Three former DeepMind researchers who developed an AI that beats humans at poker have now applied the same technology to stock trading – and the bet appears to be paying off. Her Prague-based AI lab EquiLibre Technologies is now valued at $500 million after raising an undisclosed Series A sum, TechCrunch has learned.
The round was led by Creandum, and although the VC also declined to disclose the size of the round, Vice President Cameron Sellers confirmed that it was the largest single investment “the firm has ever made in a company at once,” he told TechCrunch.
The common denominator between poker and Wall Street is that they are well-suited to reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that encourages self-learning models through rewards. According to Martin Schmid, CEO of EquiLibre: “The beauty of trading and markets is that valuation is very simple: How much money did the agent make?”
This isn’t just play money. Working with quantitative firm Tower Research Capital, EquiLibre’s algorithms have driven billions of dollars in daily trading volume across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The startup claims that its agents have performed well since launching in crypto markets in 2025 and now on exchanges, with “a perfect record of zero negative months since inception,” meaning they have ended each month with increasing investments overall.
By applying its AI to quantitative hedge funds, the startup is in a space where automation is commonplace and improvements can quickly become monetized if successful. That made the startup attractive to Creandum, Sellers said.
“The potential total addressable market for trading in financial markets is one of the largest in the world, and there are countless funds that have generated large amounts of profits over the years that dwarf most venture capital-backed successes,” Sellers said. However, he noted that EquiLibre explicitly defines itself as “primarily a laboratory, not a financial company.”
Schmid and his two founders – CTO Rudolf Kadlec and CSO Matej Moravcik – do not have a background in finance, and that is not what drives them, he told TechCrunch. “I don’t do this because I enjoy making markets efficient. I do this because we’re all excited about building new things that have never been built before, and it’s a lot of fun to build that,” Schmid said.
The prospect of Frontier AI through DeepMind alumni is also an area being closely pursued by VCs. Another recent example of this type is Ineffable Intelligence, which recently raised 1.1 billion. Most of these are based in the UK, but there are notable exceptions, including EquiLibre.
In the case of EquiLibre’s founding trio, they visited graduate students at the Google-owned company’s first international AI research office in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (which Alphabet closed in 2023). There they built DeepStack, the first AI program to beat professional players at no-limit poker, also known as Texas Hold’em. They also worked with professors who now serve on the startup’s high-profile advisory board – including Rich Sutton, who received the 2024 Turing Award for his work on reinforcement learning.
To build their startup, the founders of EquiLibre decided to return to their home country of the Czech Republic. “Here we had a lot of people we worked with and there was a large Czech diaspora at Google and elsewhere,” Schmid said. “They were our friends, so we told them, ‘Hey guys, we’re moving back to Prague, do you want to come with us?'”
This helped EquiLibre build its first team in 2022 and reach its current headcount of 25 employees; But according to Schmid, this choice of location continues to pay off. Compared to San Francisco, “it’s a lot easier to keep the good people here because there’s 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 most notable AI companies in the region when it comes to talent. Next, the company plans to scale its computing infrastructure and bring online what it expects to be the largest computing cluster in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
While the startup also declined to disclose its total funding to date, Schmid said it had previously closed two additional rounds of funding with pre-seed backers, including CEE-focused VC firm Credo, which also backed ElevenLabs and UiPath. EquiLibre’s $10 million seed round was led by Blossom Capital at a valuation of $140 million, according to dealroom data.
Sellers confirmed that the $500 million Series A valuation represented a big jump. But it also comes after the wind has turned favorably for Reinforcement Learning (RL), including in retail. “When we started, people were skeptical,” said Schmid. But now RL is the standard. “Because we started four years ago, we believe we are ahead.”
However, there is a risk that the startup will be overtaken by the competition. For example, retail giant Jane Street says it already uses RL with LLMs, “or whatever else we need to train good models.” It also claims to have “tens of thousands of high-end GPUs,” as EquiLibre seeks to squeeze more computing power from significantly fewer chips and “do more with less,” Schmid said.
Considering how profitable Jane Street is, EquiLibre will have to play its cards well to achieve its goal of being known as “The AI laboratory in retail.” But this isn’t poker and there may be no losers. Schmid says, “This is not a winner-take-all market.”
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https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/the-deepmind-trio-who-built-a-poker-ai-are-now-making-money-for-quant-hedge-funds/
