Ex-DeepMind's Silver Raises $1.1B for Ineffable Superlearner

David Silver, who led Google DeepMind's reinforcement learning team for more than a decade and built AlphaGo and AlphaZero, has raised $1.1 billion in seed funding for his new London-based lab Ineffable Intelligence at a $5.1 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times. The round, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, is described by the company as the largest seed on record in Europe.

The pitch is a bet against the LLM-scaling consensus. Ineffable is pursuing what it calls a 'superlearner', a system designed to discover knowledge from its own experience rather than from human data, extending the reinforcement-learning path Silver pioneered with AlphaZero. Investors joining Sequoia and Lightspeed include Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, the Wellcome Trust, EQT Ventures, BOND Capital, the British Business Bank, and the UK's Sovereign AI Fund. TechCrunch reports the company's own framing of the ambition: 'If successful, this will represent a scientific breakthrough of comparable magnitude to Darwin.'

Silver, 49, holds a professorship at University College London and left DeepMind in late 2025. 'Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,' he said in a statement. He has also pledged to donate 100% of his personal equity proceeds through Founders Pledge: 'any money that I make from Ineffable will go to high-impact charities that save as many lives as possible.'

The company has no product, no revenue, and no public roadmap.