Ineffable Intelligence, the London based AI startup founded earlier this year by former Google DeepMind researcher David Silver, has added six new cofounders pulled largely from DeepMind and the AI firm InstaDeep, according to Fortune. The company is built around reinforcement learning, a training approach where AI models learn through trial and error to maximize a defined reward, with the stated goal of eventually building AI superintelligence.
Four of the new cofounders come directly from Google DeepMind. Chris Apps, a former technical program and research delivery lead who managed large researcher teams, will lead what the company calls mission acceleration. Wojciech Czarnecki, who specialized in multi agent AI research and worked on AlphaStar, will oversee Ineffable's science team. Lasse Espeholt, who helped build Google's MetNet weather prediction models, is taking charge of compute, infrastructure, and engineering strategy. Junhyuk Oh, who led reinforcement learning work on AlphaStar and was an early pioneer of using AI to discover new reinforcement learning algorithms, will run the company's reinforcement learning operations.
A fifth cofounder, Alexandre Laterre, joins from InstaDeep, the London based AI firm BioNTech acquired in 2023, where he served as head of research. He will oversee research engineering at Ineffable. The sixth, Heather Gorham, previously a partner at venture firm Flying Fish, is the one who first approached Silver about reinforcement learning back in early 2024. She is now managing compute, fundraising, and operations, and was instrumental in securing Ineffable's Google Cloud partnership.
The company's scale shows in its funding. In April 2026, Ineffable raised $1.1 billion in seed funding, the largest seed round in European history, at a $5 billion valuation. Sequoia and Lightspeed Ventures led the round, with Flying Fish, Gorham's former firm, writing the very first check.
Ineffable is one of a growing crop of what the industry has started calling neolabs, next generation frontier AI companies started by veterans of Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, built around the idea of recursive self improvement, where AI systems help optimize their own future versions with minimal human intervention. The company's early history includes a leadership handoff of its own: Canadian entrepreneur George Geordie Rose originally incorporated Ineffable in November 2025, then stepped back into an advisory role by July 2026 to make way for Silver's full leadership of the company.