Emulate, a British AI startup founded last month by three former Google Deepmind researchers, is in advanced talks to raise as much as $700m in a seed funding round led by Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a deal that would value the company at $3.7bn including the new capital, nearing a $4bn (£2.9bn) valuation despite having no product or website. The terms have not yet been finalised and could change. Emulate was founded by Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill and Philip Ball, who previously worked on Deepmind’s Genie technology; Parker-Holder led the development of Genie 2, while all three contributed to Genie 3. Their new company is working on so-called world models, AI systems designed to simulate and predict how physical environments behave, which could allow a robotics company to test thousands of movements in simulated warehouses before putting a robot to work in the real world. Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, told City AM the deal reflected investors betting on “future capability creation, not present revenue or commercial traction”.