Yann LeCun Secures $1.03 Billion Seed Round to Launch Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs
Key Points
- Yann LeCun left Meta after 12 years, citing fundamental limits of large language models.
- LeCun founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI) to develop "world models" using JEPA.
- AMI announced a $1.03 billion seed round on 10 March 2026, the largest European seed round ever.
- Five co‑lead investors: Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, Bezos Expeditions.
- Additional backers include Nvidia, Toyota, Samsung, Temasek, Daphni, SBVA and several high‑profile individuals.
- Headquartered in Paris with planned offices in New York, Montreal and Singapore.
- LeCun serves as executive chairman; Alexandre LeBrun is CEO; core team recruited from Meta.
- The first year will focus exclusively on research and development of world‑model AI.
- AMI aims to begin corporate partnerships within 1‑2 years and deliver universal intelligent systems in 3‑5 years.
- The venture positions itself as a European alternative to U.S. and Chinese AI powerhouses.
Yann LeCun, the Turing Award‑winning AI researcher who left Meta after 12 years, announced a $1.03 billion seed round for his new venture, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI). The funding, the largest European seed round on record, was co‑led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions, with participation from Nvidia, Toyota, Samsung, Temasek and several high‑profile individuals. AMI, headquartered in Paris with plans for offices in New York, Montreal and Singapore, will focus on building "world models" using LeCun’s JEPA framework, aiming to create universal intelligent systems beyond large language models.
Background and Vision
Yann LeCun, a dual French‑American citizen and professor of computer science at New York University, spent twelve years leading Meta’s AI research operation. In November 2025 he informed Meta’s founder that he was departing, citing his belief that large language models (LLMs) are a statistical illusion rather than true intelligence. LeCun has long argued that LLMs, while impressive, are fundamentally limited and that a different approach is needed to achieve genuine machine understanding.
To pursue this vision, LeCun founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI), pronounced the French word for “friend.” AMI’s mission is to develop "world models," a class of AI systems that learn abstract representations of how the world works, rather than predicting the next word in a text sequence. The core technology underpinning this effort is the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), a framework LeCun first proposed in 2022.
Funding Round
On 10 March 2026, AMI announced a seed financing round that raised $1.03 billion, valuing the company at $3.5 billion on a pre‑money basis. The round is described as the largest seed round ever raised by a European startup. Five firms co‑led the investment: Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment vehicle of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Additional participants included Nvidia, Toyota, Samsung, Singapore’s Temasek, French VC Daphni, South Korean investor SBVA, and prominent individuals such as Tim and Rosemary Berners‑Lee, venture capitalist Jim Breyer, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
LeCun originally sought roughly €500 million, but demand exceeded that figure, ultimately reaching €890 million (approximately $1.03 billion). He indicated that the strong investor interest would allow AMI to be selective about its backers.
Leadership and Team
LeCun will serve as executive chairman of AMI, while day‑to‑day operations will be led by CEO Alexandre LeBrun, a French entrepreneur who previously founded and ran the medical‑AI startup Nabla. The founding team draws heavily from Meta’s AI research organization. Michael Rabbat, formerly Meta’s director of research science, joins as vice president of world models. Laurent Solly, a former Meta vice president for Europe, becomes chief operating officer. Pascale Fung, previously senior director of AI research at Meta, takes the role of chief research and innovation officer. Saining Xie, formerly of Google DeepMind, is appointed chief science officer.
Strategic Positioning and Goals
AMI is headquartered in Paris, with additional offices planned in New York, Montreal and Singapore, underscoring its intent to operate as a European counterweight to American and Chinese AI giants. LeCun has emphasized that AMI is “one of the few frontier AI labs that are neither Chinese nor American,” positioning the venture as a French‑led frontier in artificial intelligence.
The company’s short‑term focus is pure research and development; it has no product, revenue or near‑term commercial prospect. LeCun stated that the first year will be dedicated entirely to building the underlying technology. Within one to two years, AMI plans to begin discussions with corporate partners, and within three to five years aims to deliver “fairly universal intelligent systems” that can be deployed across a wide range of domains requiring machine intelligence.
Industry Context
LeCun’s critique of LLMs reflects a broader debate within the AI community about the limits of language‑only models. By championing JEPA and world‑model research, AMI seeks to advance AI that learns through embodied experience and abstract reasoning, rather than surface‑level text prediction. While the ambition is high and the timeline long, the unprecedented seed funding demonstrates investor confidence in LeCun’s research credentials, including his 2018 Turing Award for work on convolutional neural networks that underpins modern computer vision.