David Silver raises $1.1B for AI that learns without human data, challenging LLM dominance

DeepMind's David Silver just raised $1.1B to build an AI that learns without human data | TechCrunch

Ineffable Intelligence, a British AI lab founded a mere few months ago by former DeepMind researcher David Silver, has raised $1.1 billion in funding at a valuation of $5.1 billion to join the race for novel AI models that could outperform large language models. According to its newly launched site, Ineffable aims to create a "superlearner" capable of discovering knowledge and skills without relying on human data by leveraging reinforcement learning -- a technique in which AI systems learn through trial and error rather than studying human-generated examples. This is Silver's area of expertise. A professor at University College London, Silver was until recently leading the reinforcement learning team at Google-owned DeepMind, where he spent more than a decade before leaving to found this new venture. While at DeepMind, Silver was involved in developing programs that beat professional players at chess and the board game Go games by learning purely from experience, without being fed human strategies or game records -- defeating the world's top computer programs in each game. The most notable of these was AlphaZero. Similarly, Ineffable Intelligence hopes that its superlearner will discover all knowledge from its own experience. Its superlearner may lack experience, but the company doesn't lack ambition. "If successful, this will represent a scientific breakthrough of comparable magnitude to Darwin: where his law explained all Life, our law will explain and build all Intelligence," its site claims (capitals included). Referring to Ineffable Intelligence as "his life's work" in a personal note he has since published on the company's blog, Silver also told Wired that "any money that I make from Ineffable will go to high-impact charities that save as many lives as possible." It is unclear how, when or how much the venture will make money, but this clearly hasn't hindered fundraising. According to Wired, the round was led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Index Ventures, Google, Nvidia, and others. Among those other investors are the British Business Bank and Sovereign AI, the U.K.'s recently launched sovereign venture fund for AI. Fast-forwarding to so-called pentacorn status -- meaning companies valued at more than $5 billion -- Ineffable Intelligence joins the club of AI ventures founded by star researchers whose names have attracted seed rounds so large they have been nicknamed coconut rounds (a tongue-in-cheek escalation of the "seed" round). Just last month, AMI Labs, co-founded by Turing Award winner and former Meta AI scientist Yann LeCun, raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. There might be more companies in this mold. Recursive Superintelligence, cofounded by DeepMind's former principal scientist Tim Rocktäschel and incorporated in the U.K., reportedly raised $500 million, with enough demand to stretch that amount to $1 billion. While Recursive also has ties to the U.S., these companies suggest mounting momentum around London as an AI hub. This is partly thanks to DeepMind's continued presence after its acquisition by Google in 2014. But it is not just DeepMind. Jeff Bezos' AI lab, Project Prometheus, is reportedly in talks to secure office space close to Google's AI hub. This also translates into a powerful network of alumni, with several former DeepMind staffers reportedly set to join Ineffable's executive team.

UK-based AI startup Ineffable raises $1.1 billion in Europe's largest seed financing

LONDON, April 27 (Reuters) - UK-based Ineffable Intelligence, founded by former DeepMind researcher David Silver, has raised $1.1 billion in a seed funding round led by U.S. venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed, with backing from the British government. The round - Europe's largest seed financing to date - included participation from Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, and values Ineffable at $5.1 billion, the company said on Monday. The ⁠British government said its Sovereign AI initiative and the British Business Bank will co-invest in Ineffable as it seeks to strengthen domestic artificial intelligence capabilities in the global race for the technology. Separately, the British Business Bank said it had invested $20 million in Ineffable, adding to an AI portfolio that includes nine investments over the past 12 months, among them Wayve ⁠and PolyAI. Ineffable, led by Silver - one of the world's most prominent AI researchers and a professor at University College London - aims to build a "superlearner" that discovers knowledge through its own experience, from ⁠basic motor skills to intellectual breakthroughs, without relying on human-generated data. "We believe in this nation's entrepreneurs and innovators and we are backing ⁠them to seize the benefits of AI for the UK," technology minister Liz Kendall said in the government's ⁠statement. "This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors." Reporting by Muvija M. Editing by Mark Potter Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Former Google DeepMind researcher's AI startup raises record $1.1 billion seed funding to pursue superintelligence

A former top researcher at Google AI division DeepMind announced Monday a record $1.1 billion seed round for his months-old startup Ineffable Intelligence. The startup is pursuing superintelligence and was founded in late 2025 by UCL professor and former lead of DeepMind's reinforcement learning team David Silver. The seed round is the largest ever in Europe, according to the company, amounting to a valuation of $5.1 billion. The round was co-led by U.S. venture capitalists Sequoia and Lightspeed, with participation from Nvidia, DST Global, Index, Google and the UK's Sovereign AI Fund, among others. Ineffable Intelligence will focus on reinforcement learning, which is when AI models learn from experience as opposed to human data. That compares to many leading AI models that are trained on Internet text. Silver said the company is aiming to "transcend the greatest inventions in human history, such as language, science, mathematics and technology." "Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence," said Silver in a statement. "We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs," he added.

Sequoia and Nvidia back David Silver's Ineffable Intelligence at $5.1B

A London startup betting that reinforcement learning, not LLMs, is the path to superintelligence Silver left Google DeepMind in late 2025 after more than a decade building AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaStar, and contributing to Gemini. Ineffable Intelligence was incorporated in November 2025 and has no product, no revenue, and no public roadmap. What it has is a thesis, and a founder whose track record is worth a billion dollars to investors on conviction alone. Ineffable Intelligence, the London-based AI startup founded by David Silver, the British researcher who led the creation of AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and AlphaStar at Google DeepMind, has been backed by Sequoia Capital and Nvidia at a valuation of $5.1 billion. The round, one of the largest ever raised by a startup at such an early stage, was led by Sequoia, with Sequoia managing partner Alfred Lin and partner Sonya Huang having flown to London personally to meet Silver and secure the deal. Nvidia's venture arm contributed at least $250 million. The financing values a company incorporated in November 2025 with no product, no revenue, and no public roadmap at more than five billion dollars. Silver spent more than a decade at Google DeepMind, where his contributions define the modern history of AI. AlphaGo, released in 2016, was the first AI system to defeat a professional Go player without handicap, and then, in Seoul, defeated 18-time world champion Lee Sedol 4-1 in a match watched by 200 million people across Asia. The significance of the moment is now embedded in AI culture: it triggered Marc Andreessen's "Sputnik moment" description, catalysed the subsequent wave of deep learning investment, and provided the platform for Demis Hassabis to eventually receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold. Silver then built AlphaZero, which mastered Go, Chess, and Shogi from scratch through pure self-play without any human data, the first demonstration that a single reinforcement learning system could achieve superhuman performance across multiple complex games simultaneously. AlphaStar followed, achieving grandmaster-level performance in StarCraft II against professional human players. Ineffable Intelligence's thesis is a direct challenge to the prevailing paradigm of AI development. Silver's argument, developed in a 2025 paper co-authored with Richard Sutton, the University of Alberta researcher widely regarded as the father of reinforcement learning, is that large language models are fundamentally limited because they learn exclusively from human-generated data. That means they can synthesise, extend, and remix existing human knowledge but cannot discover something genuinely new. Reinforcement learning, by contrast, allows an AI to learn from interaction with its environment, from trial, error, and self-play, producing strategies and insights that no human has conceived. AlphaGo's famous Move 37 in Game 2 against Lee Sedol was not in any human game record; it was discovered by a machine reasoning beyond human intuition. Silver is betting that scaling that approach is the path to superintelligence. The valuation context is relevant. Ilya Sutskever, former Chief Scientist at OpenAI who left in 2024 to found Safe Superintelligence, raised $3 billion at a valuation that reached $32 billion by April 2025, also for a company with no product. Mira Murati, former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, founded Thinking Machines Lab and has signed a multibillion-dollar cloud infrastructure agreement with Google. Meta's former Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun is raising approximately €500 million for AMI Labs. The pattern is consistent: the AI investment market in 2025-26 is not valuing current capabilities. It is valuing the credibility of the researcher, the tractability of the thesis, and the track record of the team as a signal of the probability of a future breakthrough. By that metric, Silver, who built three of the most celebrated AI systems in history, commands a premium. Ineffable Intelligence was incorporated in November 2025; Silver was appointed director in January 2026. The company is based in London, a location Silver chose deliberately. The UK is home to Google DeepMind's headquarters, a deep academic pipeline from UCL and Oxford, and a growing density of frontier AI researchers who have left the major labs. Silver himself remains a professor at University College London. The $5.1 billion valuation makes Ineffable Intelligence immediately one of the most valuable pre-product AI startups in Europe. The round was reported in February 2026 as being at approximately $4 billion pre-money; Monday's Bloomberg valuation of $5.1 billion likely reflects the post-money figure after the capital injection, or an updated final close figure. The February reporting noted that Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft were in talks to participate; Monday's confirmed deal has Sequoia and Nvidia as the confirmed investors. The critics of Silver's thesis are not silent. Reinforcement learning has achieved spectacular results in constrained domains with clear win conditions, Go, Chess, StarCraftm but has historically struggled in open-ended real-world environments where the reward signal is ambiguous. How do you define "winning" when the goal is general intelligence? What prevents the system from optimising for an unexpected proxy reward rather than the intended capability? These are not merely technical questions; they are the central unsolved problems of AI safety. Silver's claim is that scaling the approach and applying it to open-ended research tasks rather than games will unlock qualitatively different capabilities.

Google DeepMind Veteran Raises $1.1 Billion to Build AI That Isn't Trained With Human Data - Decrypt

The startup aims to build AI "superlearners" that learn through simulations and self-play. David Silver, the DeepMind scientist behind AlphaGo's historic 2016 win over world Go champion Lee Sedol, has raised $1.1 billion to launch a startup betting that the next era of AI won't come from today's dominant technology. Silver's company, Ineffable Intelligence, launched in January at a $5.1 billion valuation and is betting on reinforcement learning, a method where AI systems improve through trial and error. Silver argues that approach, rather than the large language models now dominating the field, offers a more credible route to superintelligence. "I think of our mission as making first contact with superintelligence," Silver told Wired. "By superintelligence, I really mean something incredible. It should discover new forms of science or technology or government or economics for itself." Popularized by philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2014 book "Superintelligence," the term refers to AI that surpasses human intelligence across nearly all domains, while artificial general intelligence, or AGI, describes systems capable of matching human-level reasoning across a wide range of tasks. Silver argues that large language models are fundamentally limited because they learn from human-generated data, instead of building their own understanding through experience. "Human data is like a kind of fossil fuel that has provided an amazing shortcut," he said. "You can think of systems that learn for themselves as a renewable fuel -- something that can just learn and learn and learn forever, without limit." Silver has spent much of his career advancing that argument. AlphaGo, which combined human training data with reinforcement learning and self-play, developed strategies that surprised even top human players and demonstrated how AI can exceed human precedent in narrow domains. "I feel it's really important that there is an elite AI lab that actually focuses a hundred percent on this approach," he told Wired. "That it's not just a corner of another place dedicated to LLMs." Ineffable Intelligence plans to build what Silver calls "superlearners" -- AI agents placed inside simulations where they can pursue goals, fail, adapt, and improve without the limits of a static human dataset. Silver declined to describe what those simulations would look like, but said the approach would allow agents to collaborate and develop capabilities autonomously. Silver argued that large language models are limited by the data they are trained on, adding that a model trained in a world where everyone believed the Earth was flat would likely keep that belief unless it could test reality for itself. A system that learns through experience, he said, could discover otherwise. Ineffable Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.

David Silver's Ineffable Intelligence raises $1.1bn

The young start-up said it would be 'assembling the best engineers and researchers in the world to make first contact with superintelligence'. Ineffable Intelligence, a UK-based AI start-up building a 'superintelligence' platform and founded by former Google DeepMind researcher and AI guru David Silver, has raised $1.1bn in a seed funding round. Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed led the funding - which Ineffable said was Europe's largest ever seed round and put the company at a $5.1bn valuation - with participation from Google, Nvidia and the UK government, among others. In a LinkedIn post, the young start-up said it would be "assembling the best engineers and researchers in the world to make first contact with superintelligence" and "solving the hardest problems in AI on the way". According to Ineffable's mission statement, its goal is to build a "superlearning capability" for an AI system with the "ability to endlessly discover knowledge and skills, without relying on human data", by using "the world's most powerful reinforcement learning algorithms". The UK government said it was backing the prospect of "algorithms that can learn for themselves and uncover new knowledge, rather than simply copying what humans already know", through its Sovereign AI fund alongside the British Business Bank. It described Silver, a professor at University College London, as "one of the most influential figures in modern AI". UK science and technology secretary Liz Kendall said the investment in Ineffable "will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors". Silver is considered a leading authority in reinforcement learning, a foundational aspect of AI technologies. "David Silver is a generational talent who has consistently been on the cutting edge of AI development," said Charlotte Lawrence, managing director of direct equity at the British Business Bank. "Ineffable Intelligence has the potential to produce a paradigm shift in our scientific and technology landscape, and we are incredibly excited to be supporting him and his team in this endeavour." Tech giants such as Meta are also involved in the superintelligence development race, while that company's former AI chief Yann LeCun recently raised more than $1bn in seed funding for his own AI start-up, Advanced Machine Intelligence, at a $3.5bn valuation. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Ineffable Intelligence raises $1.1B at $5.1B valuation to build an AI 'superlearner' - SiliconANGLE

Ineffable Intelligence raises $1.1B at $5.1B valuation to build an AI 'superlearner' Ineffable Intelligence Ltd., a British artificial intelligence startup founded a few months ago, has raised $1.1 billion in seed funding. The investment values the company at $5.1 billion. CNBC reported today that Lightspeed Ventures and Sequoia Capital led the deal. They were joined by Nvidia Corp., Google LLC, the U.K's Sovereign AI Fund, DST Global, Index Ventures and others. Ineffable Intelligence is led by prominent AI researcher David Silver. He previously spent more than a decade at DeepMind, Alphabet Inc.'s machine learning unit. He was the lead developer of the groundbreaking AlphaGo model that the lab debuted in 2016. AlphaGo bested the world's highest-ranked Go player in a series of matches that were watched by more than 200 million people. DeepMind later used the technologies that underpinned the model to build a math-optimized AI called AlphaProof. In 2024, AlphaProof became the first neural network to win a medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. AI models answer user questions based on existing knowledge they collect from sources such as the public web. According to Wired, Ineffable Intelligence is seeking to build an AI model that can obtain entirely new knowledge. The startup believes that such an algorithm, which it refers to as a superlearner, could accelerate scientific research and engineering projects. Ineffable Intelligence plans to develop the superlearner using reinforcement learning. It's a common AI training method that lends itself to, among other tasks, building large language models. The core concept behind reinforcement learning is to provide an AI with sample tasks and observe how well it completes them. That monitoring is usually carried by a second, less advanced neural network called a teacher model. The teacher model provides the AI being trained with feedback that it uses to refine its output. There are many implementations of reinforcement learning. One common approach is to equip an AI model with a database of common situations that it will encounter in production. That approach, which is known as model-based reinforcement learning, speeds up AI training. Other reinforcement learning techniques don't use a database and instead prioritize model adaptability. Another method, RLHF, provides the teacher model that guides the AI training process with feedback from humans. The human feedback can significantly boost AI output quality. Reinforcement learning is usually applied to models that have already been calibrated through a process known as pre-training. Ineffable Intelligence plans to skip that step. Additionally, it will place its AI models in simulations that will enable them to learn from one another. AlphaGo, the AI model that Silver developed at DeepMind, used a similar approach. It played millions of Go matches against itself to develop novel tactics that weren't available in training datasets. Ineffable Intelligence's raise comes two months after AMI Labs Inc., another early-stage AI startup with a prominent founder, secured $1.03 billion in funding. Chief Executive Yann LeCun stated at the time that the company plans to develop world models optimized for tasks such as refining aircraft component designs.

Former DeepMind researcher's startup bags $1.1 billion in seed funding

Ineffable Intelligence, an innovative startup co-founded by DeepMind's visionary David Silver, has made headlines by raising an unprecedented $1.1 billion in seed funding. This marks a historic moment as it stands as the largest seed round investment in Europe to date, with leading contributions from Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed. UK-based Ineffable Intelligence, founded by former DeepMind researcher David Silver, has raised $1.1 billion in a seed funding round led by US venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed, with backing from the British government. The round - Europe's ⁠largest seed ⁠financing to date - included participation from Nvidia and Google , and values Ineffable at $5.1 billion, the company said on Monday. The British government said its Sovereign AI initiative and the British Business Bank will co-invest in Ineffable as it seeks to strengthen domestic artificial ⁠intelligence capabilities in the global race for the technology. Separately, the British Business Bank said it had ⁠invested $20 million in Ineffable, adding to an AI portfolio that includes nine investments over the past 12 months, among them Wayve and PolyAI. Ineffable, led by Silver - one of the world's most prominent AI researchers and a professor at University College London - aims to build a "superlearner" that discovers knowledge through its own experience, from basic motor skills to intellectual breakthroughs, without relying on human-generated data. "We ⁠believe in this nation's entrepreneurs and innovators and we are backing them to seize the benefits of AI for the UK," technology minister Liz Kendall said in the government's statement. "This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors."

David Silver's New Venture Lands $1.1B From Sequoia, Nvidia, Google

U.K.-based artificial intelligence startup Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion in new funding, putting the company's valuation at $5.1 billion. The AI lab, founded by former DeepMind researcher David Silver, aims to build a "superlearner" using reinforcement learning. The system acquires abilities through experimentation rather than training on human-produced examples, its website states. The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Major investors include Index Ventures, Google, Nvidia, the British Business Bank, and Sovereign AI, the U.K.'s new state-backed AI venture fund, Wired reported. Silver is a professor at University College London. He also previously ran DeepMind's reinforcement learning group for more than a decade. During that period, he worked on systems that focused on building reinforcement learning and co-led projects that played Atai games directly from pixels. Former DeepMind employees Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt, and Junhyuk Oh have also joined Ineffable's executive team, according to LinkedIn. Silver also described the venture as "his life's work" in a personal note posted to the company's blog. He recently told Wired that "any money" he makes from Ineffable will go to "high-impact" charities. Ballooning AI Valuations Ineffable Labs' $5 billion valuation joins other AI startups that have quickly scaled as they compete for their place in the artificial intelligence market. Notable firms that have led the way include Nscale, which was founded in 2024 and has a valuation of $14.6 billion. Key investors in the AI infrastructure hyperscaler include NVIDIA, SoftBank, Citadel, and Fidelity Management, among others. Meanwhile, Eleven Labs' most recent Series D funding raised $500 million, which was led by Sequoia Capital. This puts the AI startup at an $11 billion valuation. Key investors included Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital, BOND, Smash Capital. This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

DeepMind Vet's Ineffable Intelligence AI Startup Raises $1.1 Billion | PYMNTS.com

The funding round, announced Monday (April 27) and co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, will help Silver and his company develop a so-called "superlearner." "Ineffable is building a system designed to generate knowledge from its own experience," Lightspeed said on its website. "One that learns not by extrapolating from human examples but by acting in engineering environments and learning from the signals those environments return. The founding bet is that this approach can eventually produce the kind of knowledge currently locked behind human limits: theorems we have not yet proved, scientific frameworks we do not yet have language for." In a mission statement on its website, Ineffable predicts the superlearner will "rediscover and then transcend" history's greatest inventions, like language and science and mathematics. "If successful, this will represent a scientific breakthrough of comparable magnitude to Darwin: where his law explained all Life, our law will explain and build all Intelligence," the company said. Silver was a central figure behind the development of DeepMind's AlphaGo, the first AI system to defeat a human master at the Chinese game of Go. It's a game that contains a jaw-dropping amount of moves, as PYMNTS wrote at the time: 1 duocennovemnonagintillion, or 10 to the power of 900, a figure greater than the number of subatomic particles thought to exist in the universe. That victory, Lightspeed said, "proved something the field had argued about for decades: that a system could generate knowledge its architects did not have." In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote Monday about rising appetite for agentic commerce, with research showing that nearly half of consumers say they're interested in letting AI agents handle things like meal planning and grocery shopping. As demand picks up, payment infrastructure is becoming the crucial layer that guides whether agentic commerce can operate seamlessly and securely. "Yet most existing systems weren't designed for this environment. Legacy payment infrastructure, built for human-initiated, linear transactions, struggles to support the high-velocity, cross-platform activity generated by autonomous agents," PYMNTS added. "These systems often lack the flexibility to process parallel transactions, enforce granular controls or adapt in real time, creating friction when speed and precision matter most."

$1.1 Billion Bet on Autonomous Intelligence: David Silver Claims an AI that Teaches Itself

A $1.1 billion in funding has placed a bold wager on a new kind of artificial intelligence. The project aims to create systems that learn without human data, marking a turning point in how machines gain knowledge. A new AI startup has grabbed global attention with a bold claim. Founded just a few months ago, this British AI lab has secured $1.1 billion in funding. The founder, David Silver, has attracted interest by stating that he aims to create an AI that can train itself without relying on human data. The claim is groundbreaking, and the funding indicates that investors believe in this vision. Silver's 'Superlearner' is simple to describe, but the aim is tough to achieve. Building an AI that can explore the world, test ideas, and improve on its own is something that even the AI giants haven't claimed yet. If successful, the technology could move AI beyond pattern recognition into true independent learning.