source: techcrunch ai: the deepmind trio who built a poker ai are now making money for quant hedge funds
level: business
three former deepmind researchers who built an ai that beat humans at poker have applied the same technology to stock trading. their prague-based startup, equilibre technologies, is now valued at $500 million after a series a round led by creandum. the firm's vice president called it the largest single investment the firm has ever made in one go. the founders, ceo martin schmid, cto rudolf kadlec, and cso matej moravcik, created deepstack, the first ai to defeat pro players at no-limit poker, while visiting phd students at deepmind's edmonton office.
the common thread between poker and trading is reinforcement learning, where models learn through rewards. schmid noted that in trading, the scoring is simple: how much money the agent made. equilibre's algorithms have been trading billions in daily volume across the s&p 500 and nasdaq in partnership with quant firm tower research capital. the startup claims a perfect record of zero negative months since inception, starting with crypto markets in 2025 and expanding to stocks. this performance attracted creandum, which sees the total addressable market in financial trading as one of the largest on earth.
the founders are driven by building new things, not finance. they moved back to czechia to recruit from their network, building a team of 25. the location helps retain talent compared to san francisco. equilibre plans to scale its compute infrastructure, aiming for one of the largest clusters in central and eastern europe. while competitors like jane street use reinforcement learning with large language models and tens of thousands of gpus, equilibre focuses on getting more from fewer chips. schmid believes their four-year head start gives them an edge, but acknowledges the market is not winner-takes-all.
why it matters: reinforcement learning is moving from games to real-world financial systems, showing how ai can directly generate profit in high-stakes environments.
source: techcrunch ai: the deepmind trio who built a poker ai are now making money for quant hedge funds