GoKawiilA 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.