Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs), the Paris-based artificial intelligence startup founded by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, announced on March 10, 2026 that it had closed a seed funding round of approximately $1.03 billion. <cite index="3-3">The round was raised at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation and is described as Europe's largest seed round on record.</cite>
Founding and team
<cite index="4-13">LeCun left Meta in November 2025 after more than a decade leading Facebook AI Research (FAIR).</cite> <cite index="6-2,6-3">At two months old and with 12 employees, the company's seed funding round brings it to a $3.5 billion valuation.</cite> According to secondary reporting, the leadership team also includes <cite index="3-14">Alexandre LeBrun as CEO (previously of French medical AI startup Nabla), Saining Xie as Chief Scientific Officer (formerly Google DeepMind), Pascale Fung as Chief Research and Innovation Officer, and Mike Rabbat as VP of World Models.</cite>
Investors
<cite index="3-10">The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with additional backing from NVIDIA, Temasek, Samsung, Toyota Ventures, Bpifrance, and individual investors including Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, and Eric Schmidt.</cite> <cite index="5-6,5-7">Additional strategic backers included New Legacy Ventures, SBVA, Association Familiale Mulliez, Groupe industriel Marcel Dassault, Sea, and Alpha Intelligence Capital, with Samsung and Bpifrance Digital Venture also among the significant participants.</cite>
Technical approach
AMI Labs is pursuing an alternative to the dominant Large Language Model (LLM) paradigm. <cite index="3-4">The company is building world models based on LeCun's Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), targeting industrial, robotic, and healthcare applications where the limitations of large language models are most consequential.</cite> <cite index="3-6">The framework is designed to learn abstract representations of real-world sensor data rather than predicting outputs token by token.</cite>
In a post announcing the company, LeCun wrote that <cite index="1-7">AMI is building "a new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe."</cite>
<cite index="4-13,4-14">LeCun has said that predictive models will not lead to artificial general intelligence; while language models have demonstrated strong performance in areas like coding and summarization, he has been critical of their lack of ability to understand the physical world and plan actions within it.</cite> <cite index="4-16,4-17">AMI is developing systems designed to learn structured representations of real-world environments and predict how those environments will evolve over time, with the aim of enabling machines to reason about the consequences of their actions and plan sequences of behavior—capabilities researchers say are necessary for robotics and other complex applications.</cite>
Timeline and context
<cite index="3-7">LeCun has indicated the first year will be focused on research, with meaningful product timelines measured in years rather than quarters.</cite> CEO Alexandre LeBrun told TechCrunch that <cite index="5-12,5-13">"world models" will be the next buzzword, predicting that within six months every company will call itself a world model company to raise funding.</cite>
The raise follows a comparable bet on spatial intelligence by Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, which <cite index="5-8,5-9">raised $1 billion in February to advance its own world model technology, in a round estimated in prior reports to potentially value the start-up at $5bn.</cite> <cite index="7-7">The European Union is seeking to build out its own bench of AI startups as it pursues a "Euro stack" intended to reduce the region's dependence on American technology companies.</cite>