The British Business Bank has invested $20m in Ineffable Intelligence, the UK-headquartered AI superintelligence company, as part of a $1.1bn seed funding round. The Bank has also worked with the Government’s Sovereign AI Fund, which is co-investing additional capital into Ineffable Intelligence, alongside the Bank’s $20m investment.
The Bank is joined by other investors including Sequioa, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Index, Google, EQT, Evantic, Flying Fish, DST Global and BOND. The round represents the largest European seed round in history.
Ineffable Intelligence is led by David Silver, one of the world’s most prominent AI researchers and a professor at University College London. Silver is considered a global expert in reinforcement learning within AI, with extraordinary contributions including his role in AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaFold and AlphaProof and when he led the reinforcement learning team at Google Deepmind. Silver launched Ineffable Intelligence to develop ‘superintelligence’ by building a superlearner that can discover all knowledge from its own experience.
This investment builds on the British Business Bank’s AI portfolio with nine investments made in AI in the last 12 months including recent investments in Wayve and PolyAI. It has also played a significant role in supporting the commercialisation of cutting-edge scientific research, having supported almost a quarter (24%) of university spinout deals between 2022-2024.
Charlotte Lawrence, Managing Director of Direct Equity, British Business Bank, said, “David Silver is a generational talent who has consistently been on the cutting edge of AI development. Ineffable Intelligence has the potential to produce a paradigm shift in our scientific and technology landscape, and we are incredibly excited to be supporting him and his team in this endeavour.”
George Mills, Investment Director, British Business Bank, said, “Ineffable Intelligence is aiming to address one of the most significant opportunities within AI, superintelligence, which has the potential to open new frontier applications including in advanced problem solving and new product development with relevance across sectors. The UK produces world-class AI talent, and we are pleased to back strategically important businesses to scale and stay in the UK.”
Josephine Kant, Head of Ventures at Sovereign AI, said, “Very few founders in the world could credibly set out to build a superlearner – a system that discovers new knowledge from its own experience, rather than ours. David is one of them. From AlphaGo to AlphaZero to AlphaProof, he has spent nearly two decades turning reinforcement learning from a research idea into the results the rest of the field builds on. Ineffable is being built in the UK – and that matters.”
Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said:
“Sovereign AI is our bet on Britain – we believe in this nation’s entrepreneurs and innovators and we are backing them to seize the benefits of AI for the UK.
“This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors, underlining our determination to ensure that the UK isn’t just an AI taker but an AI maker.
“It also demonstrates Sovereign AI moving at real speed – locking down its second direct investment in just a couple of months, while also securing a really effective partnership with the British Business Bank.”
AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said:
“David Silver is one of the world’s foremost AI leaders, now taking one of the world’s most innovative approaches to frontier AI. I am delighted that he is doing so right here in the UK, backed by the full support of the British state.
“With support from Sovereign AI and the British Business Bank, we are together showing what British AI can be: the best talent, backed by exceptional state capacity, building AI in Britain, changing the world with it.”
