AMI Labs, the world model startup launched by former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, has raised more than $1 billion in its debut funding round.
At $1.03 billion, the round is Europe’s largest-ever seed deal and gives the Paris-based startup a reported pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion. The round was led by a host of investors, including Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions.
Several angels and corporates also supported the round, including Mark Cuban and Nvidia, which has been spending increasing amounts of capital on AI startups such as Nscale, which closed Europe’s biggest AI VC round earlier this week.
Led by CEO Alexandre LeBrun, former head of healthtech startup Nabla, AMI Labs is already operating in Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore, despite the venture only being confirmed a few months ago.
LeCun, a Turing Prize winner, has long been critical of LLMs and their ability to achieve artificial general intelligence. He advocates, instead, for world models capable of understanding physical spaces by creating 3D interactive worlds within predefined parameters.
Proponents of world models argue that this path offers better applications in areas such as healthcare, robotics, and video games, owing to real-world simulations that are more suited for testing. AMI Labs has already agreed a partnership with Nabla to bring FDA-certifiable agentic AI systems to healthcare.
The space has received far less funding than LLMs, but investor appetite has been on the rise. Last month, AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raised $1 billion from investors including Nvidia and Emerson Collective. In October, New York and Geneva-based General Intuition received $134 million for its seed.
Learn about our editorial standards.
