Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs Raises Over $1B in Seed

Yann LeCun’s new AI venture, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs, has closed what it calls one of Europe’s largest-ever seed rounds, raising $1.03 billion at a reported $3.5 billion valuation. Headquartered in Paris and under six months old, AMI Labs is positioning itself as an alternative path to the large language model (LLM) approach favoured by many Silicon Valley firms.

Rather than focusing on transformer-based LLMs that generate text from massive data and prompts, AMI Labs is building AI “world models” that aim to predict and simulate how the physical world behaves. These models try to capture dynamics and cause‑and‑effect relationships in the real world, with the goal of more grounded and generalizable AI systems.

The seed round was co-led by Paris-based Cathay Innovation alongside Greycroft, Hiro Capital and HV Capital, with participation from Bezos Expeditions. Notable individual backers include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and web inventor Tim Berners‑Lee. Strategic industry partners such as Nvidia and Samsung are also listed among investors, highlighting broad interest across both finance and hardware ecosystems.

Alexandre LeBrun, previously CEO of French startup Nabla, has been named CEO of AMI Labs. LeCun, who left Meta last year and is a Turing Prize laureate and former Meta chief AI scientist, serves as executive chair. The startup plans to expand teams in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore as it scales research and engineering efforts.

The size of this seed round signals strong investor appetite for fresh approaches to AI beyond the current LLM paradigm. While challenges remain in turning world models into widely deployable products, AMI Labs’ war chest and experienced backers give it resources to explore a different route toward robust, reality-aware AI.