Yann LeCun, Oriol Vinyals Launch 224 Ventures with $100 Mn for AI Startups

Yann LeCun, Meta’s former Chief AI Scientist, and Oriol Vinyals, Gemini Co-lead at Google DeepMind, have joined entrepreneur and co-founder of AIX Ventures Shaun Johnson to launch 224 Ventures, a venture capital firm which will invest in early-stage AI startups. 

The firm starts with $100 million in assets under management and will invest exclusively in AI-native companies.

The launch comes as venture capital firms continue to increase investments in AI startups, particularly those building foundation models, AI infrastructure, robotics and enterprise AI applications. 

According to Johnson, the firm has already started investing in companies across AI applications, robotics, infrastructure and core intelligence. It plans to write $1 million to $5 million cheques and participate alongside lead investors rather than lead funding rounds itself.

Johnson said all three partners would be involved in sourcing, evaluating and voting on every investment.

“We’ve already begun backing technical founders across applications, robotics, infrastructure, and core intelligence—writing $1–5M checks as a collaborative investor, partnering alongside lead investors to back companies advancing the frontier of AI,” Johnson wrote in a post on X.

The firm said it intends to source startups from research and engineering communities where frontier AI work is taking place, arguing that many technical founders emerge from these networks before entering traditional venture pipelines.

Johnson also outlined the firm’s limited partner base, saying it consists of AI operators including frontier researchers, engineering and product leaders, chief AI and data officers, sales and marketing executives, and CEOs. 

He said the network spans major AI hubs including the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Paris, Toronto, London and Tel Aviv.

According to Johnson, this network is expected to help portfolio companies find customers, design partners, employees, mentors and future investors.

The launch of 224 Ventures follows LeCun’s own push into AI entrepreneurship. He recently launched Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a Paris-based AI startup focused on developing world models that learn from real-world data rather than relying primarily on large language models. 

In March, AMI raised $1.03 billion in seed funding at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, making it one of the largest seed financings for an AI startup.

“My main gigs are still with AMI - Advanced Machine Intelligence and the NYU Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science. But 224 Ventures connects us deeply with the AI startup scene through our network of founders and amazing LPs,” he added.