Shorooq Backs $1B Startup AMI Labs in One of AI’s Largest Seed Rounds

Paris-headquartered artificial intelligence startup AMI Labs has raised $1.03 billion in a seed funding round, one of the largest early-stage financings in the history of the AI sector. The round closed on March 10th, 2026, valuing the company at approximately $3.5 billion pre-money.

The investment was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions, with participation from investors including Temasek, Nvidia, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel. Abu Dhabi-based investment firm Shorooq Partners also joined the round as the Middle East and North Africa representative.

AMI Labs—short for Advanced Machine Intelligence—was founded by Yann LeCun, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist who serves as the company’s Executive Chair. The company’s chief executive officer is Alexandre LeBrun, previously co-founder of healthcare AI company Nabla.

The company operates across Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore, developing a new approach to artificial intelligence centred on “world models.” The technology aims to move beyond traditional large language models, which primarily predict text, toward systems capable of reasoning, planning, and understanding physical environments.

AMI Labs’ AI models are designed to learn from spatial and real-world data in order to develop causal understanding of how systems operate. The company is initially targeting applications in manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, and biomedical industries.