Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Meta’s former chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun has raised more than $1bn for his new start-up in Europe’s largest ever seed funding round.
Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs announced on Tuesday that its first fundraising included backing from a global group of investors. These include France’s Cathay Innovation, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions, Singapore’s Temasek, Seoul-based SBVA and US chip giant Nvidia.
The $1.03bn seed round is second only to US start-up Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2bn last June, according to data from Dealroom.
The new venture has a pre-money valuation of $3.5bn. It will be led by Alexandre LeBrun, former chief executive of French start-up Nabla, with LeCun serving as executive chair.
Laurent Solly, who was Meta’s vice-president for Europe, is joining as the chief operating officer. The company is launching with a dozen employees across offices in Paris, New York, Singapore and Montreal.
The record-breaking fundraising underscores rising interest among investors in new approaches to AI that go beyond today’s large language models.
LeCun, a French-US scientist and Turing Award winner, has argued that systems trained mainly on text will struggle to achieve human-level reasoning. Instead, he is building “world models” that understand the physical environment with potential applications in robotics and transport.
The start-up will build on work by LeCun at Meta on new AI “architecture” that can learn about the world through videos and spatial data rather than just language. These models are designed to retain memory and reason and to plan complex action sequences.
“Anything that involves understanding the real world, we think large language models, and generative AI in general, is not the right solution,” said chief executive LeBrun. “We have at least a year of research before deploying our first real-world applications. But this is not an applied AI company.”
It is part of a global race among venture investors to identify the next big AI giant, following the success of the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
In 2025, AI companies attracted about 48 per cent of global venture fundraising, which reached $469bn, according to CB Insights. This meant AI start-ups alone raised roughly $225bn last year.
AMI Labs’ launch is the latest in a string of high-profile AI funding rounds in Europe this year. They include AI cloud provider Nscale, which announced a $2bn funding round on Monday, video AI start-up Synthesia and secretive AI chip start-up Olix.
Last month, the FT reported that David Silver, one of Britain’s top AI researchers, is in discussions to raise $1bn in a round led by Sequoia Capital for his new venture Ineffable Intelligence.
“We want to be a global company . . . [and] the round structure reflects the way we want to build,” LeBrun said. “There is incredible talent elsewhere, outside Silicon Valley.”
His former company Nabla will be the start-up’s first partner, applying its new models in the healthcare industry, LeBrun added.
LeCun’s ex-employer Meta is not an investor in his new company but will form a “partnership” with AMI Labs that will grant the tech giant access to the technology it can commercialise.
LeBrun said discussions around the details of the partnership were continuing.
“Most of the large [AI] companies are in a race to improve a little bit, and they are right to do so, as they can’t afford to lose the race,” he said. “But we are starting in a completely new track . . . which is like a dream.”
Read the full article here