AMI Labs, the Paris artificial intelligence company co-founded by former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, raised $1.03bn in a seed round, a figure LeCun put at €890m. The round was announced in March 2026; Tech.eu reported it on 10 March.
Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions, the investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, co-led the financing. According to Shorooq, one of the participating investors, the round valued AMI Labs at about $3.5bn before the new money.
LeCun wrote that it was one of the largest seed rounds ever and probably the largest for a European company. Implicator reported that only Thinking Machines Lab's $2bn raise was larger worldwide.
“We just completed our seed round, one of the largest seeds ever, probably the largest for a European company.”Yann LeCun, Co-founder and Executive Chair, AMI Labs
What AMI Labs does
AMI, short for Advanced Machine Intelligence, is building so-called world models: AI systems that learn how the physical world behaves from spatial and real-world data, rather than by predicting the next word or image. The aim, according to Shorooq, is AI agents that can reason and plan more deeply and understand cause and effect better than text-based systems.
The company plans to start with enterprise uses in manufacturing, aerospace, robotics and biomedicine, according to Shorooq. Chief executive Alexandre LeBrun, who previously co-founded and ran the French healthcare AI company Nabla, told the New York Times that AMI had at least a year of research ahead before it deploys its first real-world applications, Implicator reported.
LeCun, who won the Turing Award and founded Meta's FAIR research lab, is executive chair. Implicator reported that he left Meta in November 2025 and that the company had about a dozen employees at launch, most of them from Meta. Tech.eu described the business as less than six months old.
Who invested
Alongside the five co-leads, the round drew NVIDIA, Samsung, Temasek and Toyota Ventures, according to Tech.eu and Implicator. Shorooq, a UAE investment firm, and SBVA were also named in Shorooq's announcement, and Implicator reported that a unit of Dassault Aviation took part.
Individual backers included Eric Schmidt, Mark Cuban, Xavier Niel, and Tim and Rosemary Berners-Lee.
Meta did not invest. Implicator reported that the two companies were discussing a partnership that could bring AMI's technology to Meta's smart glasses. According to Implicator, which cited Sifted, a leaked pitch deck showed AMI had first aimed to raise about €500m (roughly $580m) before investor demand nearly doubled the round.
Where the money goes
AMI did not publish a breakdown of how it will spend the funding. The company is headquartered in Paris and is building teams in New York, Montreal and Singapore.
Its leadership team, according to Implicator, includes Michael Rabbat as vice-president of world models, Laurent Solly as chief operating officer, Pascale Fung leading research and innovation, and Saining Xie, formerly of Google DeepMind, as chief science officer.
"AMI Labs represents one of the most ambitious efforts to redefine the foundations of artificial intelligence," said Bilal Baloch, a partner at Shorooq.
Company website: amilabs.xyz