Yann LeCun's AI Lab AMI Raises $1B in Europe's Largest Seed Round

Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), the Paris-based AI startup co-founded by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, has closed a $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion valuation. The round, led by Bezos Expeditions, Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, and HV Capital, is the largest seed investment in European startup history. AMI is building what it calls "world models". AI systems designed to understand and interact with three-dimensional physical reality, a departure from the large language models that dominate today's AI landscape. "Generative architecture trained by self-supervised learning mimic intelligence; they don't genuinely understand the world," said CEO Alexandre LeBrun. The company argues that industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and robotics need AI that grasps continuous, noisy, high-dimensional reality beyond tokenized text. AMI has announced its first partnership with Nabla, a healthcare AI startup. The raise follows a similar $1 billion round by Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, signaling a broader investor shift toward physical-world AI applications. The funding underscores Europe's growing ambition to compete in frontier AI research, with France emerging as a hub for next-generation AI companies challenging U.S. dominance.