Ineffable Intelligence has handed the title of cofounder to six people who did not found it. Four come from Google DeepMind, one from InstaDeep, and one from the Seattle venture firm that wrote the company’s first cheque. The London startup is ten months old, has no product, and carries a $5 billion valuation.
Jeremy Kahn reported the hires for Fortune on Monday, in a story the magazine ran as an exclusive. Ineffable confirmed them and declined to comment further. All six had updated their LinkedIn profiles to show the new roles, which is how the appointments became visible at all.
The four from DeepMind are Chris Apps, Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt, and Junhyuk Oh. Alexandre Laterre arrives from InstaDeep, the London company BioNTech bought in 2023, where he ran research. Heather Gorham was a partner at Flying Fish, one of Ineffable’s earliest backers.
The AlphaStar band, back together
Apps, Czarnecki, and Oh all worked with David Silver on AlphaStar, the system that reached grandmaster level at StarCraft II in 2019. Espeholt built weather models on Google’s MetNet. Ineffable is not assembling a general-purpose research staff. It is rebuilding one specific team from one specific era of DeepMind, the era before the lab reorganised itself around shipping Gemini.
