🧠 With $1.03B in seed funding, Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) launches as a $3.5B AI unicorn aiming to move beyond LLMs by building “world models. These systems are designed to understand physical reality, reason about cause and effect, and power the next generation of intelligent machines. We break down what you need to know about the second-largest seed round in history.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

Headlines

🗞️ Cybersecurity startup Qevlar AI raised $30 million to help security teams move beyond endless alert firefighting and toward smarter, organization-wide security insights. Led by Partech and Forgepoint Capital International, the round comes as demand surges from large enterprises such as Mercedes-Benz and Sodexo, as well as major cybersecurity providers such as Orange Cyberdefense. Qevlar’s AI platform automates the heavy lifting of threat investigation—cutting analysis time by 10x, down to about three minutes—while giving analysts the breathing room to focus on strategic defense rather than routine triage. The company’s bigger ambition is to turn thousands of security alerts into actionable intelligence about the root causes of vulnerabilities. Instead of just putting out fires, Qevlar wants security teams to understand what sparked them and stop them from happening again. | Maddyness

🗞️ Europe has a new AI infrastructure star, and it’s riding the infrastructure gold rush. British startup Nscale, which builds and operates data centers tailored for AI workloads, raised $2 billion in a Series C round led by Norway’s Aker, pushing its valuation to $14.6 billion. The deal is Europe’s largest-ever Series C in tech and drew backing from Nvidia, Dell, and Nokia. It edges past the valuation of France’s Mistral AI. Born from Australian crypto-mining group Arkon Energy, Nscale has pivoted hard into AI as demand for compute explodes, with data centers already running across Europe and the US. The company is also deepening ties with US tech giants, including plans for major AI infrastructure projects with Nvidia, OpenAI, and Microsoft in the UK. Meanwhile, heavyweight names like Sheryl Sandberg and former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg are joining its board. | Les Echos

🗞️ When it comes to feeding the beast, France is pitching its nuclear fleet as the ultimate AI power source. Speaking at the World Nuclear Energy Summit in Paris, President Macron said the country’s massive surplus of low-carbon electricity gives it a strategic edge to host energy-hungry AI data centres. France exported nearly 90 TWh in 2024, with around two-thirds of its electricity coming from nuclear power. The country can ramp up computing capacity for AI without squeezing domestic supply, Macron argued. While others scramble for clean energy, France plans to plug the AI boom straight into its reactors. The move positions nuclear not just as a climate tool but as a key piece of the country’s tech sovereignty strategy. | Global Banking & Finance Review

🗞️ Speaking of nuclear...French nuclear startup Jimmy Energy used the summit to announce that it has secured €80 million to advance its micro-reactors designed to generate industrial heat. The funding is split between €40 million in equity led by Crédit Mutuel Impact and €40 million in public support through France 2030. It comes as the small modular reactor (SMR) sector undergoes a shakeout, with several projects struggling to stay afloat. (See our story on NAAREA's meltdown.) Rather than reinvent nuclear technology, Jimmy Energy is betting on proven reactor designs to replace gas-fired boilers that currently supply most industrial heat. The company plans its first reactor at Cristanol’s industrial site in Bazancourt, targeting construction by the end of the decade and operations in the early 2030s. | Maddyness

🗞️ French deeptech HABS is teaming up with Microsoft to push a new frontier in AI: machines that understand your brain. The startup, which analyzes brainwaves to detect emotions in real time, wants to build “neurocognitive AI” systems that adapt to a user’s actual mental state. Through the partnership, HABS gains serious computing firepower, including access to 80 H200 GPUs, to train its models and scale what it calls a new AI stack powered by “HPU” (Human Processing Units). The tech could plug into Microsoft’s ecosystem, from Azure and Foundry to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Windows devices. With use cases spanning healthcare, cybersecurity, and decision support, HABS is also preparing a new funding round to bring Neuro-AI out of the lab and into the market. | Maddyness

🗞️ Meanwhile, French search engine Qwant is trying something rare in the AI era...paying the press. The company is launching a nine-month experiment with around 20 French media outlets, including FTJ friends Le Figaro, Les Échos, and Ouest-France, to test a revenue-sharing model tied to AI-generated search answers. Its “Flash Answers” feature generates summaries directly in results while highlighting the journalistic sources behind them. Qwant will give 50% of the advertising revenue generated by these AI answers back to participating publishers. The goal is to measure the real value AI creates in search and rebalance a system in which platforms usually keep the cash. A small player (about 0.5% market share in France), but one trying to rewrite the rules. | L’Usine Digitale, Les Echos

🗞️ Paris biotech startup kyron.bio has landed a strategic partnership with French pharma group Servier to push the frontier of antibody engineering. The deal will see Kyron apply its precision glycoengineering platform to optimize a Servier-selected antibody, aiming to fine-tune glycan structures that can improve efficacy, safety, and scalability in next-gen therapeutics. Glycosylation, the sugar molecules attached to antibodies, has long been underused in drug design due to technical hurdles, which Kyron claims its proprietary platform can now overcome. Financial terms remain under wraps, but Servier will fund the initial research and may expand the collaboration depending on results. The startup, founded in 2022 and based at Paris Biotech Santé, previously raised €5.5M in seed funding and won Servier’s 2024 Golden Ticket. For more on this sweet startup, check out our deep dive | PR kyron.bio

🗞️ And last but definitely not least, AI isn’t a weapon; it’s a war accelerator. That’s the take from Jean-Christophe Noël, researcher at the French Institute of International Relations, who says artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping modern battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East. The technology can sift through huge volumes of data from drones, satellites, and social media to identify targets, track movements, or detect weak signals far faster than humans. But despite the hype, Noël argues AI itself isn’t the weapon. It’s more like the engine behind the machine, transforming how wars are fought without changing their political nature. The real questions ahead are ethical: how much autonomy should machines have, and who ultimately decides when to pull the trigger? | Les Echos

Other Headlines

🗞️ Airports of the future: Could AI make airports faster, smarter and greener? | French startups Outsight and Waltr bring AI to airports, tracking passenger flows with digital twins and cutting aircraft fuel waste. ✈️🤖 | EuroNews

🗞️ Louis Létinier, the pioneering doctor-turned-entrepreneur of French medical AI | Grand Laureate of Season 4 of My Com For Impact competition and co-founder of Synapse Medicine, Louis Létinier embodies a new generation of doctor-entrepreneurs determined to create a European champion in artificial intelligence for the health sector. Time to look at his profile. | BNP Paribas

🗞️ Oscar-nominated director calls AI a danger to human creativity | The Oscar-nominated animated film "Arco" tells the story of a young boy in a future where humanity lives in harmony with nature, far from the robots and artificial intelligence shaping our present. For first-time French director Ugo Bienvenu, who drew the whole film by hand, there was never any chance he would resort to using AI. | Daily Sabah

ICYMI

🗞️ Europe's AI Reckoning: Caught Between Regulation, Rivalry, and Risk | As 2026 begins, France and the European Union find themselves at the center of a perfect storm, facing diplomatic confrontation with Washington, urgent safety crises, and mounting questions about whether their regulatory approach can survive first contact with geopolitical reality. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ From Tesla to Paris: UMA's Audacious Bet on European Robotics | A new French startup believes Europe—not Silicon Valley—is the best place to build the robots of tomorrow. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ Gradium Wants To Make Voice The New Operating System for AI | The Paris startup, spun out of research lab Kyutai, just emerged from stealth with a $60M seed round to become the global foundation layer for real-time voice interactions. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ How HyprView Is Using Photonics And AI To Bring Cancer Diagnostics Into the Light | Thanks to developments in AI, photonics is stepping out of the lab and into the clinic. HyprView uses light to uncover the invisible biology inside tumors - information microscopes miss entirely - opening the door to faster, smarter, and far more predictive cancer diagnostics. | The French Tech Journal

🧠 Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs Launches With $1.03 Billion to Build AI That Understands the Real World

It’s not every day that a startup is born a unicorn. But when Turing Prize winner Yann LeCun is your co-founder and executive chairman, the rules of the game change considerably.

Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI) officially announced today that it has raised $1.03 billion (approximately €890 million) in a seed round, valuing the Paris-headquartered company at $3.5 billion pre-money.

That makes it the largest seed deal in European history and instantly vaults AMI into the rarefied air of AI unicorns before the company has shipped a single product.

The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with participation from a globe-spanning roster of backers including Nvidia, Samsung, Toyota Ventures, Temasek, Bpifrance, Groupe Industriel Marcel Dassault, Association Familiale Mulliez, Publicis Groupe, and Aglæ Ventures (the LVMH-linked fund).

Individual investors include Jeff Bezos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Mark Cuban, Xavier Niel, Tim and Rosemary Berners-Lee, and Jim Breyer. AMI had initially set out to raise €500 million but was overwhelmed by demand, ultimately doubling its target.

The company is the brainchild of LeCun, 65, who spent over 12 years at Meta, most recently as VP and Chief AI Scientist. He departed in November after growing disagreements with the direction of Meta’s AI strategy. His core argument: the large language models (LLMs) powering chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are fundamentally limited. They operate in the world of text. They don’t understand physical reality. They can’t plan ahead. In LeCun’s colorful formulation, they don’t even have the reasoning capacity of a house cat.

“I am very clearly in the camp that believes we need a paradigm shift” from the AI industry’s reliance on LLMs, LeCun told AFP. AMI’s work, he explained, continues directly from his research at Meta on a new architecture called JEPA: the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture. “It’s a direct continuation of that project,” he said (AFP).

So what exactly is AMI building?

📆 Events 📆

📆 European Deeptech Week 2026 | March 16–19 | Paris | A week dedicated to turning European deeptech innovation into real-world industrial impact. Bringing together founders, investors, researchers, and industrial leaders, the program covers funding, scaling, and commercialization across sectors like AI, cyber, defense, climate, industry 4.0, and health. Highlights include the Deeptech Summit, investor matchmaking, startup pitch sessions, ecosystem gatherings, and closed-door meetings designed to forge strategic partnerships and unlock capital for Europe’s next generation of deeptech champions. | Register

📆 Open Office + Lunch Break w/ Lya Akgun – Gen AI Product Design | March 17 | The Design Crew, Paris, Île-de-France | Spend a full day in a collaborative open-office environment with designers and product folks, culminating in a Q&A lunch session with Lya Akgun, GenAI Product Designer at Pennylane. A casual yet educational community day focused on AI in product design — with in-person and streaming options available. | Request to Join

📆 AI in Higher Education Summit 2026 | March 17–18 | ESCP Business School | Paris | Artificial intelligence is transforming universities at every level — from classrooms to research labs and administrative offices. The AI in Higher Education Summit 2026 in Paris will bring together academics, innovators, and policy-makers to discuss one central question: How should higher education evolve in an AI-driven world? This international event is the place to exchange ideas, showcase innovations, and shape the roadmap for universities in the age of AI. | Pre-Registration

📆 Voice AI Space Meetup Paris | March 19 | 6:30 PM–10:00 PM | Paris | Join one of Paris’s most active Voice AI gatherings bringing together founders, engineers, researchers, and operators building the next generation of voice technologies. Expect demos and talks from companies like Maki People, pyannoteAI, and ai-coustics on autonomous hiring agents, conversation context in voice systems, and speaker-isolation models — followed by networking with the French voice AI community over food and drinks. | Register to attend

📆 AI Marketing Night #4 | March 19 | 7:00 PM–10:00 PM | Paris | A hands-on evening for marketers exploring how AI is transforming real-world marketing execution. Hosted at Dust HQ, the event features practical demos and workflows from experienced operators on building AI-powered marketing systems — from AI-driven surveys and content dashboards to GTM automation and agent-based content engines. Expect tactical insights, live use cases, and networking with fellow AI-curious marketers over pizza and drinks. | Request to join

📆 OpenClaw Meetup Paris 🦞 | March 19 | 6:00 PM–10:00 PM | Artverse Gallery, Paris | An evening of demos and discussions at the intersection of AI agents and Web3, bringing together developers, founders, and builders shaping the future of autonomous AI. Expect live demos of AI agents, lightning talks from early adopters, and open Q&A with the Paris AI × crypto community — plus drinks and networking with some of the ecosystem’s most forward-thinking builders. | Request to join

📆 Cursor Meetup Paris | March 26 | Paris | Paris’s first Cursor community meetup of 2026, bringing together engineers, product managers, designers, founders, students, and AI/tool enthusiasts for an evening of networking, live Q&A with an engineer from the Cursor team, lightning showcases from the community, and casual social time with pizza and drinks — open to all AI builders and creators looking to connect and share insights. | Request to Join

📆 OpenText Summit Paris 2026 | April 15 | Palais Brongniart | AI is everywhere and full of promise — but without contextualized data, governance, and security, AI fails. Join OpenText Summit Paris 2026 to discover how to unlock the intelligence of your enterprise data and activate AI with confidence. Expect visionary keynotes, French customer success stories, real-world use cases, in-depth small-group sessions, live demos, expert meetings, and peer networking. Explore the latest innovations in content management, cybersecurity, service management, business networks, and more — and learn how to deploy responsible, compliant AI with full control and freedom of choice. | Register

📆 Paris Blockchain Week 2026 | April 15–16, 2026 | Carrousel du Louvre, Paris | Europe’s premier gathering for the institutional digital asset ecosystem, bringing together 10,000+ founders, investors, policymakers, and corporate leaders from 100+ countries. The event covers the future of digital finance — from tokenized assets and stablecoin payments to institutional custody, regulation, and market infrastructure — through keynotes, panels, startup competitions, and high-level networking. | Get tickets

📆 VivaTech 2026 | June 17–20, 2026 | Paris Expo Porte de Versailles | Europe’s largest startup and technology event returns for its 10th anniversary, bringing together 180,000+ attendees, 14,000 startups, 3,600 investors, and thousands of global tech leaders. Expect world-class speakers from companies like NVIDIA, Mistral AI, Hugging Face, Meta, and Anthropic, alongside startup showcases, investor meetings, product launches, and major conversations shaping the future of AI, tech, and innovation. | Get tickets

📆 RAISE Summit 2026 | July 8–9, 2026 | Carrousel du Louvre, Paris | Join one of Europe’s most influential AI gatherings bringing together thousands of builders, investors, executives, and innovators to shape the future of artificial intelligence. Learn from global leaders through keynotes, panels, workshops, a hackathon, startup competitions, and high-impact networking — all curated to accelerate AI strategy, investment, and real-world deployment across industries. | Tickets

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