Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, a Paris-based startup founded by Turing Award-winning researcher Yann LeCun, has closed Europe's largest seed round at $1.03 billion, signaling an extraordinary bet that an alternative approach to artificial intelligence could reshape the industry.
The funding, announced on March 10, 2026, values AMI Labs at $3.5 billion pre-money and was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. Additional participants include NVIDIA, Toyota, Samsung, and Temasek.
AMI Labs is building "world models" based on LeCun's Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), creating AI systems that learn abstract representations of how reality functions.
"Factories, hospitals, and robots in open environments need AI that grasps reality. Reality isn't tokenized--it's continuous, noisy and high-dimensional," said Alexandre LeBrun, CEO of AMI Labs.
The startup's technical team includes Saining Xie, formerly of Google DeepMind, as Chief Science Officer. LeCun has called large language models "a statistical illusion."
The capital reflects a significant shift in how investors evaluate competing technical approaches. AMI Labs is operating on research timelines, with meaningful commercial partnerships likely within 12 to 24 months.
“Language models alone will never achieve true understanding. World models are the path to human-level AI.”