The DeepMind trio that developed poker AI are now making money from quant hedge funds

Three former DeepMind researchers who built AI that beat humans at poker have now applied the same technology to stock trading – and the bet seems to be paying off. Their Prague-based AI lab, EquiLibre Technologies, is now worth $500 million after raising an undisclosed Series A, TechCrunch has learned.

The round was led by Creandum, and, although the VC also declined to disclose the size of the round, vice president Cameron Sellers confirmed that it was the single largest investment the company “has ever made at one time in a company,” he told TechCrunch.

A common feature between poker and Wall Street is that they are well-suited to reinforcement learning, an AI training method where self-learning models are motivated by rewards. According to Martin Schmid, CEO of EquiLibre, “The good thing about trading and markets is that the score is very simple: how much money did the agent make?”

This is not just game money. In partnership with quant firm Tower Research Capital, EquiLibre’s algorithms have been trading billions in daily volume across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The startup says that its agents have been doing well since they were first released in the crypto markets in 2025, and now in the stock exchange, “with a complete history of zero negative months since the beginning,” meaning that they have ended each month with their total investment.

By using its AI to measure hedge funds, the startup is in a field where automation is the norm and, if successful, innovation can quickly turn into money. That’s what made Creandam so attractive, sellers said.

“The financial market that can handle it is one of the largest in the world, and there are countless funds over the years that have produced amounts of profit that make the success of many business-based businesses look small,” Sellers said. But he noted that EquiLibre clearly describes itself as “a lab first, not a financial company.”

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

The frontier AI prospect of DeepMind alumni is an area pursued by VCs as well. Another recent such example is Ineffable Intelligence, which recently raised $1.1 billion. Most of these are based in the UK, but there are notable exceptions, including EquiLibre.

In the case of the three founders of EquiLibre, they were visiting PhD students at the first AI research office of the Google subsidiary in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (which Alphabet closed in 2023.) While there, they developed DeepStack, the first AI system to defeat pro players in no-limit poker, also known as Texas hold ’em. They also worked with professors who are already part of the startup’s high-profile advisory board – including Rich Sutton, who went on to receive the Turing Award in 2024 for his work on reinforcement learning.

To create their startup, the founders of EquiLibre decided to return to their home country, Czechia. “This is where we had a lot of people we worked with, and there was a large Czech diaspora at Google and elsewhere,” Schmid said. “These were our friends, so we told them, ‘Hey, guys, we’re going back to Prague, do you want to come with us?'”

That helped EquiLibre build its first team back in 2022 and reach its current number of 25 people; but according to Schmid, that choice of location ends up paying dividends. Compared to San Francisco, “It’s a lot easier to keep good people here, because there’s not a new sexy AI thing happening every two months.”

Not that EquiLibre is the only hot AI startup in town. BottleCap AI is based on the same architecture.

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

While the startup has also declined to disclose its total funding so far, Schmid said it previously raised two more rounds of funding, with previous seed backers including CEE-focused VC firm Credo, which also backs ElevenLabs and UiPath. According to Dealroom data, EquiLibre’s $10 million seed round was led by Blossom Capital for $140 million.

Sellers confirmed that the Series A $500 million valuation was a big jump. But it also comes after the mood has changed for good in 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.”

However, there is a risk that the startup will be overtaken by competitors. Trading giant Jane Street, for example, says it already uses RLs and LLMs, “whatever else we need to train good models.” It also says it has “tens of thousands of high-end GPUs,” while EquiLibre wants to squeeze more compute into fewer chips and “get more from less,” Schmid said.

Given how profitable Jane Street is, EquiLibre will have to play its cards right to achieve its goal of being known as “i An AI lab in commerce.” But this is not poker, and there may be no losers. Schmid says: “This is not a winning market.”