David Silver, the former head of reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind and the scientist behind AlphaGo, has raised $1.1 billion in seed funding for Ineffable Intelligence, a London-based startup pursuing artificial intelligence systems that discover knowledge through their own experience rather than learning from human-generated data.
The round, which the company says is the largest seed investment ever raised in Europe, was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Nvidia, Google, DST Global, Index Ventures and the UK government's Sovereign AI Fund.
Nvidia's venture arm contributed at least $250 million, according to The Next Web.
The investment values Ineffable Intelligence at $5.1 billion despite the company having no product, no revenue and no published roadmap.
"Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence," Silver said.
Silver spent more than a decade at DeepMind, where he led development of AlphaGo, the system that defeated the world's highest-ranked Go player in 2016 in matches watched by more than 200 million people, and AlphaZero, which mastered chess, shogi and Go entirely through self-play without any human training data.
Ineffable Intelligence's thesis is a direct extension of that work: build a "superlearner" capable of discovering knowledge autonomously using reinforcement learning, a technique in which AI systems learn through trial and error rather than studying human examples.
Where most leading AI models today are trained on billions of pages of text, images and audio produced by humans, Silver's approach would skip that step entirely, placing AI models in simulations where they learn from one another, much as AlphaZero played millions of games against itself to develop strategies no human had conceived.
The company was founded in November 2025, shortly after Silver left DeepMind, and several former DeepMind colleagues are expected to join the executive team.
Silver has pledged to donate 100% of his personal equity gains from Ineffable to high-impact charities through Founders Pledge, a commitment the organisation described as the largest in its history.
UK Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall welcomed the investment.
"This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the very frontier of AI, underlining our determination to ensure that the UK isn't just an AI taker but an AI maker," she said.
The raise is part of a broader wave of departures from major AI laboratories.
Related reading
- Google in talks with Marvell to develop two new AI chips as it builds multi-supplier TPU strategy
- Nvidia launches open-source quantum AI models as it deepens grip on chip design workflows
- Meta partners with Broadcom on MTIA AI chips
AMI Labs, founded by Yann LeCun after he stepped down as Meta's chief AI scientist, closed a $1 billion round in March, while Recursive Superintelligence, launched by former DeepMind principal scientist Tim Rocktäschel, has been reported to be raising up to $1 billion.
Jeff Bezos' AI venture, Project Prometheus, is reportedly in talks to secure office space near Google's London AI hub, adding to the concentration of frontier AI talent in the capital.
The recap
- Ineffable Intelligence raised a $1.1 billion seed round.
- The round values the company at $5.1 billion.
- Ineffable will focus on reinforcement learning research from experience.
