Abu Dhabi’s Shorooq has joined one of the largest seed rounds in AI history. The raise totals $1.03 billion for AMI Labs, the new company founded by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun. The investment signals that MENA’s private capital is now operating at the frontier of global AI, not following it.
AMI Labs, short for Advanced Machine Intelligence, closed a $1.03 billion seed round on March 10. The raise values the Paris-headquartered startup at approximately $3.5 billion pre-money. Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions co-led the round. Temasek, Nvidia, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, and Xavier Niel also participated. Shorooq joins this group as the round’s MENA representative.
LeCun, former Meta Chief AI Scientist and one of the architects of modern deep learning, founded AMI Labs and serves as Executive Chair. Alexandre LeBrun, previously co-founder of healthcare AI company Nabla, leads the company as CEO. AMI Labs operates out of Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore.
Why You Should Care
LeCun has spent years arguing that large language models are fundamentally limited. They predict text. They do not reason, plan, or understand the physical world.
AMI Labs is his answer. The company is building what LeCun calls “world models.” These are AI systems trained on spatial and real-world data, built to develop genuine causal understanding rather than pattern recognition. AMI Labs is targeting manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, and biomedical industries first. These are precisely the sectors where current AI falls short, and where the Gulf’s economic diversification agenda is most active.
The Ripple
This is a statement investment for Shorooq. The firm has been building a global AI portfolio while maintaining its MENA and Asia roots. Participating at seed stage, at this valuation, alongside Temasek and Nvidia places Shorooq among a handful of regional firms operating at the genuine frontier of global technology investment.
Dr. Bilal Baloch, Partner at Shorooq, said the investment reflects conviction that LeCun’s world-model architecture “could fundamentally expand what machines are capable of understanding and executing in the physical world.”
What to Watch
World model AI is a long-horizon bet. If it begins delivering results in manufacturing and robotics, the Gulf becomes a natural early-adopter market. The sectors AMI Labs is targeting map directly onto Vision 2030 and UAE industrial strategy. Shorooq’s early position gives the region a stake in that outcome from day one.
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