Three former DeepMind researchers who created an AI that beat people at poker have now applied the same technology to stock trading — and the gamble seems to be paying off. Their Prague-based AI lab, EquiLibre Technologiesis now valued at $500 million after raising an undisclosed Series A amount, according to TechCrunch.
The round was led by Creandum, and although the VC also declined to disclose the size of the round, VP Cameron Sellers confirmed it was the largest single investment the firm has “ever made in a company,” he told TechCrunch.
The common denominator between poker and Wall Street is that they are amenable to reinforcement learning, an artificial intelligence training technique where self-learning models are motivated by rewards. According to Martin Schmid, CEO of EquiLibre, “The nice thing about trading and buying is that the score is extremely simple: how much money did the agent make?”
This isn’t just in-game money. In partnership with quantitative firm Tower Research CapitalEquiLibre’s algorithms trade billions in daily volume on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The startup claims that its agents have been doing well since launching in the crypto markets in 2025 and now on the exchanges, with a “perfect record of zero negative months since inception,” meaning they have finished each month with their investments in total.
By applying its AI to the quantification of hedge funds, the startup is in a field where automation is commonplace and, if successful, improvements can quickly turn into cash. That made the startup attractive to Creandum, Sellers said.
“The potential total addressable trading market in financial markets is one of the largest in the world, and there are countless funds over the years that have made a profit that makes most venture-backed successes look small,” Sellers said. However, he noted that EquiLibre explicitly defines itself as “a lab first, not a financial company.”
Schmid and his two founders — CTO Rudolf Kadlec and CSO Matej Moravcik — don’t have a background in finance, and that’s not what drives them, he told TechCrunch. “I’m not doing this because I’m excited about making markets efficient. I’m doing it because we’re all excited about building new things that have never been built before, and that’s a lot of fun to build,” Schmid said.
The prospect of frontier AI from DeepMind alumni is an area hotly sought after by VCs as well. Another recent such example is Ineffable Intelligence, which recently raised 1.1 billion. Most of them are based in the UK, but they do exist notable exceptionsincluding EquiLibre.
In the case of EquiLibre’s founding trio, they were visiting PhD students at the Google-owned company’s first international AI office in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (which Alphabet shut down in 2023.) While there, they built DeepStackthe first AI program to beat professional players in no-limit poker, aka Keep them in Texas. They also worked with professors who are now part of the startup’s high-profile advisory board — including Rich Sutton, who received the Turing Award in 2024 for his work in reinforcement learning.
To create their startup, the founders of EquiLibre decided to return to their home country, the Czech Republic. “Here we had a lot of people we had worked with and there was a large Czech diaspora at Google and other places,” Schmid said. “These were our friends, so we said, ‘Hey guys, we’re coming back to Prague, do you want to come with us?’
This helped EquiLibre build its initial team in 2022 and reach its current number of 25 people. but according to Schmid, this location choice continues to pay dividends. Compared to San Francisco, “It’s a lot easier to keep the good people here, because there’s not something new sexy AI happening every couple of months.”
Not that EquiLibre is the only hot AI startup in town. BottleCap AI is located in the same building.
However, this is one of the most notable AI companies in the region for talent. It then plans to scale its computing infrastructure, bringing online what it expects to be one of the largest computer clusters in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
While the startup also declined to disclose its total funding to date, Schmid said it previously raised two other rounds of funding, with upfront backers including CEE-focused VC firm Credo, which also backed ElevenLabs and UiPath. According to Dealroom dataEquiLibre’s $10 million round led by Blossom Capital at a $140 million valuation.
Sellers confirmed that the $500 million Series A valuation was a big jump. But it also comes after the winds have shifted in favor of reinforcement learning (RL), including trading. “When we started, people were skeptical,” Schmid said. But now RL is the standard. “Because we started four years ago, we think we’re ahead.”
However, there is a risk that the startup will outpace competitors. Shopping giant Jane Street, for example, states that 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,” while EquiLibre seeks to squeeze more computing from far fewer chips and “get more from less,” Schmid said.
Considering how profitable Jane Street isEquiLibre will have to play its cards right to achieve its goal of becoming known as “the AI Lab in Trading.” But this isn’t poker, and there may be no losers. Says Schmid: “This is not a winner-takes-all market.”
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