Why Almost Every Investor Passed on DeepMind — And How to Spot the Next One

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Demis Hassabis pitched countless investors when he started DeepMind. Almost everyone said no. Why did these VC’s miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime?

“Finding initial funding for this was very hard,” Demis later recalled.

Demis and DeepMind are leading the race to AGI. They won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their protein folding technology, AlphaFold.

Passing on DeepMind is one of the biggest misses ever. But when Demis was raising his first capital in 2010, most investors gave him the cold shoulder.

That mistake was much far reasonable than it seems…

Why They Passed

As someone who looks at a couple thousand startups a year, I can give you some great reasons to pass on DeepMind:

No product
No revenue
No path to revenue
Founder has no experience

Demis told a great story about inventing machines that can think. But how would he get the money to keep this business alive for the years it would take to reach that goal?

Would I Have Invested in DeepMind?

Demis is very smart — that would be obvious to anyone. But given the way I judge investments, I would have passed on DeepMind too.

I’d love to tell you that I would have seen the future back in 2010 and written a huge check! But for a pre-revenue company with no real path to market?

Not likely.

How Investors Can Get These Decisions Right — The Wildcard

Passing on DeepMind was a huge mistake.

But if we rip checks into pre-revenue companies with no business strategy all the time, we’ll go broke. We’ll no longer be able to make investments.

How can we change our rules to capture the occasional moonshot like DeepMind, while avoiding some of the failures?

What if we gave ourselves a wildcard?

Maybe 80-90% of our investments have traction or at least a path to market. We could reserve 10 to 20% of our capital for moonshots like DeepMind.

How Investors Could’ve Seen DeepMind’s Potential at the Time

Every company comes down to one factor: the founder.

In 2010, Demis didn’t have much business experience. But he was exceptional in one way: he was a chess prodigy.

As a child, Demis was the second-highest-rated chess player on earth.

He spent much of his youth traveling all over Europe for chess tournaments. He beat grandmasters decades older.

When Elon Musk hires someone, he looks for evidence they’re exceptional in some area — any area. Demis was clearly exceptional in chess.

The One Question I’ll Be Asking Founders From Now On

To make sure we don’t miss this crucial fact, we can ask founders, “What achievements are you most proud of?”

Demis would have probably mentioned his past as a chess champion. We’d know that, despite his lack of track record in startups, he’s achieved something big.

Judging talent like Elon does helps us make far better decisions. And sure enough, Elon was one of the first investors in DeepMind!

I’m going to start asking founders this question. I can’t miss the next Demis.

Wrap-Up

It’s easy to sit here in 2026 and call the VCs that passed on DeepMind idiots.

But none of these people are stupid. Their decision was wrong, but it made sense at the time.

We need to learn from their mistake. We need to adjust our rules so we don’t miss the next DeepMind.

The key is finding founders who have done something exceptional. For the next Demis, it’s worth breaking the rules.

Would you have invested in DeepMind?

Why Almost Every Investor Passed on DeepMind — And How to Spot the Next One

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