A startup founded by a former DeepMind researcher has raised $1.1 billion in seed funding — the largest seed round in AI history — to pursue what the company calls "phase 2 AI": systems that don't just respond to prompts but pursue long-horizon goals autonomously.
The company, which has not publicly disclosed its name, is reportedly working on research that challenges the scaling-laws assumptions that have guided most frontier AI labs. If the research delivers, it could represent a fundamental shift in AI capability rather than an incremental improvement.
Investors were drawn by the founder's track record and the thesis that the current AI boom is still in its early innings — with the real breakthroughs still ahead.