A new $100 million AI fund backed by Abu Dhabi-based Presight and Shorooq Ventures has made its first major investment in AMI Labs, an AI startup founded by Turing Award winner and former Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun. The deal confirms AMI as one of the fund’s initial six investments, following a $1.03 billion seed funding round that places the company at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation – one of the largest seed rounds in AI history.
The Shift from Prediction to Understanding
The significance of this move extends beyond financial backing. LeCun has long argued that current AI models, focused on predicting patterns rather than understanding cause and effect, have inherent limitations. AMI Labs is betting on a different approach: building AI systems with “world models” that simulate the physical world, enabling them to reason, plan, and interact with reality more effectively. This is a fundamental architectural departure from the dominant AI paradigm.
Key Details of the Investment
The Presight-Shorooq Fund assessed over 1,000 companies before selecting AMI and five other startups for its portfolio. The fund’s investors include Temasek, Nvidia, SBVA, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, and Xavier Niel. AMI Labs, based in Paris and New York with offices in Montreal and Singapore, is targeting enterprise applications in industries where understanding physical cause and effect is crucial: manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, and biomedicine.
The Presight-Shorooq Fund’s other portfolio companies include NodeShift (sovereign cloud), Hebbia (enterprise AI), Candid (procurement AI), Crunched (financial intelligence), and Blue (voice action models). The fund provides portfolio companies with access to Presight’s AI infrastructure and Shorooq’s regional scaling expertise.
Building an AI Ecosystem
Presight and Shorooq are not just providing capital; they’re constructing an entire AI ecosystem. This includes an AI Accelerator Program for early-stage startups from the MENA, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia regions, offering mentoring, computing resources, and access to foundational AI models. The Presight-Shorooq Fund extends this support by providing financial backing alongside infrastructure access. The program launched in 2024 at Expand North Star in Dubai and is now onboarding its second cohort.
This investment signals a broader shift in AI development, from probabilistic prediction to more robust, causal understanding. The backing of established investors and the creation of an AI ecosystem suggest a long-term commitment to this approach.
The fund’s expansion plans include future cohorts targeting energy systems, industrial autonomy, sovereign data infrastructure, and AI-native public services. The combined infrastructure, funding, and regional expertise positions Presight and Shorooq as key players in shaping the future of AI development.
