The DeepMind trio who built a poker AI are now making money for quant hedge funds
Three former DeepMind researchers who created an AIthat beat humans at pokerhave now applied the same technology to trading stocks — and the bet appears to be paying off. Their Prague-based AI lab,EquiLibre Technologies, is now valued at $500 million after raising an undisclosed-sum Series A, TechCrunch 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 largest single investment the firm “has ever made in one go into a company,” he told TechCrunch.The common denominator between poker and Wall Street is that they are well suited forreinforcement learning, an AI training technique where self-learning models are incentivized by rewards. According to Martin Schmid, EquiLibre CEO, “The nice thing about trading and markets is that the scoring is super simple: how much money did the agent make?” This isn’t just game money. In partnershipwith quant firm Tower Research Capital, EquiLibre’s algorithms have been trading billions in daily volume across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The startup claims its agents have been doing well since their rollout on crypto markets in 2025, and now on stock exchanges, with “a perfect record of zero negative months since inception,” meaning they have finished each month with their investments up overall. By applying its AI to quant hedge funds, the startup is in a field where automation is commonplace and, if successful, improvements can quickly turn into cash. That made the startup appealing to Creandum, Sellers said.“The potential total addressable market of trading in the financial markets is one of the biggest on earth, and there are countless funds over the years that have generated quantums of profit that make most venture-backed successes look small,” Sellers said. But he noted that EquiLibre explicitly defines itself as “a lab first, not a finance firm.”Schmid and his two founders — CTO Rudolf Kadlec and CSO Matej Moravcik — don’t have a background in finance, and it is not what drives them, he told TechCrunch. “I’m not doing this because I’m excited about making markets efficient. I’m doing this because we are all excited about building new things that have never been built before, and this is a lot of fun to build,” Schmid said. The prospect of frontier AI by by DeepMind alumni is an area of hot pursuit by VCs as well. Another recent such example is Ineffable Intelligence,which recently raised 1.1 billion. Most of these are based in the U.K., but there arenotable exceptions, including EquiLibre. In the case of EquiLibre’s founding trio, they were visiting PhD students at the Google-owned company’sfirst international AI research office in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada(which Alphabetshut downin 2023.) While there, they builtDeepStack, the first AI program to defeat pro players at no-limit poker, also known asTexas hold ’em. They also worked with professors who are now part of the startup’s high-profile advisory board — including Rich Sutton, who went on to receive theTuring award in 2024for his work on reinforcement learning.To build their startup, EquiLibre’s founders decided to move back to their home country, Czechia. “This is where we had a lot of people we had worked with, and there was a large Czech diaspora at Google and other places,” Schmid said. “These were our friends, so we told them, ‘Hey, guys, we are moving back to Prague, do you want to join us?’”That helped EquiLibre build its initial team back in 2022 and reach its current headcount of 25 people; but according to Schmid, that choice of location keeps paying dividends. Compared to San Francisco, “It’s much easier to keep the 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 AIis based in the same building. Still, this is one of the more notable AI companies in the region for talent. It next plans to scale its compute infrastructure, bringing online what it expects will be one of the largest compute clusters in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). While the startup also declined to disclose its total funding to date, Schmid said it previously raised two other funding rounds, with pre-seed backers including CEE-focused VC firm Credo, which also backed ElevenLabs and UiPath. According toDealroom data, EquiLibre’s $10 million seed round was led by Blossom Capital at a $140 million valuation. Sellers confirmed that the Series A $500 million valuation was a big jump. But it also comes after the winds have changed favorably for reinforcement learning (RL), including in trading. “When we started, people were skeptical,” said Schmid. But now RL is the standard. “Because we started four years back, we believe we are ahead.” Still, there is a risk that the startup will get leapfrogged by competitors. Trading giant Jane Street, for instance,states it already uses RLwith LLMs, “or whatever else we need to train good models.” It also claims it has “tens of thousands of high-end GPUs,” while EquiLibre is seeking to squeeze more compute out of way fewer chips and “get more from less,” Schmid said. Consideringhow profitable Jane Street is, EquiLibre will have to play its cards well in order to reach its goal to be known as “theAI lab in trading.” But this isn’t poker, and there might be no losers. Says Schmid: “This is not a winner-takes-all market.”
