- Emulate, a UK-based AI startup founded last month, is currently in advanced negotiations to raise funds.
- The Financial Times reports that the company could be valued at around $3.7 billion following this funding round.
- The funding round is expected to be jointly led by Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Three researchers who had devoted years to developing Google DeepMind’s Genie models, which can generate 3D worlds from a single prompt, have recently left to found their own company.
The startup Emulate, founded in August by Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill, and Philip Ball, is now reportedly in advanced negotiations for a potential fundraising round of up to $700 million, according to the Financial Times.
It is expected that Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners will jointly lead the round.
Meet the Genie alumni behind Emulate
None of the founders has run a company. Each of the three had been a member of DeepMind’s world-model team, Parker-Holder in particular being in charge of developing Genie 2 and Genie 3, systems capable of producing playable 3D environments from a single image or text prompt.
Emulate has not launched a product, not published a website, and has not disclosed how many people are on the team.
The science behind Emulate is complex, but the company’s approach is straightforward. While large language models attempt to predict the next word in a sentence, world models work by forecasting what will occur in real-world scenarios, for instance, predicting how a glass breaks when dropped or determining how a robot arm should move to avoid colliding with an object.
For example, a robotics team could use Emulate’s engine to test a warehouse picking strategy across thousands of simulations before implementing it on actual robots, thereby preventing costly mistakes.
Emulate is entering a highly competitive arena which includes a number of well-funded rivals. World Labs, which was founded by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, has raised $1.23 billion since 2024, and its Marble product has recently given it a valuation of almost $5 billion. Yann LeCun has now set up AMI Labs following his departure from Meta. Generalist, a company founded by former DeepMind staff, has reached a $3 billion valuation by training robots directly.
Although World Labs is concentrating on 3D-generation tools and Generalist is working on robot policies, Emulate’s founders are most famous for their research into open-ended simulation, not for selling commercial products.
A DeepMind founder factory
If the round ends as stated, Emulate would become one of Index and Lightspeed’s most significant investments in AI. Index has likewise backed the protein-design company Cradle and was involved in Ineffable Intelligence‘s most recent funding round.
Emulate would be the third UK ‘neo-lab’ originating from DeepMind to aim for a nine- or ten-figure funding raise this year. In April, David Silver’s company, Ineffable Intelligence, completed the largest-ever seed round in Europe, raising $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion valuation. It was in the same month that Tim Rocktäschel’s Recursive Superintelligence raised $500 million at a $4 billion valuation.
Research by the firm Evertrace shows that 112 DeepMind alumni have either started or are believed to be starting companies in the past 18 months, more than a quarter of them being based in the UK.
The AI sector for physical products, which involves world models used to train robots and autonomous systems, is currently small but is expected to expand from $1.5 billion in 2026 to $15.24 billion by 2032.
A company that has only just been established, has no product, and yet is worth $3.7 billion, is in a better position than Emulate to explain just how rare top AI talent is, since Emulate’s technology has not been shown outside of the agreement in question.
The real challenge will be whether Emulate or other DeepMind spin-offs can turn their impressive demonstrations into products that robotics companies are actually willing to buy.
