Former Meta AI chief’s new AI startup secures $1bn for world models

Advanced Machine Intelligence, a startup founded by former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, said on Tuesday it had raised $1.03 billion in seed funding at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation to develop artificial intelligence systems designed to reason about the physical world.

The Paris-based company said the financing was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions, with backing from investors including Nvidia, Samsung and Temasek. According to Reuters, the round positions AMI as a test of LeCun’s long-standing view that today’s large language models fall short of human-level reasoning and autonomy.

LeCun, who left Meta at the end of 2025 after more than a decade leading its AI research, told Reuters that the company aims to build systems capable of planning and reasoning in complex environments rather than simply predicting the next word or image. “We want to become the main provider of intelligent systems, regardless of what the application is,” he said.

Bloomberg reported that the three-month-old company is headquartered in Paris and led by chief executive Alexandre LeBrun, a former Meta AI researcher and former chief executive of health-technology startup Nabla. The startup currently employs around 20 people and operates offices in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore.

The technology under development centres on so-called “world models”, which are designed to learn from video and spatial data so machines can understand cause and effect in real environments. Proponents argue such systems could enable applications ranging from robotics and self-driving vehicles to industrial automation.

LeBrun told the Financial Times that the company would focus on research before deploying commercial applications. “We have at least a year of research before deploying our first real-world applications,” he said.

According to Bloomberg, AMI plans to work initially with industries that operate complex physical systems, including automotive, aerospace and pharmaceuticals, rather than launching a consumer product. LeCun told Reuters that the technology could eventually support devices such as domestic robots and wearable products.

The funding round is among the largest seed investments in Europe’s technology sector and reflects continued investor appetite for new artificial intelligence approaches beyond existing chatbot systems.