SBVA announced on the 11th that it has invested approximately 50 billion won (30 million euros) in the seed round of AMI, a global frontier lab founded by Yann LeCun, a world-renowned artificial intelligence scholar.
The funding round included global institutional investors such as Greycroft Partners, Cathay Innovation, and Hiro Capital, as well as Nvidia. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt, former Google chairman, also participated in the round.
The investment was made through SBVA's newly established "Alpha AI Architecture Fund." Major domestic and international companies and institutions, including Coupang and Doosan, joined the fund as limited partners.
LeCun, who leads AMI, is the founder of Meta's Facebook AI Research (FAIR). He laid the foundation for modern deep learning and has received top honors in science and engineering, including the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and the ACM Turing Award. Key researchers and engineers from global tech giants such as Meta and Google DeepMind have joined AMI. The company is developing a "world model" centered on self-supervised learning and joint embedding predictive architecture, aiming to create practical intelligence that enables AI to understand and reason about the world like humans.
Through this investment, SBVA plans to serve as a strategic partner connecting AMI with the Asian industrial ecosystem. The firm will support innovation in industrial settings through proof-of-concept projects leveraging its large corporate network and help domestic startups gain early access to next-generation world model architecture through technology collaboration with portfolio companies in robotics, manufacturing, and AI.
An AMI spokesperson said, "SBVA joining us as a strategic partner encompassing the Asian ecosystem, beyond being a financial investor, demonstrates AMI's global vision and ambitious goals. This partnership will be a significant turning point in building close cooperative relationships across Asia, including Korea."
Jang Yu-jin, Managing Director at SBVA, said, "AMI is a key company leading 'world models' that understand the physical world. We expect this investment to be an important opportunity for the industrial ecosystems of Korea and Asia to strategically integrate with next-generation AI technology at an inflection point where the AI paradigm shifts to 'physical AI.'"