AMI Labs, Advanced Machine Intelligence, announced on March 10, 2026, that it had closed a $1.03 billion seed round at a pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion, according to TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal. The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.
Co-founder Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner and former Meta AI chief scientist, left Meta to build a company around a specific thesis: that transformers are the wrong foundation for AI systems that need to understand the physical world. AMI Labs’ stated mission is developing “world models,” an architectural approach that differs from the transformer-dominated mainstream. Investors are betting on the founder and the thesis before any product exists.
The co-lead investor list is diverse in a way that matters. Bezos Expeditions alongside deep-tech VCs (Cathay Innovation, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, Greycroft) signals conviction in a research direction, not a commercial traction story. According to reporting by Futurumgroup, Nvidia was among additional investors, the same Nvidia that backed Nscale’s $2 billion infrastructure round announced this week.
AMI Labs raised one of the largest seed rounds ever by a European startup, according to reporting on the round. The superlative hasn’t been independently verified, so the scale is the meaningful data point: $1.03 billion at the seed stage, before revenue, before a product.
That’s not a bet on what exists. It’s a bet on what LeCun believes should exist.