UK and Europe Land 33% of New Startups Founded by DeepMind Alumni

Former Google DeepMind employees have founded 37 startups in the UK and Europe in the past 12 months, according to data from founder intelligence platform Evertrace.

In total, 112 DeepMind alumni have launched a startup since Q2 2025, with 70 of these based in the United States, 28 in the United Kingdom, three in Spain, two in Switzerland, two in Germany, one in Austria, and one in Poland.

At a time when the EU has a reputation for hampering innovation via perceived over-regulation, and when the UK is being described as the ‘sick man’ of Europe, the significant percentage of DeepMind-linked startups being founded in the continent may come as a welcome sign of growth.

And at a time when legal proceedings between OpenAI’s co-founders have revealed that Elon Musk had a consuming fear that DeepMind would end up dominating the AI industry, it highlights just how fertile Google’s research lab is as an incubator of emerging tech talent.

A breeding ground for the next generation of AI models?

Recent weeks have already provided some fairly strong signs of the health of Europe’s tech sector, including the news that the total value of VC deals in Europe in Q1 topped $25.7 billion.

This was its highest level since 2022, yet the UK and Europe have every chance of surpassing this figure in Q2, at least judging by some of the funding rounds that have been completed since the beginning of April.

One of the biggest of these was closed by Ineffable Intelligence, which came out of stealth last month to break Europe’s record for a seed funding round, raising $1.1 billion.

Ineffable was founded by David Silver, who up until a few weeks ago worked at Google DeepMind, where he led research into reinforcement learning.

Ineffable will build on this research to develop frontier AIs that aren’t large language models (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude), and what’s interesting is that other UK-based startups with ties to DeepMind are also working on comparable alternatives to LLMs.

Most notably, Recursive Superintelligence raised $500 million in an April funding round led by Google Ventures, with the London-based startup featuring ex-DeepMind principal scientist Tim Rocktäschel, as well as former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher.

Recursive aims to develop an AI system capable of learning by itself, in part via the use of world models, which enable it to construct logics that may avoid the hallucinations typical of LLMs.

But what’s also interesting about the 112 founders Evertrace has identified is that their (planned) startups span a relatively wide range of sectors, even if 70 of them (approximately 62%) can be classed as working primarily in core AI.

As for the rest, the breakdown is as follows:

• 19% (or 22) in data & analytics.
• 13% (14) in healthtech.
• 8% (9) in biotech.
• 8% (9) in robotics.
• 5% (6) in dev tools.
• 4% (5) in fintech.
• 3% in consumer products.
• 3% in industrial applications.
• 2% in cybersecurity.
• 2% in edtech.
• 2% in social media.

Evertrace also tell TechRepublic that there’s a ‘long tail’ of ‘one or two’ founders or startups each working in a variety of other sectors, such as defencetech, mobilitytech, legaltech, marketplaces, AR/VR, blockchain, creative industries, foodtech, hardware, HRtech, IoT, martech, pharma, quantum computing, and wearables.

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The expanding DeepMind ‘mafia’

For Evertrace co-founder Jacob Houlberg, this wide diversity is just as interesting as the fact that some of the biggest DeepMind-linked startups are working on novel types of AI.

“The more interesting nuance is the second-layer applications,” he tells TechRepublic. “It is not a wave of generic foundation-model startups, it is AI being pushed into specific verticals.”

Recursive and Ineffable Intelligence may be two of the most prominent, yet some other European startups with DeepMind alumni include Mentiora.ai, a Switzerland-based company founded by former Gemini engineering lead Alexander Taboriskiy, who with Mentiora.ai is now developing an enterprise-grade engine for AI agents in customer experience.

Another interesting example is Munich-based Omnisent, which was co-founded by former DeepMind researcher Ann-Kristin Balve, and which raised $3 million in pre-seed funding last year to build its acoustic AI platform for drone detection.

And if we go beyond the 12 months in which the identified 112 founders have started new businesses, we encounter some very other significant members of the so-called Google DeepMind ‘mafia.’

Chief amongst these is France’s Mistral AI, which to date has raised $3.1 billion to build frontier AI models, while Isomorphic Labs — which was founded in 2022 by Demis Hassabis — has raised over $600 million.

This puts total funding for European DeepMind offshoots at well over $5 billion, highlighting just how important Google’s AI research lab is for the UK and European tech sectors, in terms of both innovation and economic output.

According to Jacob Houlberg, DeepMind has become such a fertile breeding ground for startups because it combines frontier research, world-class talent, and a highly ambitious culture.

He explains, “That mix naturally creates founders, and highly fundable companies. What’s unusual is the scale — very few companies of DeepMind’s size have produced this many influential AI startups.”