EquiLibre Technologies raises Series A at $500 million valuation

Prague-based artificial intelligence lab EquiLibre Technologies has secured a Series A funding round, valuing the company at $500 million. The investment was led by venture capital firm Creandum. According to Cameron Sellers, vice president at Creandum, the round represents the largest single investment the firm has made in one go into a company. While the exact funding amount was not disclosed, the valuation marks a big jump from EquiLibre’s previous $10 million seed round, which was led by Blossom Capital at a $140 million valuation. The startup also previously raised a pre-seed round from Central and Eastern Europe-focused venture capital firm Credo.

EquiLibre applies reinforcement learning—an AI training technique where models are incentivized by rewards—to financial trading. The startup explicitly defines itself as an AI lab rather than a finance firm, partnering with quant firm Tower Research Capital to apply its models to quant hedge funds (investment funds that use quantitative analysis). Its algorithms have been trading billions in daily volume across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq stock indexes. Following a rollout on crypto markets in 2025, the company asserts it has achieved a perfect record of zero negative months since inception. “The nice thing about trading and markets is that the scoring is super simple: how much money did the agent make?” said Martin Schmid, EquiLibre’s CEO and co-founder.

Schmid founded the company in 2022 alongside CTO Rudolf Kadlec and CSO Matej Moravcik. The trio previously worked as researchers at DeepMind’s office in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, before Alphabet shut down the facility in 2023. While there, they developed DeepStack, an AI program that defeated professional players at poker. To build their startup, the founders returned to Czechia, growing their Prague-based team to 25 people. The company’s advisory board includes Rich Sutton, a reinforcement learning pioneer who received the Turing award in 2024.

With the new funding, EquiLibre plans to scale its compute infrastructure, expecting to build one of the largest compute clusters in Central and Eastern Europe. However, the startup faces competition from trading giant Jane Street, which already uses reinforcement learning, and other AI startups such as Ineffable Intelligence, which raised 1.1 billion. The source notes there is a risk that EquiLibre could be leapfrogged by these competitors, particularly as Jane Street operates with tens of thousands of GPUs, while EquiLibre plans to squeeze more compute out of fewer chips.

Why it matters

EquiLibre’s $500 million valuation highlights the growing investor appetite for frontier AI applications in high-stakes, non-traditional sectors like quantitative finance, moving beyond standard LLM hype.