Abu Dhabi, UAE — Shorooq today announced its participation in the $1.03 billion funding round of AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence), the newly launched artificial intelligence company founded by AI pioneer Yann LeCun, alongside a global consortium of leading venture capital firms and technology investors.

The round, one of the largest seed financings ever raised by an AI startup, was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, and values AMI Labs at approximately $3.5 billion pre-money.

Shorooq joined the round alongside a distinguished group of global investors including Temasek, Nvidia, SBVA, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, and other institutional backers, reflecting strong conviction around AMI’s vision to develop a new class of artificial intelligence systems capable of reasoning, planning, and understanding the physical world.

Founded by Turing Award winner and former Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, AMI Labs is pioneering 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. This architecture aims to enable AI agents with deeper reasoning capabilities and a more robust understanding of cause and effect.

AMI Labs is led by CEO Alexandre LeBrun, formerly the co-founder and CEO of healthcare AI company Nabla, with LeCun serving as Executive Chair. The company is headquartered in Paris with additional offices in New York, Montreal, and Singapore, and is expected to initially target enterprise applications across manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, and biomedical industries.

For Shorooq, the investment reflects the firm’s continued commitment to backing category-defining companies at the frontier of technological innovation.

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 also aligns with Shorooq’s growing global AI strategy, including its work bridging emerging AI ecosystems across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

About Shorooq

Founded in 2017, Shorooq is a multi-strategy investment firm engineered around technology. Our strategies span venture capital, credit, private equity, and real assets—each guided by a tech native lens that informs how we identify innovation, underwrite risk, and drive value. This integrated approach allows us to invest across the capital stack in businesses reshaping their sectors, from fintech and software to AI, industrials, and infrastructure.

Rooted in a founder-centric principle and disciplined underwriting, Shorooq blends global investment standards with true on-the-ground presence across the MENA and Asia. We are building an institution designed to endure, born in a region where the future of capital is being written.

Visit us at www.shorooq.com

Shorooq refers to a group of companies that are affiliates of each other and which operate under this business name, of which Shorooq Partners Ltd (regulated by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority FSRA FSP: 190004 as a category 3C Fund Manager) is a member.

Media Contacts:
Tarek Fouad
Chief Marketing Officer, Shorooq
Shorooq Group Press: press@shorooq.com
Direct: tfouad@shorooq.com