The founders of EquiLibre Technologies, who previously built an AI that beat professional poker players, are now using their skills in financial markets. Martin Schmid, Rudolf Kadlec, and Matej Moravcik started the company in Prague in December 2021.
EquiLibre just closed a Series A round led by Creandum at a valuation of over $500 million. Creandum has not shared the size of the round, only the valuation and that it is their largest investment in a single company.
“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. That’s what drew us to the problem, and it’s why reinforcement learning is such a natural fit. The question is no longer whether this approach works. It’s how big it can get. We’ve proven the technology in the world’s biggest and most liquid markets.”
Schmid, Kadlec, and Moravcik left DeepMind to create DeepStack, the first AI to beat professional players at no-limit poker. They used reinforcement learning, training the model through trial and reward instead of labelled examples, in a competitive, high-stakes setting with clear scoring. Schmid says markets are similar. The founders returned from North America to start the company in Prague, thinking it would be easier to retain talented people than in Silicon Valley.
“We want to build a global business from Prague. 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,” Schmid says.
This choice helped EquiLibre build a team of about 25, mostly Czech engineers who have worked at Google and other US tech companies. EquiLibre trains reinforcement learning agents using both historical and live market data, then lets them trade on their own. After trying its approach on crypto markets in 2025, EquiLibre moved into US stocks. Its agents now trade billions each day on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq with Tower Research Capital, a detail not included in EquiLibre’s funding announcement.
“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.”
While the total for Series A remains undisclosed, the company has explained that the capital raised will be used to scale compute infrastructure. The new cluster will be one of the largest in the region. This will allow the company to make its models more profitable and to expand to more products and markets.
The team of researchers and engineers – drawn from DeepMind, Google, Jane Street, G-Research, and Optiver – is also looking to grow the team across research and engineering roles in its Prague headquarters over the coming months.
"EquiLibre Technologies is an anomaly - the ML talent density they've put together in prague would normally be considered impossible outside of SF/London. And on top of their insane quality a team of genuinely good and nice people you enjoy spending time with and learning from, i don't know anyone who wouldn't wish them well. When we led the pre-seed a few years ago, using RL for algotrading seemed crazy, now it's more and more clear that the revenue trajectory is reflecting the chart Martin Schmid drew at our founder summit when explaining Equilibre to other founders."
