David Silver

Money Moves

Leading a $1.1 billion seed-funded research lab in London; pledged 100% of personal equity proceeds to Founders Pledge

A London artificial intelligence lab raised $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion valuation in April 2026—the largest seed round in European history. The founder, David Silver, is a University College London professor who led the team at Google DeepMind that built AlphaGo and AlphaZero, programs that learned board games at superhuman levels by playing against themselves rather than studying human examples. Silver co-authored a paper with reinforcement learning pioneer Richard Sutton—titled 'Welcome to the Era of Experience'—arguing that systems trained on human-generated data can synthesize and remix existing knowledge but cannot genuinely discover something new. Sutton, who with Andrew Barto won the 2025 Turing Award for foundational reinforcement learning research, publicly endorsed Ineffable's mission on its launch day.

Updated Apr 28