Deepmind founder Demis Hassabis said on Wednesday that Jasjeet Sekhon, who served as the chief scientist and head of AI in Bridgewater, will be joining Bridgewater’s board of directors.
“Super excited to be working with Jas to accelerate this important work at such a critical time for this technology,” Hassabis said in a post on LinkedIn.
This comes as Google tries to strengthen its position against rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. Over the last year, DeepMind has rolled out major AI products, including its Gemini model and upgraded chatbot offerings, alongside new creative tools such as AI-powered photo editing.
READ: Elon Musk apologizes for xAI hiring mistakes, signals talent reset (
Google’s offerings have helped the company nearly double in value over the past year.
Sekhon joined Bridgewater in 2018, and has since played an important role in in building its AI research and investment lab called AIA Labs, which is led by the firm’s Co-Chief Investment Officer Greg Jensen. He had also held professorships at several U.S. universities, including Harvard, University of California, Berkeley, and most recently, Yale.
Bridgewater recently posted its highest profit in its 50-year history in 2025, with its flagship fund Pure Alpha delivering a 34% return. It recently named Bob Prince, one of its CIOs and a firm veteran of four decades, as the chair of its board of directors. The hedge fund recently projected that technology companies led by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft will collectively invest about $650 billion to scale up AI-related infrastructure this year.
READ: Bobby Ghoshal takes command as Experity’s new CEO (
Bridgewater is one of the world’s largest hedge funds that uses systematic, data-driven investment strategies. It manages about $92 billion of assets at the end of September, and operates numerous macro funds focused on various areas and regions, including the Pure Alpha fund, the All Weather fund, the Asia Total Return fund, the China Total Return fund, and the AIA Macro fund.
Deepmind’s latest move to hire Sekhon would bring a senior financial modeler into an AI lab whose founders have described its mission as to “solve intelligence”. The hire adds experience from quantitative finance, a field built around using complex models in high-consequence settings, as research groups push toward broader real-world use.
According to Tech in Asia, Sekhon’s chief strategy officer role may bring more focus on risk tradeoffs and how resources get allocated, though sources do not explicitly link his hire to big tech spending plans.