UAE-based venture capital firm Shorooq has participated in a $1.03 billion seed funding round for artificial intelligence startup AMI Labs, valuing the company at approximately $3.5 billion pre-money.
The round is among the largest seed financings ever raised by an AI startup. It was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with participation from global investors including Temasek, Nvidia, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, and Xavier Niel.
AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence) was founded in 2026 by AI pioneer Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, alongside entrepreneur Alexandre LeBrun, the co-founder and former CEO of healthcare AI company Nabla. LeBrun currently serves as CEO of AMI Labs, while LeCun acts as Executive Chair.
Headquartered in Paris, the company also maintains offices in New York, Montreal, and Singapore as it builds research and engineering teams focused on developing next-generation artificial intelligence systems.
AMI Labs is developing an alternative approach to artificial intelligence centered on “world models”—systems designed to learn from spatial and real-world data rather than purely predicting text or images. The architecture aims to enable AI systems capable of reasoning, planning actions, and understanding cause and effect in physical environments.
The company expects its technology to initially target enterprise applications across industries such as manufacturing, robotics, aerospace, and biomedical sectors where AI systems must interact with complex real-world environments.
For Shorooq, the investment reflects its broader strategy to back frontier technologies and globally significant AI companies.
Dr. Bilal Baloch, Partner at Shorooq, said: “AMI Labs represents one of the most ambitious efforts to redefine the foundations of artificial intelligence. Yann LeCun’s vision for world-model architectures could fundamentally expand what machines are capable of understanding and executing in the physical world. We are proud to support this next wave of AI innovation alongside some of the world’s leading investors.”
The investment aligns with Shorooq’s expanding global AI strategy, which focuses on connecting emerging artificial intelligence ecosystems across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.
