Yet another star AI researcher has raised a mega round for their own startup.
Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning computer scientist and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, has co-founded AMI Labs — Advanced Machine Intelligence — and secured a $1.03 billion (approximately €890 million) seed round to back it. Alex LeBrun, the French entrepreneur best known for founding Wit.ai and Nabla, has been appointed CEO. LeCun serves as Executive Chairman. The round values the company at $3.5 billion.
The Thesis: Beyond LLMs
The bet at AMI Labs is a direct challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy in AI. In a LinkedIn post announcing his new role, LeBrun was candid about the limitations he has observed across 24 years of building AI products — from chatbots (VirtuOz, 2002) to natural language understanding (Wit.ai, 2012) to Facebook’s M assistant and healthcare AI at Nabla. “The solutions we’ve shipped have all relied on ‘shortcuts,'” he wrote. “Generative architectures trained by self-supervised learning mimic intelligence; they don’t genuinely understand the world.”
His argument is that predicting tokens works well for discrete tasks like coding, math, and summarization — but fails in environments that demand real-world understanding. “Factories, hospitals, and robots operating in open environments demand AI that grasps reality. And reality is not tokenized: it’s continuous, noisy and high-dimensional.” The solution, in LeBrun’s framing, is world models — AI systems that learn abstract representations of real-world data and can predict the consequences of actions, enabling planning under safety guardrails. Target industries include industrial automation, robotics, wearables, and healthcare.
Nabla is AMI’s first partner, with Nabla’s customers set to gain early access to AMI’s world model research. LeBrun will transition from CEO of Nabla to Chairman and Chief AI Scientist there, with the Nabla co-founding team — Martin Raison, Delphine Groll, and Laurent Landowski — continuing to lead day-to-day operations.
A Pattern Investors Know Well
AMI Labs is the latest in a wave of billion-dollar bets on star researchers going independent. Former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever founded Safe Superintelligence in 2024, raising $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation. Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab in 2025, raising $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation. And Dario Amodei left OpenAI in 2020 to found Anthropic, now one of the leading frontier AI labs. The template is consistent: a famous name, a bold thesis, no product yet — and investors writing nine-figure checks anyway.
LeCun’s scientific credentials are admittedly impressive. A 2018 Turing Award winner and one of the three “godfathers of deep learning,” he spent over a decade at Meta building FAIR into one of the world’s premier AI research labs. He has also been the most prominent public critic of the LLM paradigm — he has declared that he was “no longer interested in LLMs” and has argued that nations could leapfrog AI leaders by working on ideas beyond LLMs. AMI Labs is, in a sense, LeCun putting over a billion dollars behind that conviction.
Investors in the round include Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, 20VC, Bpifrance, Daphni, and HV Capital. The company will operate across Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore.