Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, is in early discussions to raise about €500 million ($586.00 million) for a new AI startup, a move that would value the company at roughly €3 billion ($3.5 billion) before its formal launch, the Financial Times reported.
LeCun, who is set to leave Meta by the end of the year, has lined up Alexandre LeBrun, founder of French health-tech company Nabla, to serve as chief executive. The discussions are at a preliminary stage, and the valuation could change, the report added.
The venture, called Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs, is expected to be announced in January. LeCun will serve as the executive chair.
The leadership transition was confirmed by the company, which stated, “As part of a planned, board-supported transition, Nabla co-founder and CEO Alex LeBrun will transition from his role to become CEO of AMI Labs.”
Nabla has also entered into a strategic research partnership with AMI Labs. LeBrun will remain Nabla’s chair and chief AI scientist, while Delphine Groll, Nabla’s co-founder and COO, will lead the company during the search for a permanent CEO.
Under the partnership, Nabla will receive early access to AMI Labs’ world model technologies, which the company plans to use to develop agentic AI systems for healthcare that are intended to meet FDA certification requirements.
The funding talks follow November’s report that LeCun was planning to leave Meta after 12 years to start his own AI company. LeCun is a French-American scientist, a Turing Award winner, and one of the pioneers of modern AI.
AMI Labs will develop AI systems based on “world models”—architectures that can understand the physical world rather than relying primarily on language data.
The systems are intended for applications including robotics and transport. The work builds on research led by LeCun at Meta, involving AI models trained on video and spatial data, with features such as persistent memory, reasoning and planning.
Meta will not invest directly in the start-up but plans to form a partnership that would give it access to the technology for commercial use, according to the report.
LeCun’s departure comes amid broader changes to Meta’s AI strategy under CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has shifted focus toward faster product development to compete with companies such as OpenAI and Google.
Meta has scaled back longer-term research at its Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research unit, which LeCun founded in 2013, and laid off about 600 staff from the group in October.
His exit follows other senior departures from Meta’s AI leadership. In May, vice president of AI research, Joelle Pineau, left the company and later joined Canadian AI start-up Cohere.
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