Former chief AI scientist at Meta, Yann LeCun, who was a co-winner of the 2018 Turing Prize (the de facto Nobel Prize of computing), announced Tuesday that his startup Advanced Machine Intelligence, known as AMI Labs, has raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. On X, LeCun wrote, "We just completed our seed round: $1.03B / €890M, one of the largest seeds ever, probably the largest for a European company. We're hiring!"

The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. Corporate backers include NVIDIA, Samsung, Sea, Temasek, and Toyota Ventures. Individual investors include Tim and Rosemary Berners-Lee, Jim Breyer, Mark Cuban, Xavier Niel, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

LeCun founded Facebook AI Research at Meta in 2013, a lab later renamed FAIR. He left Meta at the end of 2025. In June 2025, Meta reorganised its AI division under a new unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs, led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.

What AMI Labs Is Building

AMI Labs is working on world models. This is AI that learns from reality rather than from language patterns. The technical approach is based on JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), a framework LeCun proposed in 2022. In an interview with Reuters, LeCun said AI systems that work by predicting the next word or pixel will not produce broadly capable intelligent agents on their own.

Alexandre LeBrun, former CEO of French health startup Nabla, is CEO of AMI Labs. LeCun serves as executive chairman. Laurent Solly, former Meta VP for Europe, is COO. Saining Xie serves as chief science officer, Pascale Fung as chief research and innovation officer, and Michael Rabbat as VP of world models.

TechCrunch reported LeBrun said the company could take years to move from research to commercial products. AMI Labs plans to publish research and open-source parts of its code as it develops. AMI Labs has offices in Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore.

First Partner and Target Customers

Reuters reported that AMI Labs is targeting manufacturers, automakers, aerospace companies, biomedical firms, and pharmaceutical groups as near-term customers. "We want to become the main provider of intelligent systems, regardless of what the application is," LeCun told Reuters. Nabla is the first confirmed deployment partner, per TechCrunch.

LeCun told Reuters that AMI is in active conversations with Meta about deploying the technology inside Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, calling it "probably one of the shorter-term potential applications." On domestic robots, he said, "You need a domestic robot to have some level of common sense to really understand the physical world."

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