The DeepMind trio that built AI for poker are now making money from quantitative hedge funds

Three former DeepMind researchers created the AI That beats humans at poker It has now applied the same technology to stock trading – and the bet appears to be paying off. Their artificial intelligence lab in Prague, Equilibre TechnologiesIt is now valued at $500 million after raising an undisclosed Series A, TechCrunch has learned.

Creandum led the round, and although the venture capitalist also declined to disclose the size of the round, Vice President Cameron Sellers confirmed that it was the largest single investment the company has ever made in a single company, he told TechCrunch.

What poker and Wall Street have in common is that they are a perfect fit Reinforcement learningan artificial intelligence-based training technique where self-learning models are motivated by rewards. According to Martin Schmid, CEO of EquiLibre, “The nice thing about trading and markets is that scoring is very simple: How much money did the agent make?”

This is not just game money. In partnership With Tower Research Capital QuantitativeEquiLibre’s algorithms trade billions in daily volumes across the S&P 500 and NASDAQ. The startup claims that its agents have been doing well since launching on the cryptocurrency markets in 2025, and now on the stock markets, with a “perfect record of zero negative months since inception,” meaning they have ended each month with their investments higher overall.

By applying its AI to quantitative hedge funds, the startup is in a space where automation is common and, if successful, improvements can quickly turn into cash. This made the startup attractive to Crendum, Sellers said.

“The total potentially addressable trading market in the financial markets is one of the largest on Earth, and there have been countless funds over the years that have generated amounts of profits that make most venture-backed successes seem small,” Sellers said. But he noted that EquiLibre explicitly defines itself as “a lab first, not a finance company.”

Schmid and his co-founders — CTO Rudolf Kadlec and CSO Matej Moravcik — don’t have a background in finance, and that’s not what drives them, he told TechCrunch. “I’m not doing this because I’m passionate about making markets efficient,” Schmid said. “I’m doing this because we’re all passionate about building new things that haven’t been built before, and that’s a lot of fun to build.”

The prospect of frontier AI by DeepMind graduates is an area venture capital is also pursuing. Another recent example is indescribable intelligence, Which recently raised $1.1 billion. Most of these companies are based in the UK, but there are… Notable exceptionsincluding Equilibre.

In the case of the EquiLibre founding trio, they were visiting PhD students at the Google-owned company The first international research office for artificial intelligence in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (i.e. the alphabet close In 2023.) While there they built deepstackthe first AI program to beat professional players at No Limit Poker, also known as Texas Hold’em. They also worked with professors who are now part of the startup’s high-level advisory board, including Rich Sutton, who received an award Turing Award in 2024 For his work in reinforcement learning.

To build their startup, the founders of EquiLibre decided to return to their homeland, the Czech Republic. “This is where we had a lot of people we worked with, and there was a large Czech diaspora at Google and other places,” Schmid said. “These were our friends, so we said, ‘Hey guys, we’re going back to Prague, do you want to join us?’

This has helped EquiLibre build its initial team in 2022 and reach its current headcount of 25 people; But according to Schmid, the location choice continues to pay off. Compared to San Francisco, “it’s much easier to retain good people here, because there’s not something exciting new AI happening every couple of months.”

That’s not to say EquiLibre is the only AI startup in town. Bottle cap AI Located in the same building.

However, this is still one of the most prominent AI companies in the region in terms of talent. It then plans to scale up its computing infrastructure, bringing what it expects to be one of the largest computing clusters in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) online.

While the startup also declined to disclose its total funding yet, Schmid said it had previously raised two other funding rounds, with initial backers including CEE-focused venture capital firm Credo, which also backed ElevenLabs and UiPath. according to Deal room dataBlossom Capital led Equilibre’s $10 million seed round at a $140 million valuation.

The sellers emphasized that a $500 million Series A valuation was a big jump. But it also comes after circumstances have changed in favor of reinforcement learning (RL), including trading. “When we started, people were skeptical,” Schmid said. But now RL is the standard. “Because we started four years ago, we believe we are ahead of the curve.”

However, there is still a risk that the startup will be outpaced by competitors. For example, trading giant Jane Street. It states that it actually uses RL With an MBA, “or whatever else we need to train good models.” It also claims to have “tens of thousands of high-end GPUs,” while EquiLibre seeks to squeeze more compute into fewer chips and “get more from less,” Schmid said.

By looking How profitable is Jane Street?EquiLibre will have to play its cards well in order to reach its goal known as “the Artificial Intelligence in Trading Lab.” But this isn’t poker, and there may be no losers. “This isn’t a winner-take-all market,” Schmid says.