Google DeepMind alumni have founded dozens of European startups or plan to launch startups in the past 18 months, new data shows.
Ex-DeepMind luminary David Silver captured headlines last month when his new UK AI lab Ineffable Intelligence landed a massive $1.1bn seed funding round.
But data shows that Silver is one of 112 alumni of DeepMind, which was founded in the UK, who in the past 18 months have launched a startup or are believed to be launching one.
The data has been sourced from Evertrace, a data firm which helps VCs and investors with investment decisions. Evertrace gathered the data from a range of public sources, including Companies House, patents and research grants.
DeepMind doing for AI what Klarna and Spotify did for European tech
Jacob Houlberg, Evertrace co-founder, said: “We are seeing that DeepMind is doing for AI what Klarna and Spotify did for European tech.
“It’s compounding into a founder factory. David Silver is the headline, but the pipeline behind him is the real story.”
Of the 112 new startups identified, 70 have been identified as being in the US, 28 in the UK, three in Spain, two in Switzerland, Germany and Canada and one in Austria, Poland, Hong Kong, India and South Korea.
Thirty-eight have started a new company, while 74 have moved into a stealth role.
The startups identified each have a LinkedIn company page and an active website.
A “stealth” role is a term typically used when an individual is launching a new startup, although Tech.eu has not ascertained fully whether each “stealth” role equates to a new startup.
One of the most prominent names identified is Saining Xie, an ex-DeepMind scientist and computer science professor at NYU, who began the research project that spawned the diffusion transformer in 2022.
Xie is now the chief science officer and co-founder at Advanced Machine Intelligence, the high-profile AI world model startup founded by former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun.
Another DeepMind heavy-hitter is senior researcher Wojciech Marian Czarnecki who has joined Ineffable Intelligence as chief scientific officer, though he did not make the list as he is not a founder.
Meanwhile, ex-DeepMind scientist and Stanford professor of psychology and computer science Noah Goodman is the co-founder of US AI startup Humans&, which wants to empower people rather than replace them and which raised $480m in a seed funding round earlier this year.
UK startups
In the UK, examples include former DeepMind scientist Olivier Henaff, who is now the co-founder of Cursive, an AI foundation model startup. Cursive recently received backing from the government-backed VC fund Sovereign AI.
Meanwhile, a trio of former DeepMind interns have set up tech companies.
Guanming Wang has set up vision-language-model AI startup General Instinct; Arhaan Shaikh has co-founded healthcare data infrastructure startup Wizzaid; and Abdul Raheem Nazir has co-founded tech research startup Experiqlabs.
Another notable DeepMind reinforcement learning researcher, Edward Hughes, is in a stealth role.
Across Europe
Across Europe, Alexander Taboriskiy, a former software engineering lead on Gemini at DeepMind, is the CEO and co-founder of Zurich-based Mentiora, which is building a “next-gen” AI platform.
Former DeepMind consultant Angelos Chionis has founded Paris-based FormalistAI, an AI legal outfit, and Ann-Kristin Balve, who received a scholarship from DeepMind, co-founded Munich-based defence tech startup Omnisent.
In the US
In the US, examples include former DeepMind Gemini scientist Pierre-Alexandre Kamienny, who is the co-founder of Kinro, which is building AI sales agents and Pouya Samangouei, former DeepMind search engineer, who has founded AI agent platform ROI-AI.