"We Got Funded!" UAE-Based Investment Firm Shorooq Joins US$1.03 Billion Funding Round for Ex-Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun’s New Venture

UAE-based investment firm Shorooq has joined a US$1.03 billion seed funding round for AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence), the Paris-headquartered artificial intelligence company founded by former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun. The round, reported as one of the largest seed financings ever raised by an AI startup, values AMI Labs at approximately US$3.5 billion pre-money and was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions.

"AMI Labs represents one of the most ambitious efforts to redefine the foundations of artificial intelligence," said Dr. Bilal Baloch, partner at Shorooq. "Yann LeCun’s vision for world-model architectures could fundamentally expand what machines are capable of understanding and executing in the physical world."

Deal details and investor lineup

The financing round brought together a global roster of strategic and institutional backers. Shorooq joined the round alongside prominent names that include:

• Temasek
• Nvidia
• SBVA
• Mark Cuban
• Eric Schmidt
• Xavier Niel
• Bezos Expeditions (co-lead)
• Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital and HV Capital (co-leads)

AMI Labs is positioning itself to develop a new class of AI built on so-called "world models." Unlike systems focused primarily on predicting text or images, world-model architectures are designed to learn from spatial and real-world data, modeling environments and interactions to enable reasoning, planning and a deeper grasp of cause and effect.

The company’s approach aims to shift capabilities from passive prediction to active understanding, equipping AI agents to operate in more complex and dynamic real-world scenarios. The funding round, which places AMI Labs at an estimated US$3.5 billion pre-money valuation, provides the startup with a substantial capital base to pursue research, engineering and scale-up efforts in pursuit of those goals.

Outlook

With backing from blue-chip investors spanning venture capital, corporate technology and individual investors, AMI Labs enters a crowded but fast-evolving field of foundational AI research with a clear strategic bet on environment-aware systems. If the promise of world-model architectures materializes, proponents say such models could broaden the range of tasks machines can perform autonomously by improving their ability to reason about physical interactions and long-term consequences.

For Shorooq, participation in the US$1.03 billion round underscores continued interest from Middle East investors in high-impact AI startups and aligns the UAE firm with one of the sector’s most high-profile researchers, Yann LeCun, as AMI Labs scales its work on next-generation artificial intelligence.