AlphaGo Creator David Silver Raises $1.1B Seed Round for RL-Only AI Startup Ineffable Intelligence

From AlphaZero to a Universal Superlearner

David Silver, the DeepMind researcher who co-created AlphaZero, which mastered chess and Go without studying a single human game, has launched a new AI company. Ineffable Intelligence emerged from stealth on April 27, 2026, with a $1.1 billion seed round led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Index Ventures, Google, and Nvidia. The round values the company at $5.1 billion and is Europe's largest seed round ever recorded.

The UK government's Sovereign AI venture fund and the British Business Bank also participated, underscoring the UK's ambitions as a global AI research hub.

The Superlearner Vision

Ineffable's thesis is that reinforcement learning, AI learning by trial and error rather than absorbing human-generated data, is the path to artificial superintelligence. The company's mission is to build a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience. Silver has described the ambition as a scientific breakthrough of comparable magnitude to Darwin.

Profits to Charity

Silver has pledged to donate profits from Ineffable to high-impact charitable causes. Former DeepMind colleagues are expected to join the executive team.