AMI Labs, the world-model startup co-founded by former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, has raised $1.03 billion in a seed round — one of the largest seed deals on record and, by several accounts, the biggest ever for a European company. The financing values the Paris-based lab at roughly $3.5 billion pre-money.
A Bet Against Large Language Models
Advanced Machine Intelligence, or AMI Labs, is building "world models" rather than the token-by-token systems that power today's chatbots. Using LeCun's Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), the company trains models that learn abstract representations of real-world sensor data and predict in representation space — an approach LeCun argues is better suited to robotics, planning and physical reasoning than large language models.
Heavyweight Backers
The round was led by Cathay Innovation, with Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions participating. Nvidia and entrepreneur Mark Cuban joined as well. Led by CEO Alexandre LeBrun, formerly of healthtech startup Nabla, AMI operates across Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore from day one.
The World-Model Race Heats Up
The raise lands amid surging investment in physical and embodied AI, from NVIDIA's Cosmos world foundation model to Decart's Oasis 3 and large robotics-brain rounds such as Skild AI's $1.4 billion Series C. It also underscores how much capital European AI labs can now command, echoing rounds like Sarvam AI's Series B.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch, PitchBook and Sifted.