The British Business Bank has committed $20m to Ineffable Intelligence, the London-headquartered artificial intelligence venture, as part of a landmark $1.1bn seed round—the largest in European history.
The state-owned development bank co-invested alongside the Sovereign AI Fund, the Treasury-backed vehicle established to keep strategically significant AI businesses anchored in the UK. The Sovereign AI Fund provided additional capital, though the precise figure remains undisclosed.
The syndicate includes Silicon Valley investors: Sequoia, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Index Ventures, Google, EQT, Evantic, Flying Fish, DST Global and BOND.
Ineffable Intelligence was founded by David Silver, the University College London professor widely regarded as one of the most influential reinforcement learning researchers of his generation. Silver previously ran the reinforcement learning team at Google DeepMind and is credited with pivotal work on AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaFold and AlphaProof.
His new venture aims to build what Silver calls a “superlearner”—a system capable of discovering knowledge from its own experience rather than relying on data humans feed it. If realised, the technology would represent a step change beyond today’s large language models.
The British Business Bank has now made nine AI deals over the past twelve months, with recent backing for autonomous driving outfit Wayve and conversational AI specialist PolyAI. The Bank has supported almost a quarter of all university spinout deals between 2022 and 2024.
Charlotte Lawrence, managing director of direct equity at the British Business Bank, described Silver as “a generational talent who has consistently been on the cutting edge of AI development”. She added: “Ineffable Intelligence has the potential to produce a paradigm shift in our scientific and technology landscape.”
George Mills, the Bank’s investment director, said the company was tackling “one of the most significant opportunities within AI”, citing potential applications spanning advanced problem solving and new product development.
Josephine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI, said: “Very few founders in the world could credibly set out to build a superlearner. David is one of them.”
The deal arrives at a sensitive moment for British technology policy. Ministers have faced criticism for the relative scarcity of late-stage growth capital available to scaling deep-tech businesses.