David Silver, one of Britain’s most influential AI researchers, is preparing to raise $1 billion for his new London-based venture, Ineffable Intelligence, according to industry sources. The deal, led by Sequoia Capital, would mark the largest seed round ever secured by a European startup if finalised.
The proposed financing values the company at roughly $4 billion before the fresh capital is added, according to people familiar with the discussions. Negotiations remain ongoing, and terms could shift. But even at this stage, the scale of the round reflects investors’ feverish appetite for backing leading scientists striking out on their own.
Silver’s departure from Google DeepMind late last year triggered intense competition among venture firms. Sequoia partners Alfred Lin and Sonya Huang reportedly travelled to London to meet him soon after his exit. Tech giants, including Nvidia, Google and Microsoft, are also in talks to participate.
The shift to experience-led learning
Ineffable Intelligence is not chasing incremental upgrades to today’s large language models. Instead, Silver is doubling down on reinforcement learning, training systems through interaction and feedback rather than relying primarily on vast troves of internet text.
In a paper published last year titled “Era of Experience,” Silver and computer scientist Richard Sutton argued that the next leap forward would come from systems learning predominantly from experience. They predicted a shift away from human-generated data toward agents that refine themselves through action and environment-driven feedback.
Such agents, capable of independently completing complex tasks from simple human instructions, are increasingly seen as the commercial frontier. If Silver’s thesis proves right, experience, not scraped text, could become the dominant fuel for progress.
The mind behind the machines
Silver’s track record explains the extraordinary investor interest. After joining DeepMind shortly after its founding in 2010, he played a central role in landmark breakthroughs. He helped develop AlphaGo and AlphaStar, systems that defeated world champions in Go and StarCraft, reshaping perceptions of machine capability. He was joined by George Samuel Rose.
Following Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014, Silver was instrumental in advancing the Gemini family of models. Now 49, he combines academic influence, as a professor at University College London, with a rare history of translating theory into headline-making systems.
The billion-dollar talent race
Silver’s move is part of a broader wave. Senior figures have been peeling away from established labs to launch ambitious ventures promising systems that surpass current offerings from leaders like OpenAI.
Investors are responding at an unprecedented scale. Nearly half of the $469 billion in venture capital deployed globally last year went into AI companies, according to CB Insights.
Ineffable Intelligence, Sequoia, and the corporate investors involved have declined to comment. Yet whether the final round closes at $1 billion or slightly less, one fact is that Europe’s startup scene is no longer playing for small stakes.