British AI trailblazer raising $1bn for three-month-old start-up
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ThePostMaster- 0
- 7 minutes read
A British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher is in talks to raise $1bn (£740m) for his three-month-old start-up in what would be one of the biggest ever venture funding rounds in Europe.
Prof David Silver, a former scientist at Google’s DeepMind lab, is close to raising hundreds of millions of pounds for his new business, Ineffable Intelligence, from investors including Silicon Valley fund Sequoia.
The deal would be the largest “seed” investment – a start-up’s first equity funding round – of any British company on record. It is expected to value Ineffable at $4bn, the Financial Times reported.
Prof Silver, a research scientist at University College London, joined DeepMind shortly after it was launched in 2010 and is a friend of Sir Demis Hassabis, its founder and chief executive.
He led some of its work on AlphaGo, an AI programme that made history in 2016 by beating Lee Se-dol, the top player of the ancient Chinese strategy game, at Go.
The game was seen as a particularly difficult challenge for AI to master, given its complexity and vast numbers of potential moves and strategies.
Prof Silver, 49, was also one of the DeepMind experts who helped to develop Google’s Gemini AI tool, which is a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
AI experts have been hot property amongst technology investors chasing the next breakthrough after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. A handful of AI researchers who helped to set up OpenAI or other labs have raised billions of dollars to develop new products.
Mira Murati, a former OpenAI executive, raised $2bn in 2025 just months after launching her start-up, Thinking Machines.
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former technology chief, has raised $3bn for a new AI lab since leaving the ChatGPT developer in 2024.
The funding round for Ineffable Intelligence would make Prof Silver’s start-up one of the best-funded British start-ups in the AI business. The company was founded on Nov 19 last year, according to Companies House filings, making it just three months old.
Prof Silver was one of the pioneers of so-called “reinforcement learning”, which uses feedback from human trainers or simulations to improve AI bots.
According to the Financial Times, Microsoft, Nvidia and Google have also held talks to invest in Prof Silver’s business.
In a research note published by Prof Silver last year, he predicted that AI tools would soon begin to learn from their own “experience”, which could “unlock unprecedented capabilities”.
He added that this method of learning would help to “eclipse the scale and quality of human-generated data”, as AI labs had struggled to obtain enough high-quality information to improve their bots.
