Yann LeCun’s AMI Raises $1.03 Bn to Develop "World Models"
The funding round values the company at $3.5 billion pre-money.
Artificial intelligence startup Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), founded by former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, has raised $1.03 billion in funding to pursue a new approach to building advanced AI systems that move beyond today’s dominant large language model (LLM) technology.
The funding round values the company at $3.5 billion pre-money and was co-led by investors including Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions.
LeCun, one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence and a Turing Award winner, left Meta in late 2025 after more than a decade leading the company’s AI research efforts.
His new venture aims to build AI systems based on “world models,” which attempt to understand the physical world and enable reasoning, planning and decision-making rather than simply predicting the next word in a sequence.
The company believes current AI systems, which rely heavily on large language models, are limited in their ability to achieve human-level reasoning or autonomy. Instead, AMI plans to develop AI capable of understanding complex environments and interacting with real-world systems.
According to LeCun, the technology could eventually power a wide range of applications across industries. Early customers are expected to include organizations operating complex systems such as manufacturing, aerospace, automotive and biomedical companies.
In the longer term, the company also sees potential consumer uses, including domestic robots and smart devices that require deeper understanding of the physical world.
Headquartered in Paris with additional offices in Montreal, Singapore and New York, AMI positions itself as a challenger to the dominant LLM-focused strategies pursued by major AI firms including OpenAI and Anthropic.
