Emulate, a UK AI startup founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is in advanced talks to raise up to $700 million in a seed round, with Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners leading the round. The company's pre-money valuation is reported to be around $3.7 billion, although the terms have not yet been agreed and may still be subject to change.
The company was founded in August by Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill, and Philip Ball, all of whom were involved in DeepMind's world-model team. Jack Parker-Holder was one of the principal researchers on Genie 3, the model which DeepMind presented last year for generating interactive 3D environments from a text prompt.
World models are AI systems that are trained to simulate and predict the way in which the physical world behaves, making them useful for the training of robots and agents as well as for the creation of games and virtual worlds. This field is considered to be less crowded than that of large language models, which underlie chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
In other news, SpaceX has held informal internal talks about buying customer and operational records from troubled or defunct startups to train its AI models. The buyer would be SpaceXAI, whose training of Grok on European users' posts has been under statutory inquiry in Ireland since April 2025.
SpaceXAI wants cheap operational data and customer information to feed Grok, and has considered buying records from failed startups. However, this approach raises questions about data privacy and the lawful basis for processing such data. The European Data Protection Board's 2024 opinion states that the basis for processing data partly depends on what people would reasonably expect, and a customer of a company that no longer exists may have no expectations about Grok.
Emulate's seed round is the most recent in a series of large early investments made by researchers leaving leading laboratories. David Silver, a former scientist at DeepMind, raised $1.1 billion for Ineffable Intelligence in April on the back of a $5.1 billion valuation, and Yann LeCun's AMI Labs, which is also developing world models, raised $1.03 billion in March.
Cet article a été rédigé avec l'assistance de l'IA.
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