Big Tech AI researchers launch billion-dollar labs

Since early 2025, $18.8 billion in VC funding has flowed into newly founded AI startups, on pace to surpass the $27.9 billion raised by companies founded since last year.

• DeepMind's AlphaGo developer David Silver closed a $1.1 billion seed round for Ineffable Intelligence.
• Former DeepMind researcher Tim Rocktäschel is pursuing up to $1 billion in funding for Recursive Superintelligence.
• AMI Labs, founded by former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, announced a $1 billion raise in March.
• Former OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI personnel have also moved to Ricursive Intelligence ($335 million), Periodic Labs ($300 million), Humans&, and others.

Within large labs, intensifying benchmark competition and pressure for rapid launches are reportedly pushing back exploratory research into new architectures, agents, interpretability, and vertical models.

The new labs are focusing on reinforcement learning, autonomous reasoning, chip design, and agentic systems, and with multiple new entrants backed by Sequoia Capital, Google, and even NVIDIA, the movement of talent and capital is accelerating.