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AMI Labs

Yann LeCun's world-model lab — the bet that intelligence isn't language-first

Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) is the world-model research company founded by Yann LeCun, the Turing Award winner who left Meta — where he had served as chief AI scientist and founding director of FAIR — in late 2025 after 12 years. LeCun announced the venture on 19 November 2025; the Paris-headquartered company (with day-one hubs in New York, Montreal and Singapore) is run day-to-day by CEO Alexandre LeBrun. AMI is building world models on LeCun's JEPA framework (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), which learns abstract representations of real-world data and predicts in representation space instead of next-token or next-pixel generation — an explicit challenge to the industry's language-first consensus. On 9 March 2026 AMI announced a ~US$1.03B (≈€890M) seed round at a US$3.5B pre-money valuation — Europe's largest seed at the time — co-led by five funds including Bezos Expeditions, with a syndicate of strategics (NVIDIA, Samsung, Toyota Ventures, Temasek) and star angels (Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Cuban). The ~12-person, product-less company was valued primarily on scientific credibility.

AMI Labs logo
Founded
Announced 2025-11-19; registered Paris ~2025-12-15; public Jan 2026
Headquarters
Paris (multi-hub: New York, Montreal, Singapore)
Founder / Chairman
Yann LeCun (Turing Award 2018; ex-Meta Chief AI Scientist)
CEO / Co-founder
Alexandre LeBrun (ex-CEO of Nabla; Wit.ai founder; former FAIR engineering lead)
Sector
World models / JEPA / embodied & physical AI research
Team
~12 at announcement; Julia Kempe joined as Director of Research (Jun 2026)
Total raised
~US$1.03B (one disclosed round)
Latest valuation
US$3.5B pre-money (Seed, Mar 2026; post ≈US$4.5B, inferred)
Rounds recorded
1
Total raised
$1.03B
amilabs.xyz

Funding timeline

Every disclosed equity round for AMI Labs, oldest to newest, with lead and participating investors where reported.

  1. Mar 9, 2026

    Seed

    $1.03BLatest
    Led by Bezos ExpeditionsLed by Cathay InnovationLed by GreycroftLed by Hiro CapitalLed by HV CapitalNVIDIASamsungToyota VenturesTemasekSeaSBVANew Legacy VenturesBpifrance Digital VentureAlpha Intelligence CapitalAssociation Familiale MulliezGroupe Industriel Marcel DassaultPublicis GroupeAglaé Lab (Kering)Artémis (Pinault)ZEBOX VenturesJeff BezosEric SchmidtTim Berners-LeeJim BreyerMark CubanMark LeslieXavier Niel

    Europe's largest seed financing at the time (LeCun: 'probably the largest for a European company'), announced weeks after Ineffable Intelligence's record and before it. Oversubscribed well beyond the €500M target in the leaked late-2025 deck; LeBrun said AMI could select investors for alignment, not just capital. Pure equity, no disclosed debt component. Priced at US$3.5B pre-money (official); post-money ≈US$4.5B is an inference, no official figure.

    Source ↗

The story behind the numbers

LeCun and the JEPA bet

After 12 years at Meta — five as founding FAIR director, seven as chief AI scientist — LeCun left to industrialize his 'Advanced Machine Intelligence' research program. The core wager is JEPA: instead of predicting the next token or pixel, systems learn abstract representations of real-world sensor data and predict in representation space, ignoring the noise generative models are forced to reproduce. AMI wants AI that 'understands the real world, has persistent memory, can reason and plan, and stays controllable and safe' — a direct rebuke to what LeCun calls the industry's language-first monoculture.

A scientific-credibility valuation

At US$1.03B on a US$3.5B pre-money, investors paid primarily for scientific credibility and long-term option value: a company of roughly a dozen people, no product, and a research agenda measured in years. Structurally AMI differs from Thinking Machines Lab's US$2B single-lead seed: it assembled five co-leads spanning US and European VC plus a coalition of strategics and star angels — reading more like a coalition of patrons than a conventional round. The strategics were arguably the message: NVIDIA signals infrastructure, Toyota Ventures and Samsung point to industrial and device applications, Temasek mirrors the Singapore hub.

Team and multi-hub structure

AMI operated from day one across Paris (HQ), New York, Montreal and Singapore — deliberately built around where its leaders live: LeCun teaches at NYU, CSO Saining Xie came from Google DeepMind, and Singapore serves both talent and future Asian industrial clients. The founding roster is a Meta/FAIR diaspora: CEO Alexandre LeBrun (Nabla, Wit.ai), COO Laurent Solly (Meta VP Europe), CRIO Pascale Fung. LeCun remains a NYU professor, and Paris was welcomed by President Macron — positioning AMI within Europe's sovereign-AI narrative as an explicitly 'neither American nor Chinese' frontier lab.

Roadmap, proof, and risk

LeBrun is candid that AMI is 'not your typical applied AI startup' — commercial applications could take years, with early industrial targets in robotics, manufacturing and process control (partners scouted in South Korea mid-2026). The first rigorous public output came in May 2026, when LeCun and co-authors posted a formal proof that LeJEPA recovers a world's true latent variables (verified in Lean 4). Independent benchmarks of early JEPA preprints still show fragility under visual distractors — underscoring that the framework must close a large gap between theory and reliable real-world deployment before the next financing round tests the thesis.

More in the Atlas

AMI Labs's lead investors are profiled in the Investor Atlas when their firms join the directory. Track who backs every frontier AI round on the Funding Leaderboard.