Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs has secured $1.03 billion in seed funding at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, making it one of the largest pre-revenue AI investments in history.
The funding round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with backing from notable investors Jeff Bezos and Mark Cuban. This significant investment positions the startup as a high-profile bet on “world models” as an alternative to large language models.
Yann LeCun, the company’s founder and executive chairman, departed Meta Platforms at the end of 2025 after leading Meta’s foundational AI research group FAIR for more than a decade. LeCun stated that AMI aims to build systems capable of reasoning and planning in complex real-world settings. “We want to become the main provider of intelligent systems, regardless of what the application is,” LeCun said.
The company’s near-term targets include manufacturers, automakers, aerospace companies, and pharmaceutical groups, industries that require understanding physics and causality more than generating text. LeCun revealed that he is in talks with Meta about deploying AMI’s technology in its Ray-Ban smart glasses, calling this a shorter-term potential application.
Alexandre LeBrun serves as chief executive officer, while LeCun holds the role of executive chairman. Through a partnership with Nabla, AMI Labs plans to develop FDA-certifiable AI systems for healthcare. The company employs about a dozen people and is less than three months old.
LeCun acknowledged that commercial products may take years to materialize. Other notable developments in the AI space include World Labs, founded by Fei-Fei Li, which is reportedly in talks to raise funding at a $5 billion valuation. NVIDIA has invested roughly $53 billion across 170 AI startup deals, according to PitchBook data cited by Forbes.
AMI Labs plans to develop domestic robots that need common sense to understand the physical world, further expanding its potential applications.
