AMI Labs, the new startup from former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, has raised more than $1bn in funding, the largest seed round for a European company.
Investors in the round include chip titan Nvidia and Singapore-based firm Temasek, confirming Sifted’s earlier reporting from January. Other investors in the round include French firms Cathay Innovation and Daphni, German VC firm HV Capital, London-based Hiro Capital, Jeff Bezos’ investment firm Bezos Expeditions and South Korean investor SBVA.
LeCun initially aimed to raise €500m for his startup, which he announced late last year after leaving Meta, according to a leaked pitch deck seen by Sifted. Sifted also previously reported that the round had received potential commitments of more than $1bn.
The company is building so-called world models, which, unlike large language models (LLMs) can understand the physical world instead of just generating text or images. The startup plans to build its own model called AMI Video.
LeCun’s company will focus on powering businesses in robotics, manufacturing and those working on wearables, as Sifted previously reported. The company will operate across hubs in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore.
The startup will be led by Alexandre LeBrun, former CEO of medical AI startup Nabla, with LeCun serving as the company’s executive chair. Other key hires for the startup include Mike Rabbat, the VP of world models at AMI and a former research science director at Meta; Saining Xie, chief science officer and former research scientist at Google DeepMind; and Pascale Fung, chief research and innovation officer and former senior director of AI research at Meta.
“AMI Labs could be the first European company to reach the scale of the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) companies," said Pierre-Éric Leibovici, founder and Managing Partner of Daphni.
“Seeing talent from the world's best labs join this project in Paris confirms that France is the fertile ground for this next industrial revolution.”
Europe’s chance to win AI?
The excitement over AMI Labs touches on the bigger hope among some investors that world models could finally provide an avenue for Europe to compete in the AI race.
The region’s expertise in industrial production and robotics could be a plus point, both cited as early use cases for world models.
For some, “it’s almost a political thing,” Margaux Grégoir, partner at French early-stage VC Serena, recently told Sifted. “LeCun wants to create a new paradigm. Everyone thinks we’ll reach AGI (artificial general intelligence) with LLMs, and he’s coming out of that logic. For this reason, leaving Silicon Valley and coming to Paris is extremely important.”
While US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are dominating the LLM space, world models are still nascent and the playing field still seems open. “It feels like Europe is really at the cutting edge, very much on the same level as the American companies,” Andreas Goeldi, partner at Swiss firm B2venture, told Sifted last month.
“We have a chance here to really play a significant role, and we all hope that we are not missing out on this one again.”
Update, March 10, 2026: This article has been updated with additional context at the bottom.
