AMI Labs closed a $1.03 billion seed round on March 10, 2026, in what Crunchbase News and other outlets describe as the largest seed round in European startup history. Reuters and Bloomberg both confirmed the raise amount and the involvement of co-founder Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta and recipient of the 2018 Turing Award.
The round was co-led by Bezos Expeditions, Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, and HV Capital. AMI Labs is reportedly valued at $3.5 billion pre-money, according to multiple reports, though no regulatory filing has confirmed that figure independently.
The company’s stated research focus is world models: AI systems built to reason about and plan within three-dimensional physical environments, rather than processing language and symbols alone. LeCun has argued publicly and at length that transformer-based LLMs, however capable, aren’t the right architecture for general machine intelligence. AMI Labs is his bet on what comes next.
The round’s structure is the signal. A $1.03 billion seed round doesn’t fund a product roadmap. It funds a research thesis at a scale that only a handful of frontier labs worldwide can match. Investors aren’t buying an application. They’re buying a position on a fundamental AI research direction.
For AI strategists and enterprise decision-makers: “world models” will appear more frequently in vendor positioning over the next 12-24 months. AMI Labs just made that term fundable at nine figures.