Former DeepMind world-model researchers’ startup Emulate in talks to raise $700M

Emulate, a UK AI startup founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is in advanced talks to raise up to $700mn in a seed round, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

Both the FT and Bloomberg report that Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners will lead the round, with Creandum also participating.

The two outlets provided different figures regarding the valuation. The Financial Times reported that Emulate’s pre-money valuation was $3.7bn, whereas Bloomberg claimed the company was seeking $3bn before the new funds were injected.

The Financial Times also noted that the terms have not yet been agreed and may still be subject to change.

The company Emulate was founded in August by Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill and Philip Ball, all of whom were involved in DeepMind’s world-model team.

Jack Parker-Holder was one of the principal researchers on Genie 3, the model which DeepMind presented last year for generating interactive 3D environments from a text prompt.

World models are AI systems that are trained to simulate and predict the way in which the physical world behaves, making them useful for the training of robots and agents as well as for the creation of games and virtual worlds; the field is considered to be less crowded than that of the large language models which underlie chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Emulate did not provide Bloomberg with a comment upon request, nor did Index or Lightspeed, and Creandum refused to comment.

This round of financing is the most recent in a series of very large early investments made by researchers leaving leading laboratories.

David Silver, a former scientist at DeepMind, raised $1.1bn for Ineffable Intelligence in April on the back of a $5.1bn valuation, and Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs, which is also developing world models, raised $1.03bn in March.

The discussions took place six weeks after a leadership change at DeepMind, during which Demis Hassabis resigned as chief executive to become chairman; Koray Kavukcuoglu, who was chief technology officer, assumed responsibility for the day-to-day operation of the lab; and a number of senior researchers have since left to set up their own companies.