Ami Labs, led by Alexandre Lebrun, is the start-up set to revolutionise AI and has raised £1 billion

The start-up Ami Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence), founded by French researcher Yann LeCun (former Chief Scientist at Meta and winner of the 2018 Turing Award), became a unicorn as soon as it was created. It will be led by Alexandre Lebrun. He is the co-founder of the medical AI start-up Nabla. He is also a 1994 graduate of the École Polytechnique. The goal at Ami Labs is to develop the next generation of artificial intelligence capable of understanding the world around us: ʻworld modelsʼ.

10 Mar. 2026

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Alumni association-AX

A new start-up has just joined the unicorn club: Ami Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence). Its founder, Yann LeCun, secured one of the largest global fundraising rounds for a start-up company!

This exceptional fundraising brought together numerous investors in France and abroad, including international funds, industrialists, and major figures in the tech sector, such as the French fund Cathay Innovation, BPI France, the Mulliez family association, the Marcel Dassault industrial group, LVMH's Aglaé Ventures fund, the Singaporean fund Temasek, Rodolphe Saadé's Zebox Ventures (Saadé is the CEO of the CMA CGM group), Bezos Expeditions (the family office of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon), and personalities like Xavier Niel (founder of Free) and Eric Schmidt (former head of Google).

Ami Labs CEO Alexandre Lebrun (X1994) welcomed the deal, telling the media: ʻThe investors are very diverse and spread across three continents.ʼ Alexandre Lebrun, a graduate of the prestigious École Polytechnique, had already made a name for himself in the field of AI. He worked with LeCun for several years at Meta's artificial intelligence laboratories. In 2018, he launched his start-up, Nabla, which specialises in healthcare AI and automatically generates reports following medical consultations.

The founder Yann LeCun

The Chief Executive Officier Alexandre Lebrun

Rethinking AI to gain a better understanding of the world's complexities

In addition to this financial achievement, the Ami Labs team aims to disrupt the tech industry by developing new AI models that can automate complex tasks through observation and modelling of the world — known as ʻworld models̕. Unlike large language models (LLMs), which most American tech giants currently rely on for processing historical text data, ʻworld modelsʼ are based on analysing videos, 3D environments, and spatial data. This new generation of AI models could understand the physical world by relying on ʻabstract representations of reality, similar to the mental models that humans use to reason and guide their actionsʼ, according to the Ami Labs leaders. This concept is similar to digital twins. Many fields could be affected, including robotics, autonomous vehicles and AI agents responsible for solving complex problems. In addition to modelling, ʻworld modelsʼ would be able to anticipate the real world.

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