Yann LeCun's AMI Labs Closes $1.03B Seed — Largest in European History
AMI Labs, the AI research company founded by Yann LeCun following his departure from Meta in November 2025, closed a $1.03 billion seed round on March 10, 2026 at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation — the largest seed round in European history. Investors include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Samsung, and Toyota. AMI Labs is pursuing JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), a world-model approach that LeCun argues supersedes language-model scaling. The lab's LeWorldModel, developed with Mila, NYU, Samsung SAIL, and Brown, is the first pixel-native JEPA achieving 48× faster planning than foundation-model baselines on a single laptop GPU.
Why It Matters
$1B+ at seed stage signals that investors see JEPA-based world models as a credible alternative to the transformer-LLM paradigm — and that LeCun's post-Meta platform is now funded at a scale to compete directly with frontier lab research.