A London AI lab founded a few months ago, with no product and a team of under 20 people, just raised $1.1 billion. It is called Ineffable Intelligence. The name means too great to be expressed in words. They chose that before building anything.

The founder is David Silver, the DeepMind researcher who built AlphaGo. The company's website describes its ambition as a breakthrough "of comparable magnitude to Darwin." Not inspired by Darwin. Comparable to Darwin. The investors include Sequoia, Lightspeed, Google, Nvidia, and the UK government's own Sovereign AI Fund.

This is a seed round. The product does not yet exist. The valuation is $5.1 billion. A company incorporated last year, named after a concept meaning beyond description, has raised more money at seed than most mature businesses raise in a lifetime, on the basis that its founder once beat a professional at Go.

The bar for a $5 billion valuation in London in 2026 is: a Nobel-adjacent researcher, a suitably cosmic company name, and a stated intention to contact superintelligence. Revenue is, at this stage, a secondary consideration.