Former DeepMind researchers who built a poker AI are now making money for quant hedge funds

Three former DeepMind researchers who built an AI that defeated humans at poker have now applied the same technology to stock trading — 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 Series A, TechCrunch learned. The round was led by Creandum, and although the VC also declined to disclose the size, vice president Cameron Sellers confirmed it was the largest single investment the firm has ever made into a company.

The common denominator between poker and Wall Street is that they are well suited for reinforcement learning, an AI training technique where self-learning models are incentivized by rewards. According to EquiLibre CEO Martin Schmid, "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 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 claims its agents have had a perfect record of zero negative months since inception, meaning they have ended each month with overall gains.

By applying its AI to quant hedge funds, the startup operates in a field where automation is common, and improvements can quickly turn into cash. That made it appealing to Creandum. "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. However, he noted that EquiLibre defines itself as a lab first, not a finance firm.

Schmid and his co-founders — CTO Rudolf Kadlec and CSO Matej Moravcik — do not have a background in finance, and it is not what drives them. "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," Schmid said.

To build their startup, the 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. That helped EquiLibre build its initial team in 2022 and reach its current headcount of 25 people. 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."

The startup 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. While the startup declined to disclose its total funding to date, Schmid said it previously raised two other rounds, with pre-seed backers including Credo. According to Dealroom, 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.

However, there is a risk of being leapfrogged by competitors. Trading giant Jane Street, for instance, states it already uses reinforcement learning with LLMs and claims it has tens of thousands of high-end GPUs, while EquiLibre seeks to squeeze more compute from fewer chips. Schmid notes, "This is not a winner-takes-all market."