com) Humans&, founded by researchers from Google, Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI and Meta, announced a $480 million seed round in January at a $4.48 billion valuation. TechCrunch said the company was only a few months old at the time. (techcrunch.com) (crunchbase.com) The backdrop is a market already awash in capital for frontier AI. OpenAI said on March 31 that it closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion post-money valuation, and Google said on April 24 that it plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic. (openai.com) (cnbc.com) That money is reshaping hiring inside the incumbents too. Meta said on April 23 that it will cut 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 employees, while continuing to ramp up spending on artificial intelligence. (cnbc.com) The result is a new layer of AI labs between Big Tech and the broader startup market: small teams, famous résumés, and funding rounds that now look like late-stage financings. (cnbc.com)
