A former top researcher at Google AI division DeepMind announced Monday a record $1.1 billion seed round for his months-old startup, Ineffable Innotifyigence.
The startup is pursuing superinnotifyigence 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 U.K.’s Sovereign AI Fund, among others.
Ineffable Innotifyigence will focus on reinforcement learning, which is when artificial innotifyigence models learn from experience as opposed to human data. That compares with many leading AI models that are trained on internet text.
Silver stated the company is aiming to “transcfinish the greatest inventions in human history, such as language, science, mathematics and technology.”
“Our mission is to create first contact with superinnotifyigence,” stated Silver in a statement.
“We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound innotifyectual breakthroughs,” he added.
Big Tech talent exodus fuels startup boom
Silver is one of several former top researchers at Big Tech companies who’ve jumped ship to launch their own AI labs in recent months, with investors funneling billions of dollars into the ventures.
Last week, a months-old startup called Recursive Superinnotifyigence — founded by former Google DeepMind engineer Tim Rocktäschel — was reported by the Financial Times to be raising up to $1 billion. AMI Labs announced a $1 billion raise in March, months after its founder, Yann LeCun, announced he was leaving his role as Meta‘s AI chief.
In the past year, former staff at OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic and xAI have also raised hundreds of millions from investors for months-old ventures, including AI labs Periodic Labs and Humans&.
“This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors, underlining our determination to ensure that the UK isn’t just an AI taker but an AI creater,” the U.K’s Science and Technology secretary, Liz Kfinishall, stated in a statement.
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