Yann LeCun’s AMI joins Presight–Shorooq $100m AI fund
AMI investment one of six AI startups invested in by the $100m AI fund
#UAE #funding – Paris and New York-based AI startup AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence), founded by Turing Award winner and former Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, has been confirmed as one of the first six investments of the Presight–Shorooq Fund I. The $100 million global early-stage AI fund was established by ADX-listed applied AI company Presight and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm Shorooq. The confirmation follows the fund’s investment in AMI Labs $1.03 billion funding round: one of the largest seed financings ever raised by an AI startup. At a pre-money valuation of approximately $3.5 billion, AMI is developing a new class of AI systems built on world model architectures, designed to reason, plan and understand cause and effect in the physical world.
SO WHAT? – Most AI systems today are built to predict. The next word, the next image, the next token. LeCun has long argued that this approach has fundamental limits. AMI Labs aims to build something categorically different: AI that models the physical world, understands cause and effect, and can plan ahead. That is a significant architectural bet. For Presight and Shorooq, backing AMI is not just a financial decision, it is a signal about AI’s future.
Here are some key points about this investment:
AMI Labs has been confirmed as the sixth investment of the Presight–Shorooq Fund I, a $100 million global early-stage fund launched in September 2025. The fund assessed over 1,000 companies before deploying capital into its initial six-company portfolio.
AMI Labs has recently closed a $1.03 billion funding round, one of the largest seed financings in AI startup history. The round values the company at approximately $3.5 billion pre-money and was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions.
The Presight–Shorooq Fund joined the AMI round alongside a distinguished group of global investors including Temasek, Nvidia, SBVA, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel, reflecting broad institutional and individual conviction around AMI’s technical approach.
AMI Labs was founded by Yann LeCun, winner of the Turing Award (widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of computing) and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, where he spent nearly a decade. LeCun serves as Executive Chair, with Alexandre LeBrun, formerly co-founder and CEO of healthcare AI company Nabla, as CEO.
AMI’s core focus is world model architecture: AI systems that learn from spatial and real-world data to model cause and effect, enabling deeper reasoning and planning capabilities that go beyond the predictive text and image generation approaches that dominate today’s AI landscape.
Headquartered in Paris with offices in New York, Montreal and Singapore, AMI is initially targeting enterprise applications across manufacturing, aerospace, robotics and biomedical industries (i.e. sectors where understanding physical cause and effect is operationally critical).
Five other Presight–Shorooq Fund I portfolio companies were announced in February. The are sovereign cloud platform NodeShift, enterprise AI platform Hebbia, procurement AI company Candid, financial intelligence platform Crunched and voice action model company Blue, spanning sovereign infrastructure, vertical intelligence and edge-native systems.
Portfolio companies benefit from capital alongside access to Presight’s AI infrastructure and the broader G42 ecosystem, as well as Shorooq’s track record in scaling startups across MENA and Asia, creating structured pathways from early-stage investment to enterprise and government deployment.
Presight’s AI Innovation Ecosystem combines the Presight–Shorooq Fund, an AI Accelerator Program and Research and Development Labs. The ecosystem is expected to expand through future cohorts targeting energy systems, industrial autonomy, sovereign data infrastructure and AI-native public services.
ZOOM OUT – Launched in September 2025, the Presight-Shorooq Fund builds on Presight’s AI-Startup Accelerator, first announced at Expand North Star 2024 in Dubai. Now onboarding its second cohort, the three-month programme targets early-stage AI start-ups with prototypes or minimum viable products from MENA, South-East Asia and Central Asia. Selected start-ups receive mentoring, AI-specific technological resources, high-performance computing, cloud services and access to foundational language models and algorithms. With backing of Presight and the G42 Group, the accelerator helps AI start-ups refine business models and achieve market fit before scaling. The Presight-Shorooq Fund I extends this ecosystem support by providing capital alongside infrastructure access.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Read more about the fund:
Presight-Shorooq AI fund deploys capital in five companies (Middle East AI News)
Presight appoints global Advisory Board for $100M AI fund (Middle East AI News)
Presight & Shorooq launch $100 million AI fund (Middle East AI News)