By Mauro Orru
Advanced Machine Intelligence, the startup co-founded by Meta Platforms' former chief artificial-intelligence scientist Yann LeCun, said it raised $1.03 billion in a seed funding round as it seeks to develop a new breed of AI systems that can better understand the real world than existing models.
LeCun, often described as one of the godfathers of AI, created an AI research organization inside Facebook in 2013 and became Meta's chief AI scientist a few years later. However, he left the tech giant last year as his views on AI diverged from the company's, saying he didn't believe that large language models would lead to so-called superintelligence, or intelligence that is smarter than humans.
In November, he wrote in a LinkedIn post that he was creating a startup to "bring about the next big revolution in AI," focusing on systems that could understand the physical world, have persistent memory, could reason and plan complex action sequences, all while remaining controllable and safe.
That startup--Advanced Machine Intelligence, or AMI Labs--now operates out of Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore. The company said Tuesday the funding round was co-led by Bezos Expeditions of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and venture capital firms Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital and HV Capital.
Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, Toyota Motor's venture capital arm Toyota Ventures, former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and French billionaire Xavier Niel are also among AMI's backers, according to the company.
LeCun wrote in a post on X that the funding round was "one [of] the largest seeds ever, probably the largest for a European company." AMI's fundraise comes a day after Nscale Global Holdings, a U.K.-based AI infrastructure startup that builds and operates data centers, raised $2 billion at a $14.6 billion valuation.
Valuations of AI startups in Europe continue to lag behind U.S. peers. Last month, ChatGPT maker OpenAI said it had secured commitments totaling $110 billion in new funding in a deal valuing the company at $730 billion before the investment. News Corp, owner of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Alex LeBrun, formerly part of Meta's AI efforts and co-founder of AMI Labs, announced on X that he was taking the helm of the startup as CEO. Meanwhile, Laurent Solly, also a co-founder and formerly at Meta, said he was taking over as chief operating officer. Saining Xie, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind and co-founder of AMI Labs, said he would serve as chief science officer at the startup.
Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 10, 2026 06:37 ET (10:37 GMT)
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