Yann LeCun, the Turing Award winner and former Meta chief AI scientist, has closed a $1.03 billion seed round for Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation—Europe's largest seed funding round ever.

Founded in late 2025 after LeCun's departure from Meta, Paris-based AMI Labs is developing world models using LeCun's Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). Unlike large language models that predict outputs token-by-token, world models learn abstract representations of physical reality through sensors and cameras, making them better suited for robotics, industrial applications, and healthcare where hallucinations carry real costs.

The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with participation from Nvidia, Temasek, Samsung, and Toyota Ventures. Individual backers include Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, and Tim Berners-Lee.

AMI's leadership team draws heavily from Meta's AI research organization, with Alexandre LeBrun (former Nabla CEO) as CEO, Saining Xie as chief science officer, and Pascale Fung as chief research and innovation officer. The company operates hubs in Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore.

LeBrun emphasized AMI's long-term research focus, noting the first year will prioritize foundational work with commercial products potentially years away. The company positions itself as a European alternative to US and Chinese AI labs, though it acknowledges that true AI independence remains aspirational given supply chain dependencies.