A British AI startup, Emulate, founded just last month by three former Google Deepmind researchers, is reportedly nearing a $4bn (£2.9bn) valuation. This comes despite the company currently having no product or website.
Emulate is in advanced talks to raise as much as $700m in a seed funding round, led by Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. This deal would value the company at $3.7bn, including the new capital, though terms are not yet finalised and could change.
The startup was incorporated in August 2026 by Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill, and Philip Ball. These founders previously worked on Deepmind's Genie technology, with Parker-Holder leading Genie 2 development and all three contributing to Genie 3, a world model capable of generating interactive environments from text prompts.
Emulate is focusing on developing 'world models', which are AI systems designed to simulate and predict the behaviour of physical environments. Unlike large language models, world models aim to understand how actions affect an environment, potentially allowing for applications such as testing robotics in simulated environments.
Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, stated that the deal reflects investors betting on "future capability creation, not present revenue or commercial traction." He added that investors are increasingly backing elite AI research teams before they achieve product-market fit, particularly in frontier domains.