AI Trading Lab EquiLibre Hits $500M Valuation in Series A

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-01

Prague-based EquiLibre Technologies, a frontier AI trading research lab that uses reinforcement learning in financial markets, just closed a Series A round at a valuation of over $500 million. This round was led by Creandum. Word is, it's their biggest investment ever. Most of the cash will go toward buying compute power to scale up operations, with plans to bring one of the largest compute clusters in the region online. ### Why Reinforcement Learning Matters in Trading Martin Schmid, co-founder of EquiLibre, put it bluntly: "Trading is one of the few fields where technology is the entire game. There's no sales cycle, and no marketing spend can rescue a weak product. The market is the judge, and the verdict updates every millisecond." He's right. That brutal feedback loop is exactly why reinforcement learning fits so well. The question isn't whether this approach works anymore—it's how big it can get. They've already proven the tech in the world's biggest and most liquid markets. ### A Bigger Pattern in European AI Funding EquiLibre's Series A is part of a wider 2026 trend. European companies applying AI, automation, and infrastructure software to financial markets are pulling in serious cash. Here are some comparable announcements: - 9fin raised $169 million for its AI-native debt-markets platform - Upvest scored $123 million for securities infrastructure - Midas landed $49 million in Series A for tokenised investment infrastructure - Performativ secured $13.6 million Series A for an AI-native wealth management operating system Earlier-stage activity includes Elastics' $1.9 million pre-Seed round for AI agents in prediction markets and Ekiden's $1.9 million Seed round for blockchain-based trading infrastructure. All told, relevant 2026 activity represents about $407 million in disclosed funding across AI-enabled financial software, capital-markets infrastructure, digital assets, and trading-related platforms. ### Building a Global Business from Prague "We want to build a global business from Prague," says Martin. "We are by far the most exciting company working on the frontier of applied AI research here, and this allows us to attract and retain amazing talent. Our ambitions are global, and we aim to build the world's leading AI trading company." The company was founded in 2022 by researchers from DeepMind and the team behind DeepStack—the first AI system to beat professional players at no-limit poker. After testing their tech in crypto, they moved into traditional financial markets. EquiLibre went live in early 2025, claiming to be the first company to deploy reinforcement learning agents on the world's largest and most competitive financial instruments. According to the company, these agents now trade billions of dollars daily and have never had a negative month. ### What the Series A Money Will Do The exact amount of the Series A is still under wraps, but the plan is clear: scale compute infrastructure. That new cluster will be one of the biggest in the region, helping the team make their models more profitable and expand into more products and markets. The team—drawn from DeepMind, Google, Jane Street, G-Research, and Optiver—is also looking to grow across research and engineering roles at their Prague headquarters in the coming months. ### Creandum's Biggest Bet Yet Cameron Sellers, Vice President at Creandum, says: "This is the largest investment we have ever made, showing the belief that we have in the future scaling of the technology. EquiLibre is doing what the best frontier labs do: picking a domain where the feedback loop is brutal and honest, and letting the technology speak for itself. Martin and the team have proven the approach in the hardest possible environment. We're thrilled to back them as they scale." It's a bold move. But if anyone can make reinforcement learning work at this scale, it's probably the team that built the first AI to beat poker pros.