Month-old AI company already worth DKK 25 billion

A British AI company called Emulate was founded in August this year. Even so, the company is now raising up to $700 million (around DKK 4.8 billion) in its first funding round, a so-called seed round, which is the earliest form of investment in a new company. That would put Emulate's valuation at about $3.7 billion, or just over DKK 25 billion.

Behind the company are three former researchers from Google DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence division. Their names are Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill and Philip Ball. All three helped develop Genie, an AI model that can create interactive 3D environments from a short text prompt. When Genie came out last year, it sent shockwaves through the gaming industry and helped wipe out billions of dollars in market value at companies like Take-Two, Roblox and Unity.

Building world models

At Emulate, the three founders want to build so-called world models. These are AI models that learn how the physical world behaves, for example how a glass breaks when dropped, or how a robot arm should move to avoid bumping into something. Models of this kind can be used to test robots and other systems thousands of times in a computer simulation before they are tried out in reality.

According to several media outlets, the funding round is led by the two big venture capital firms Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, meaning investment firms that finance new companies in exchange for an ownership stake. The investment firm Creandum is also taking part in the round.

No product yet

What's remarkable is that none of the three founders has run a company before, and that Emulate is still in what the industry calls stealth mode. The company has neither a website nor a finished product, and it hasn't disclosed how many employees it has. So the investors are primarily betting on the founders' research background rather than a finished product.

Emulate is far from alone in raising enormous sums in a short time. The company is the third British DeepMind spin-out this year to raise an investment in the billion class. Earlier this year, both Ineffable Intelligence, with one billion dollars at a valuation of $5 billion, and Recursive Superintelligence, with $600 million at a valuation of $4 billion, raised similar sums.

For ordinary Danes, the story isn't about an app you can download tomorrow. But it shows how much money investors are currently willing to bet on AI that can predict and simulate the physical world. In the long run, technology like this could make robots, self-driving cars and factory automation significantly better and cheaper to develop.