The DeepMind trio who built a poker AI, are now making money for quant hedge funds
Three former DeepMind researchers who created an AI that beat humans at poker have now applied the same technology to trading stocks — and the bet appears to be paying off. Their Prague-based AI lab, EquiLibre Technologies, is now valued at $500 million after raising an undisclosed-sum Series A, TechCrunch learned. According to Martin Schmid, EquiLibre CEO, “The nice thing about trading and markets is that the scoring is super simple: how much money did the agent make?” This isn’t just game money.
- ▪Three former DeepMind researchers who created an AI that beat humans at poker have now applied the same technology to trading stocks — and the bet appears to be paying off.
- ▪Their Prague-based AI lab, EquiLibre Technologies, is now valued at $500 million after raising an undisclosed-sum Series A, TechCrunch learned.
- ▪According to Martin Schmid, EquiLibre CEO, “The nice thing about trading and markets is that the scoring is super simple: how much money did the agent make?” This isn’t just game money.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/the-deepmind-trio-who-built-a-poker-ai-are-now-making-money-for-quant-hedge-funds/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:33:48 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-30T20:43:34.548Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-30T20:43:34.548Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zjP2ZHrDAHh3 |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Three former DeepMind researchers who created an AI that beat humans at poker have now applied the same technology to trading stocks — and the bet appears to be paying off. Their Prague-based AI lab, EquiLibre Technologies, is now valued at $500 million after raising an undisclosed-sum Series A, TechCrunch 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 one go into a company,” he told TechCrunch.The common denominator between poker and Wall Street is that they are well suited for reinforcement learning, an AI training technique where self-learning models are incentivized by rewards.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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