UK AI startup Emulate raises $700M in new funding round

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Project funding news broke Tuesday as UK-based AI startup Emulate secured $700 million in a new funding round led by Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The deal values the company at $3.7 billion. Founded in August 2026 by Jack Parker-Holder and Matthew McGill, both former DeepMind employees, Emulate had operated in stealth mode. The firm is the third DeepMind London spinout to secure major funding this year. New token listings remain a key focus for investors in the AI and blockchain sectors.
UK AI startup Emulate has raised $700 million in funding, led by Index Ventures and Lightspeed, with a post-money valuation of approximately $3.7 billion.

Author and source: AIBase

UK AI startup Emulate launches new funding round

On Wednesday, September 16, the UK AI startup Emulate launched a new funding round aiming to raise up to $700 million, with a post-money valuation of approximately $3.7 billion, led by Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Emulate was founded in August 2026 by founders Jack Parker-Holder and Matthew McGill, both former employees of Google DeepMind, who previously contributed to the creation of DeepMind’s Genie world model.

Genie can generate realistic videos and interactive 3D environments from brief prompts; when it was released in January, it sent shockwaves through the gaming industry, wiping out billions of dollars in combined market value for Take-Two, Roblox, and Unity. Trained to understand and replicate physical spaces, the model is considered a new frontier in AI research—a field that remains less crowded than the race behind large language models powering ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Emulate previously operated in stealth mode and is the third UK startup this year to emerge from DeepMind’s London office with hundreds of millions in funding.

New companies led by former researchers from major AI firms are commonly referred to as "neo-labs" and have attracted tens of billions of dollars in funding this year, often achieving massive valuations before even releasing a product, based primarily on the founders' reputations. Last month, Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean left to found the AI startup Discovery Loop; David Silver, a former researcher at DeepMind, raised approximately $1 billion for Ineffable Intelligence at a $5 billion valuation; and Recursive Superintelligence, founded by a team of former engineers from DeepMind and OpenAI, raised over $600 million at a $4 billion valuation.

The two largest costs for such companies are computing power financing and recruiting top-tier researchers.

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