British AI Pioneer Raises $1B
A new startup from British AI pioneer David Silver has raised $1 billion in Europe's largest-ever seed funding round. The company's stated goal is to build "superhuman intelligence." The funding reflects a global surge in AI investment and the increasing convergence of fintech, AI, and infrastructure.
- Before founding his new company, Ineffable Intelligence, David Silver was a principal research scientist at Google DeepMind. There, he led the teams that created AlphaGo, the first AI to beat a professional Go player, and AlphaZero, which taught itself to master Go, chess, and shogi without human data. - The $1 billion seed round for Ineffable Intelligence is reportedly led by Sequoia Capital and is expected to value the pre-product startup at around $4 billion. Other potential investors in the round include Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft. - Silver's new venture is centered on reinforcement learning, a method where AI learns through trial and error rather than from pre-existing datasets. This approach contrasts with the large language models (LLMs) that power most current commercial AI systems. - The startup, which was incorporated in November 2025, is based in London and is actively recruiting AI researchers. Silver officially became a director in January 2026 after a sabbatical from DeepMind. - This funding round marks a significant increase in the scale of seed investments in Europe. For comparison, in 2025, the largest European tech seed round was $70 million. - The investment in Ineffable Intelligence is part of a larger trend of nine and ten-figure funding rounds for AI companies. In 2024, AI-related companies accounted for nearly a third of all global venture funding. - Silver's work at DeepMind extended beyond games to scientific discovery. The principles developed for AlphaGo and AlphaZero were influential in the creation of AlphaFold, which has made significant breakthroughs in predicting protein structures.
