EquiLibre Technologies, a Prague-based AI lab founded by three former DeepMind researchers, has raised a Series A round that values the company at more than $500 million, TechCrunch reported on June 30, 2026. The round was led by Creandum, whose vice president Cameron Sellers described it as the largest single investment the firm has ever made in one company, though the exact sum was not disclosed.
The startup was founded by CEO Martin Schmid, CTO Rudolf Kadlec, and CSO Matej Moravcik — the trio behind DeepStack, the first AI program to defeat professional players at no-limit Texas hold ’em poker. They built DeepStack while visiting PhD students at DeepMind’s Edmonton, Alberta research office, which Alphabet shut down in 2023. The founders subsequently relocated to Czechia, their home country, establishing EquiLibre in 2022 with a current headcount of 25 people.
The company applies reinforcement learning — the same AI training technique used in its poker work — to financial markets. In partnership with quant firm Tower Research Capital, EquiLibre’s algorithms trade billions of dollars in daily volume across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The startup says its agents have posted zero negative months since launching on crypto markets in 2025 and subsequently expanding to stock exchanges.
Schmid noted that trading suits reinforcement learning because performance measurement is straightforward: “how much money did the agent make?” Despite operating in a field where competitors like Jane Street claim to already use reinforcement learning alongside LLMs and tens of thousands of high-end GPUs, Schmid said EquiLibre’s four-year head start gives it an advantage, and characterized the market as one where “there might be no losers.”
The Series A follows a $10 million seed round led by Blossom Capital at a $140 million valuation, according to Dealroom data. EquiLibre plans to use the new funding to scale its compute infrastructure, with the goal of building one of the largest compute clusters in Central and Eastern Europe.
Source: TechCrunch