AI start-up of former Meta bigwig bags $1bn in funding

By Agency Staff

Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), the start-up founded by former Meta Platforms chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, said on Tuesday it raised $1.03bn based on a $3.50bn valuation, as it seeks to commercialise artificial intelligence (AI) systems built around reasoning, planning and “world models”.

The financing positions the company as a test of LeCun’s belief that large language models (LLM) fall short of human-level reasoning and autonomy.

The funding round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions.

Meanwhile, Meta has been intensifying its push into LLM development. In June 2025, the company reorganised its AI efforts under the division Meta Superintelligence Labs led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.

LeCun joined Meta in 2013 to found Facebook AI Research, later known as Fair, and became one of the company’s most prominent AI leaders before departing at end-2025.

LeCun said AMI aims to build systems capable of reasoning and planning in complex real-world settings. He added that current AI approaches based on predicting the next word or pixel will not produce broadly capable intelligent agents by themselves.

The company’s near-term target customers are organisations operating complex systems, including manufacturers, carmakers, aerospace companies, biomedical firms and pharmaceutical groups.

“We want to become the main provider of intelligent systems, regardless of what the application is,” LeCun said.

Over time, he added, the technology could also support consumer applications. “What consumers could be interacting with is a domestic robot. You need a domestic robot to have some level of common sense to really understand the physical world.”

LeCun said he is also talking to Meta about potentially deploying the technology in its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. “That’s probably one of the shorter-term potential applications,” he said.