Three ex-DeepMind researchers have moved from beating humans at poker to generating returns for quant hedge funds, and their new Prague lab, EquiLibre Technologies, is now valued at $500 million after raising a Series A round.
The pivot to trading
The investment round was led by Creandum. Vice president Cameron Sellers told TechCrunch that the deal represented the largest single investment the firm has ever made in one go into a company, though the exact size remains undisclosed.
The link between poker and Wall Street is simple: both rely on reinforcement learning. This is an AI training method where self-learning models are incentivised by rewards. Martin Schmid, EquiLibre CEO, noted that scoring in markets is straightforward.
“The nice thing about trading and markets is that the scoring is super simple: how much money did the agent make?”
Performance so far
EquiLibre is not dealing with game money. Working with quant firm Tower Research Capital, its algorithms trade billions in daily volume across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The startup claims its agents have performed well since rolling out on crypto markets in 2025 and moving to stock exchanges.
Since inception, the system has maintained a record of zero negative months. Every month ends with the investments up overall.
A lab, not a finance firm
Automating strategies in hedge funds is a field where improvements can quickly turn into cash. This appeal drew Creandum in, according to Sellers. He pointed to the massive potential total addressable market of trading, noting that countless funds have generated profits that make most venture-backed successes look small.
Sellers noted that EquiLibre explicitly defines itself as “a lab first, not a finance firm.” Schmid and his co-founders, CTO Rudolf Kadlec and CSO Matej Moravcik, have no background in finance. Schmid told TechCrunch that the motivation is building new things rather than making markets efficient.
“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.
DeepMind origins and the move to Prague
Frontier AI by DeepMind alumni is a hot pursuit for VCs. Another example is Ineffable Intelligence, which recently raised 1.1 billion. Most of these firms are based in the U.K., with EquiLibre being a notable exception.
The founding trio were visiting PhD students at the Google-owned company’s first international AI research office in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Alphabet shut that office down in 2023. While there, they built DeepStack, the first AI program to defeat pro players at no-limit poker, also known as Texas hold ’em.
They also worked with professors who now sit on the startup’s high-profile advisory board. This includes Rich Sutton, who received the Turing award in 2024 for his work on reinforcement learning.
To build the startup, the founders moved back to their home country, Czechia. Schmid said they had many contacts there, including a large Czech diaspora at Google and other places. They asked friends if they wanted to join them in Prague.
This helped EquiLibre build its initial team in 2022 and reach a current headcount of 25 people. Schmid said the location choice keeps paying dividends. Compared to San Francisco, it is much easier to retain talent because there is not a new sexy AI thing happening every two months.
Not that EquiLibre is the only hot AI startup in town. BottleCap AI is based in the same building.
Still, this is one of the more notable AI companies in the region for talent. The next plan is to scale its compute infrastructure, bringing online what it expects will be one of the largest compute clusters in Central and Eastern Europe.
Funding history
While the startup declined to disclose its total funding to date, Schmid said it previously raised two other rounds. Pre-seed backers included CEE-focused VC firm Credo, which also backed ElevenLabs and UiPath.
According to Dealroom data, EquiLibre’s $10 million seed round was led by Blossom Capital at a $140 million valuation.
Competitors and risks
Sellers confirmed that the Series A $500 million valuation was a big jump. This comes after the winds have changed favourably for reinforcement learning, 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.”
There is a risk that the startup will get leapfrogged by competitors. Trading giant Jane Street, for instance, states it already uses RL with LLMs, “or whatever else we need to train good models.” It also claims it has “tens of thousands of high-end GPUs.”
EquiLibre is seeking to squeeze more compute out of way fewer chips and “get more from less,” Schmid said. Considering how profitable Jane Street is, EquiLibre will have to play its cards well in order to reach its goal to be known as “the AI lab in trading.”
This is not poker, and there might be no losers. Schmid said: “This is not a winner-takes-all market.”
