A startup founded by three ex-Google DeepMind researchers which builds AI agents to trade across the Nasdaq says it has hit a valuation of more than $500m, following fresh funding.
Prague-based EquiLibre Technologies says it has closed a Series A funding round, but did not disclose how much it has raised.
The funding round was led by European early-stage investor Creandum, which, the VC said, marked its single biggest investment in a startup.
EquiLibre builds reinforcement learning agents which trade billions of dollars on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq financial markets daily, it said. Reinforcement learning is when AI models learn from experience. The founders are the team behind DeepStack, the first AI to beat human professional players at no-limit Texas hold'em poker.
The majority of the capital raised will go towards purchasing compute power to scale the operation, the startup said.
Founded in 2022, the startup leveraged its tech in crypto before moving to traditional financial markets. Last year, it said it became the first company to deploy reinforcement learning agents live on key financial markets.
It says its agents now trade billions of dollars daily, via a partnership with a quant firm.
EquiLibre's earliest backers include Richard Sutton, a recent Turing award laureate and a key figure in reinforcement learning.
Martin Schmid, co-founder of EquiLibre, said: "Trading is one of the few fields where technology is the entire game. There's no sales cycle, and no marketing spend can rescue a weak product.
"The market is the judge, and the verdict updates every millisecond. That's what drew us to the problem, and it's why reinforcement learning is such a natural fit.
"The question is no longer whether this approach works. It's how big it can get. We've proven the technology in the world's biggest and most liquid markets."