Czech firm EquiLibre runs AI trading across billions daily

Published: 2026-07-02T11:15:44.000Z

There is a small Prague outfit quietly running algorithms across billions of dollars of trades every day, and its founders did not come from Wall Street at all. They came from poker. EquiLibre Technologies was set up by a trio of former DeepMind researchers, Martin Schmid, Rudolf Kadlec and Matej Moravčík, who first made their name building DeepStack, the artificial intelligence system that became the first to beat professional players at no-limit Texas hold'em. Rather than chase jobs at the big Silicon Valley labs, they moved back home to Czechia to turn the same ideas into a trading business. The link between poker and the markets is less of a leap than it sounds. Both are games of incomplete information where you have to weigh probabilities, manage risk and act under uncertainty, and the reinforcement learning techniques that cracked poker turn out to translate well to financial trading. Working in partnership with the quant firm Tower Research Capital, EquiLibre's agents have been trading substantial daily volumes across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The company says its systems first proved themselves in cryptocurrency markets in 2025 before moving into equities, and it makes the striking claim of a perfect record with no losing months since it began. That track record has caught the eye of venture capital. The startup recently raised a Series A that valued it at around 500 million dollars, a sharp jump from the roughly 140 million dollar valuation attached to its earlier 10 million dollar seed round, which was led by Blossom Capital. Cameron Sellers of Creandum, one of the backers, argued that because the financial markets are so vast, even small improvements in an algorithm can translate into serious money very quickly. Interestingly, EquiLibre prefers to describe itself as a technology lab first rather than a financial institution, even as it competes with giants such as Jane Street that are pouring tens of thousands of high-end chips into the same problem. For the Gulf, a story like this lands on fertile ground. Sovereign investors such as Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Abu Dhabi's Mubadala and ADIA rank among the largest backers of hedge funds and quantitative strategies worldwide, and they have been leaning hard into anything that combines artificial intelligence with finance. Abu Dhabi and Dubai have spent years luring quant and trading firms into their financial free zones at ADGM and DIFC, positioning the region as a serious home for algorithmic capital. A Czech firm with no local office may seem distant from all that, yet the money funding and allocating to precisely this class of strategy increasingly flows out of the Middle East, which makes EquiLibre's rise very much a regional concern too.