David Silver, a leading AI researcher known for his work on AlphaGo and AlphaZero at Google DeepMind, has launched a new startup called Ineffable Intelligence. The company secured an impressive 5.1 billion. This funding round, announced in April 2026, marks the largest seed round in European history.
The investment was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional participation from notable investors including Nvidia, Google, Index Ventures, and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Fund.
Ineffable Intelligence’s core mission is to develop a “superlearner” - an AI system that autonomously discovers knowledge through reinforcement learning (RL). This approach differs significantly from current Large Language Models (LLMs), which primarily rely on existing human-generated data. Silver posits that LLMs are limited by their dependence on pre-existing knowledge, and his company aims for superintelligence through autonomous discovery. He is joined by former DeepMind colleagues, such as Wojciech Czarnecki and Junhyuk Oh. David Silver has also committed to donating all his personal proceeds from the company to high-impact charities.
This substantial funding underscores a growing interest in AI architectures that move beyond conventional generative models towards more agentic, self-learning systems.