Radical Ventures' Aaron Rosenberg on DeepMind's alumni wave
Inside the talk
Aaron Rosenberg spent six years at Google DeepMind, three of them as Demis Hassabis's deputy, and now runs Radical Ventures' UK office. He talks to John Thornhill about Radical's $1B growth fund, the DeepMind staff leaving to start companies, and the London neo-labs he has backed.
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Chief of staff at McKinsey, then deputy to Demis Hassabis
1:46CareerHe joined DeepMind's office of the CEO about nine years ago, when the lab had around 500 researchers. He opened offices, set up the ethics and safety group and worked on commercialising research.
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Left DeepMind for Radical in 2023
3:27CareerSix years in: three as Hassabis's deputy, three as head of strategy and operations. Radical was set up in 2017 to invest only in AI, around Geoffrey Hinton's lab in Toronto.
His old McKinsey boss, Dominic Barton, joined Radical at the same time -
$1B+ first close for the Breakout Fund
7:19RadicalThe largest venture fund in Canadian history, announced in September. It is for late rounds: AI companies stay private longer and now go public at valuations above $1 trillion.
Early cheque: Discovery Loop, from Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le -
Radical invests in every layer of the AI stack
10:04ThesisCompute (Crusoe), chips (Etched), grid management (Emerald), models (Cohere, Reka, World Labs), biology (Latent Labs) and applications (Slingshot, for mental health).
World Labs sold to AMD for more than $8B -
AlphaFold won a Nobel Prize but was not obviously valuable
13:32DeepMindColin Murdoch, formerly chief business officer of Google DeepMind and president of Isomorphic Labs, has joined Radical. At its free founder masterclasses he explained how DeepMind built value from research in steps, through partnerships.
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Often the first call for DeepMinders thinking of leaving
15:09DeepMindHe acts as a sounding board, sometimes for staying. For those who go, he explains a funding market that is hard to read from inside a lab.
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500 → 6,000 DeepMind staff when he joined, and today
16:32DeepMindAt 6,000 people some attrition is normal. Gemini work is moving to Mountain View, and London staff are deciding whether to follow or start their own company.
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London neo-labs each bet on one research path
18:24Neo-labsWorld models (Emulate, Odyssey), diffusion language models (Revolution Labs), reinforcement learning (David Silver's Ineffable). Google DeepMind now runs like an assembly line for Gemini, so researchers leave to get resources for other ideas.
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40+ neo-labs have raised about $40B between them
20:53Neo-labsRadical's count, worldwide. The bar for each next round is high and some consolidation is likely. Most work on approaches the big labs have deprioritised for their large transformer models.
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European neo-labs can become global champions
24:00Neo-labsThe risk is that research is unpredictable. A lab that misses state-of-the-art results cannot raise its next round.
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What Radical looks for in a founder
25:36ThesisHassabis is his model: technically exceptional, able to explain the work to any audience, commercial, and quick to hire around his own gaps. Radical turns down most neo-lab pitches; a contrarian view backed by evidence gets attention.
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$50M seed round for Inherent, out of stealth in May
29:31Neo-labsRadical and Index Ventures co-led it. The London lab treats its own organisation as an experiment, on the model of electrification: factories only got more productive once they were redesigned around the new power.
CEO Tantum Collins, the first person Rosenberg knew at DeepMind -
Non-compete reform should mean more DeepMind spin-outs
36:08DeepMindRestrictive covenants have held back staff who leave to start companies. Without them, Rosenberg expects more companies at the earliest stage and founding teams that grow faster. Inherent lobbied for the change.
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$50M Series A for Latent Labs in 2025
37:15Neo-labsFounder Simon Kohl led protein design on AlphaFold. Its models now design proteins from scratch that bind a chosen target and have drug-like properties, and it signs deals with pharma companies.
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70+ former DeepMinders in his London alumni group
40:07DeepMindThe Deep Alum WhatsApp group meets in person, most recently when Oriol Vinyals was in town. Rosenberg uses it to check founders' technical claims with experts.
20 moments from the 48-minute talk. Each time opens the video on YouTube at that point.
