Temasek and Sea back a record seed round as AMI expands its Singapore base
One of artificial intelligence’s best-known pioneers has launched his new venture with a blockbuster funding round, and Singapore is part of the story. AMI Labs, backed by Temasek and Sea, has raised US$1.03 billion to build a new kind of AI focused on understanding the real world, not just language.
Record Seed Round Draws Global Attention
AMI Labs announced the US$1.03 billion seed round on March 10, with the company valued at US$3.5 billion. Reports describe it as Europe’s largest seed round to date, with backers including Temasek, Sea, Cathay Innovation, Bezos Expeditions, and Nvidia.
The company is headquartered in Paris and has offices in New York, Montreal, and Singapore. Yann LeCun, formerly Meta’s chief AI scientist and a 2018 Turing Award winner, is serving as executive chairman.
What AMI Labs Is Trying To Build
AMI says it is developing “advanced machine intelligence” built around world models, where systems learn from visuals and representations of the physical world rather than relying mainly on text. The company says these models are designed to predict how situations evolve and how actions lead to consequences, with an emphasis on safety and reliability.
LeCun has argued that this approach could be safer and more controllable than current large language model systems. He said prototype systems can already recognize physically impossible events in video, which he sees as evidence that the company is on a promising trajectory.
Singapore Is A Strategic Base
LeCun said Singapore is an important location for AMI Labs because of its talent pool and its links with partners in Singapore and across Asia. The Straits Times reported that the company’s Singapore office currently has four staff based at a WeWork office on Robinson Road, with plans to grow to 20 in the coming year.
The first phase of growth in Singapore is expected to focus on research and development and AI infrastructure. A later phase is expected to focus on transferring the technology to industrial partners and real-world applications.
How This Fits Singapore’s AI Push
The funding news arrives as Singapore expands its own national AI efforts. Recent measures include plans for a National Artificial Intelligence Council and a scheme that will give selected SkillsFuture course participants six months of free access to premium AI tools.
LeCun said Singapore is right to focus on education and public research, adding that AI literacy keeps changing as the technology evolves. He also said he believes regulation should focus more on AI products than on research and development itself.
Why It Matters Beyond The Funding Number
AMI Labs says the new capital will support long-term research and hiring, but the bigger significance may be strategic. The company wants to publish research and open-source models to help build a broader community around world-model AI, a field that is gaining attention but is still less commercially dominant than generative AI.
For Singapore, the investment reinforces its position as a serious node in the global AI ecosystem. For Indonesia and the wider region, it is another sign that Singapore is becoming a launchpad for frontier AI work that could later shape industrial automation, robotics, healthcare, and enterprise applications across Southeast Asia.
AMI Labs’ US$1.03 billion raise is not just a headline-grabbing funding event. It also signals that Singapore is being treated as a meaningful base for advanced AI development, not merely a sales outpost. For Singaporeans, that strengthens the city-state’s role in frontier research and talent attraction. For Indonesians, it highlights how major AI advances in Singapore can ripple into the regional economy through partnerships, industrial deployment, and new expectations around digital capability.
Sources: Straits Times (2026) , Ground News (2026)
Keywords: Yann LeCun, AMI Labs, Temasek Investment, Sea Limited, Advanced Machine Intelligence, Singapore AI Office
