DeepMind’s Genie creators launch Emulate, seeking $700M to build world models for robotics and simulation: Report

Three former Google DeepMind researchers have started Emulate, a UK AI startup that is already in advanced talks for a huge round. The Financial Times says the company could raise up to $700 million and end up valued at about $3.7 billion. Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners are expected to lead it together.

The founders are Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill and Philip Ball, who left DeepMind after years on its world-model work. Parker-Holder helped lead Genie 2 and Genie 3, the systems that can build playable 3D environments from a single image or a text prompt. That pedigree is the entire pitch right now. Emulate was founded in August, has no product, no website and has not said how many people work there.

Its bet is on world models, not chatbots. Large language models predict the next word; these systems try to predict what happens in the physical world. Think of a glass falling, or a robot arm moving around an obstacle. In robotics, that could mean testing a warehouse-picking plan across thousands of simulations before anyone risks real hardware.

The catch is that Emulate is walking into a crowded and very well-funded field. World Labs, founded by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, has raised $1.23 billion since 2024 and says its Marble product has pushed it to a valuation of almost $5 billion. Generalist, another DeepMind-linked company, has reached $3 billion by training robots directly, while Yann LeCun has launched AMI Labs after leaving Meta.

If the deal closes as reported, Emulate would become one of the biggest AI investments for both Index and Lightspeed. It would also be the third UK DeepMind spin-off this year to chase a nine- or ten-figure raise, after Ineffable Intelligence and Recursive Superintelligence. The bigger question is whether these lab-born demos can survive contact with actual buyers.