Google's head of AI invested in the angel round of Anthropic, one of its biggest competitors.
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Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind and Nobel Prize winner, once quietly invested in Anthropic as a personal angel investor—a company now considered one of Google’s strongest rivals in the AI business.
According to a recent report by the UK’s Financial Times, this investment had never been disclosed before. People familiar with the matter revealed that Hassabis became a shareholder at Anthropic’s early stage. Anthropic is currently valued as high as $900 billion, making it one of the fastest-growing AI startups in the world.
It is noteworthy that Google as a company has also separately invested billions of dollars in Anthropic, establishing a cooperative relationship in cloud computing and AI. In other words, Google is both a strategic investor in Anthropic, and its AI leader is also an early personal shareholder of Anthropic—a rather delicate relationship.
According to people close to Anthropic, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei sees Hassabis as a role model.
Hassabis’s “AI Circle of Friends”
Hassabis’s investment portfolio extends far beyond just Anthropic.
He has also participated as an angel investor in several companies founded by former DeepMind colleagues, including Inflection AI founded by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman before he joined Microsoft, as well as Ineffable Intelligence founded by longtime collaborator David Silver.
Ineffable Intelligence and Isomorphic Labs (also founded by Hassabis) have jointly raised over $3 billion in the past month.
In addition, he has invested in the startup incubator Entrepreneurs First.
This model of “holding power in a large company while also deploying investments externally” is quite rare in the tech world.
The DeepMind Network: An Expanding AI Talent Empire
Hassabis’s influence is amplified to a large extent through the talent network he has cultivated.
According to data from PitchBook and Dealroom, since 2021, former DeepMind researchers have founded more than a dozen companies, raising at least $14 billion in total.
These companies cover multiple AI tracks, including Mistral, Harvey, AMI Labs, Recursive Superintelligence, Latent Apps, Reflection AI, Cursive AI, and Orbital Materials, among others.
According to an insider at Cambridge-based AI materials search engine Cusp.ai, about one-third of the company’s employees come from DeepMind or Isomorphic Labs.
The latest example: former DeepMind researcher and former senior White House official Tantum Collins is co-founding a stealth-mode AI startup with two other former DeepMind researchers in London’s King’s Cross area.
Within Google: Full-scale Promotion of DeepMind Alumni
Meanwhile, DeepMind executives are also occupying increasingly important positions within Google.
DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu was promoted last year to Google’s Chief AI Architect; Pushmeet Kohli, who led the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold project, was just promoted last month to Chief Scientist of Google Cloud.
DeepMind’s status within Google was further consolidated in 2023—at that time, Google merged several of its research teams into one unified department led by Hassabis. This integration was a direct response to the pressure from the AI race triggered by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
At the time, Hassabis stated that the new team needed to “work at greater speed, with stronger collaboration and execution, and simplify decision-making in order to focus on achieving maximum impact.”
Google said in a statement: “It is impressive to see Google DeepMind alumni building influential new enterprises. Investors clearly view the Google DeepMind experience as a hallmark of deep expertise and high-quality work.”
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