A UK-headquartered AI superintelligence company has raised $1.1 billion in seed funding.
Ineffable Intelligence has been backed by the Government’s Sovereign AI Fund and the British Business Bank – the latter of which invested £15 million – as well as Sequioa, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Index, Google, EQT, Evantic, Flying Fish, DST Global and BOND.
The round represents the largest European seed round in history.
Ineffable Intelligence is led by David Silver, one of the world’s most prominent AI researchers and a professor at University College London. Silver is considered a global expert in reinforcement learning within AI, with extraordinary contributions including his role in AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaFold and AlphaProof and when he led the reinforcement learning team at Google Deepmind.
Silver launched Ineffable Intelligence to develop ‘superintelligence’ by building a superlearner that can discover all knowledge from its own experience.
“Very few founders in the world could credibly set out to build a superlearner – a system that discovers new knowledge from its own experience, rather than ours,” said Josephine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI.
“David is one of them.
“From AlphaGo to AlphaZero to AlphaProof, he has spent nearly two decades turning reinforcement learning from a research idea into the results the rest of the field builds on.
“Ineffable is being built in the UK – and that matters.”
The investment builds on the British Business Bank’s AI portfolio with nine investments made in AI in the last 12 months including recent investments in Wayve and PolyAI. It has also played a significant role in supporting the commercialisation of cutting-edge scientific research, having supported almost a quarter (24%) of university spinout deals between 2022-2024.
Charlotte Lawrence, managing director of direct equity, British Business Bank, said, “David Silver is a generational talent who has consistently been on the cutting edge of AI development.
“Ineffable Intelligence has the potential to produce a paradigm shift in our scientific and technology landscape, and we are incredibly excited to be supporting him and his team in this endeavour.”