Martin Schmid: Czech poker genius behind a trillion-crown AI trader

Martin Schmid and his partner Matej Moravcik turned an online poker algorithm into EquiLibre, a startup valued at half a billion dollars. Their AI trades on the market so actively that in a single week it handles sums comparable to the annual budget of the Czech Republic.

The story began back in their student days. Schmid and Moravcik earned extra money with a program that beat amateurs at online poker. Then they went much further: they were the first in the world to create an algorithm capable of beating any human at poker. That work put them on the cover of the prestigious scientific journal Science.

Now they have applied the same approach to decision-making under incomplete information to the financial markets. The algorithm they built “beats” the market, and, according to Schmid, trillions of crowns already pass through it. That is where the comparison to “one Czech budget per week” comes from.

The startup EquiLibre is still relatively young, but its valuation reaches $500 million. The founders’ ambitions are far higher: they want to become the largest trading company in the world. Schmid explained why this claim does not sound like empty bragging on the Forbes podcast “Lepší Česko”, where he also shared other details about his business.

This story shows how the Czech scientific school and a passion for games can grow into a technology business of global scale.