DeepMind spinout Emulate nears $3.7bn valuation in new funding talks

In short: Emulate, a new UK company started by former Google DeepMind researchers, is in talks to raise up to $700 million at a valuation close to $3.7 billion.

What happened

Emulate was incorporated in August and is only about a month old, according to the Financial Times. The company has been operating quietly, without a public profile.

The FT reports that Emulate is in advanced talks with investors to raise as much as $700 million. The deal would value the company at about $3.7 billion, including the new money coming in. Index Ventures, based in the UK, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, based in Silicon Valley, are expected to lead the funding round together, according to people familiar with the talks.

Emulate was founded by former DeepMind researchers including Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill, and Philip Ball. They previously worked on DeepMind’s “Genie” work, which can create realistic videos and interactive 3D scenes from a short text prompt.

The FT says Emulate is part of a growing wave of startups founded by researchers leaving large AI labs. These new teams can raise large sums partly based on the founders’ track records, sometimes before releasing a product.

Why it matters

This is another sign that investors are putting huge amounts of money into small groups of well known AI researchers. For regular people, it can affect what kinds of AI products appear next, especially tools for making video and 3D worlds (like giving a computer a short instruction and getting a playable scene back). It also shows why AI companies spend so much on computing power and hiring, since those are major costs for building these systems.

Source: Financial Times