(Bloomberg) — Former Google DeepMind researcher David Silver has raised $1.1 billion for his new company, Ineffable Intelligence, in the latest example of an artificial intelligence startup securing enormous funds out of the gate.
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Venture firms Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners led the seed financing round that gives the London-based company a $5.1 billion valuation. Nvidia Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Index Ventures also participated alongside several other investors, including the British government.
In a statement, the startup said it will build on Silver’s research specialization, reinforcement learning, where AI agents make decisions based on trial and error. The company said its lofty goal is to create a “superlearner” — an AI system that can teach itself without having to rely on data generated by humans.
“If successful, this will represent a scientific breakthrough of comparable magnitude to Darwin,” the company said in its mission statement.
Investors have flocked to back a new generation of AI labs founded by marquee computer scientists pursuing novel methods to push the field ahead. The appetite is so strong that many financial backers are willing to plow money into months-old ventures that don’t have a product, let alone a business plan.
So-called neolabs have raised billions since the beginning of this year, with Ineffable Intelligence’s round ranking among the largest for a new company. Former Meta Platforms Inc. chief scientist Yann LeCun raised $1 billion for his new startup, AMI Labs. Researcher Richard Socher has also held funding talks with investors for his own lab at a $4 billion valuation.
Silver was a central figure behind the development of DeepMind’s AlphaGo, the first AI system to beat a human world champion in the ancient Chinese game of Go. The milestone touched off a new wave of AI development and reinforced the theory that the technology could advance to solve highly complex problems.
Silver is also a professor at University College London. His new company won the financial support of the British Business Bank and Sovereign AI, a £500 million ($678 million) fund the UK government recently formed to back startups in the sector.
