Yann LeCun's AMI raises $1.03B at $3.5B for world-model research

The financing was a seed round, and the $3.5 billion valuation is pre-money, which implies roughly $4.5B after the new cash. The company is Paris-based and the raise equals about €890M. It reportedly sought only €500M in December. Nvidia, Temasek, Samsung, Toyota Ventures and Bpifrance also backed the round. Eric Schmidt, Mark Cuban and Xavier Niel invested as individuals. Reports date the announcement to March 9 or 10. The lab builds on LeCun's JEPA architecture, aimed at industrial, robotic and healthcare uses. Nabla is the first partner and will use early models in healthcare. Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $1 billion a month earlier, so world models are drawing large checks across several teams. Only Thinking Machines Lab's $2 billion seed in June 2025 was larger. For founders, the round shows that investors will fund non-LLM architectures at frontier scale. The payoff is slow, though. The first year is focused on research, with product timelines measured in years. Startups in robotics, industrial automation or healthcare may soon face a well-funded lab with strategic hardware backers in their market. Others could become early partners, as Nabla has.