- Led by AI Pioneer Yann LeCun, AMI Brings Together Top Talent from Meta and Google to Build Next-Generation "World Models"
- Advancing "Practical Intelligence" That Operates in Real-World Industrial Environments, Accelerating Transformation Across Manufacturing and Robotics
- SBVA to Serve as Strategic Bridge Between Global AI Leadership and Asia’s Industrial Ecosystem
SEOUL, South Korea, March 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — SBVA (CEO: JP Lee) announced today that it has committed a total of €30 million in the seed round of AMI (Advanced Machine Intelligence), a global frontier AI lab founded by Professor Yann LeCun, one of the world’s foremost pioneers in artificial intelligence.
SBVA Invests €30 Million in Yann LeCun–Founded AMI to Pioneer the Era of World Models
The round includes participation from leading global institutional investors such as Greycroft Partners, Cathay Innovation, and Hiro Capital, as well as NVIDIA. In addition, prominent figures in the global technology industry, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, have also contributed capital to the round.
SBVA’s investment was made through its existing 2023 Alpha Korea Fund and Alpha Intelligence Fund, alongside its newly established Alpha AI Architecture Fund. Notably, the new fund includes prominent domestic and global corporations and institutions, including Coupang and Doosan, as limited partners (LPs), establishing a collaborative foundation to accelerate the adoption of next-generation AI architectures.
Yann LeCun, who leads AMI, was the founding director of Meta’s Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and a recipient of some of the world’s most prestigious honors in science and engineering, including the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and the ACM Turing Award. Widely recognized as a foundational figure in modern deep learning, LeCun is joined at AMI by leading researchers and engineers from Meta, Google DeepMind, and other globally renowned technology organizations. Together, they are building a global frontier AI research lab.
AMI is developing a next-generation World Model architecture centered on self-supervised learning and Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). Its goal is to enable AI systems to understand and reason about the world more like humans, realizing what the team describes as "practical intelligence" capable of operating in real-world environments.
SBVA will serve as a strategic partner connecting AMI with Asia’s industrial ecosystem. Through proof-of-concept (PoC) initiatives with major corporations, SBVA aims to support real-world industrial innovation. At the same time, it plans to foster technological collaboration across its portfolio companies in robotics, manufacturing, and AI, enabling Korean startups to adopt next-generation World Model architectures early and expand jointly into global markets.
"We are grateful for SBVA’s support and for its commitment to long-term scientific work," said an AMI official. "It reflects our global vision and ambition and underscores our commitment to building deep partnerships in Korea and across Asia."
"AMI is a leading pioneer of ‘world model’ AI designed to understand the physical world," said JP Lee, CEO of SBVA. "As the AI paradigm shifts toward physical AI, we believe this investment represents a pivotal moment to strategically connect the industrial ecosystems of Korea and Asia with next-generation AI technologies."
