Continental Breakfast
Continental Breakfast
etn Newsletter | September 17, 2026
What a time to be live. The main thing happening today is a one month old British AI startup closing in on a $4 billion valuation. Live from 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
12:30 - Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder & CEO at PubMatic
12:50 - Judith Dada, Co-CEO at Langdock & Partner at Visionaries
13:00 - Jeetu Patel, President & Chief Product Officer at Cisco
13:10 - Nigel Vaz, CEO at Publicis Sapient
14:00 - Ethan Barajas, Co-Founder & CEO at Icarus Robotics
14:00 - Jamie Palmer, Co-Founder & CTO at Icarus Robotics
14:15 - Jacob Lauritzen, CTO at Legora
What’s Happening Today
A British AI startup is closing in on a $4 billion valuation just one month after founding.
Emulate, founded in August by former Google DeepMind researchers, is in advanced talks to raise up to $700 million at a $3.7 billion valuation. Index Ventures and Lightspeed are expected to lead the round. The company has been operating in stealth so far, with no public product, so investors are largely betting on the team behind it.
And they have some serious credentials. Founders Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill and Philip Ball previously worked on Genie, DeepMind's world models, which can turn short prompts into videos and interactive 3D environments. When Genie was unveiled in January, it wiped billions off the value of games companies including Take-Two, Roblox and Unity.
Emulate is now the third UK "neo-lab" to emerge from DeepMind's London offices this year. David Silver's Ineffable Intelligence raised around $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation, while a group of former DeepMind and OpenAI engineers raised more than $600 million for Recursive Superintelligence, valuing both companies at billions before either has much of a product.
The numbers show how much investors are willing to pay for top AI talent. Emulate’s fundraising comes just weeks after Google DeepMind co founder. It is the latest sign of how quickly DeepMind’s top researchers are turning to startups of their own.
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
etn. Insight
Paul Bonnet, general partner at 20VC, came on the show and questioned the huge bets VCs are placing on a new wave of AI labs.
“Many new labs are raising at $5 billion seed or pre-seed,” he said. At that price, “what you're really saying is that company will be worth at least $100 billion.” That’s a huge outcome to bet on, especially when “there haven't been many hundred-billion-dollar-plus exits in the history of technology.” And with these bets being made “10, 20 times over,” Bonnet says “you have to start asking, where is all that value coming from?” His answer is that “you have to assume that there are two more Anthropics and OpenAIs.”
Watch the full clip below.
Continental Breakfast
Alexandre Arnault appointed to Nike board
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