Yann LeCun’s AI Startup Wins $1.03 Bn Funding to Build ‘World Model’ Systems

Yann LeCun’s AI startup Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) has raised $1.03 billion as it seeks to build AI that can understand the physical world, reason and plan.

The funding round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, the investment firm of Jeff Bezos. The company said the round values its effort to develop what it calls a new class of AI systems based on world models.

“Advanced Machine Intelligence is building a new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe,” the company said in a statement announcing the funding.

Other investors participating in the round include Toyota Ventures, Temasek, SBVA, Nvidia, Mark Cuban, Association Familiale Mulliez, Groupe industriel Marcel Dassault, Sea and Alpha Intelligence Capital, among others. 

AMI said the funding will be used to develop AI systems centred on world models, an approach that gives machines the ability to understand how the real world works, maintain persistent memory, and plan actions over time.

LeCun, who won the 2018 Turing Award for his contributions to deep learning, has long argued that current large language models are insufficient to achieve human-level intelligence and that AI systems need deeper representations of the physical world.

The company operates across Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore and said it is expanding its team of researchers and engineers.

AMI was founded in 2025 after LeCun stepped down from his role as Chief AI Scientist at Meta, where he had led the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) lab for more than a decade. 

The company is led by Alex LeBrun, Co-founder of healthcare AI startup Nabla, who serves as CEO, while LeCun serves as executive chairman.