The DeepMind trio who built a poker AI are now making money for quant hedge funds

Still, this is one of the more notable AI companies in the region for talent. It next plans to scale its compute infrastructure, bringing online what it expects will be one of the largest compute 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 funding rounds, with pre-seed backers including 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.

Sellers confirmed that the Series A $500 million valuation was a big jump. But it also comes after the winds have changed favorably for reinforcement learning (RL), 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.”

Still, 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,” while 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.” But this isn’t poker, and there might be no losers. Says Schmid: “This is not a winner-takes-all market.”