SBVA Invests 50 Billion Won in Startup Founded by AI Scholar Yann LeCun
SBVA announced on March 11 that it had invested approximately 50 billion won (30 million euros) in the seed round of AMI, a frontier lab established by Yann LeCun, a world-renowned scholar in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
This round also saw participation from global institutional investors such as Greycroft Partners, Cathay Innovation, and Hiro Capital, as well as Nvidia. Notably, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Google, also provided funding.
SBVA made this investment through its newly formed 'Alpha AI Architecture Fund.' This fund includes domestic and international corporations and institutions such as Coupang and Doosan as limited partners (LPs).
Yann LeCun is credited with laying the foundation for modern deep learning. He is the founder of Facebook AI Research (FAIR) at Meta and has received some of the most prestigious awards in science and engineering, including the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and the ACM Turing Award.
AMI has assembled key researchers and engineers from global big tech companies such as Meta and Google DeepMind, establishing itself as an execution-driven frontier lab. AMI's goal is to develop a world model centered on self-supervised learning and joint embedding predictive architectures (JEPA), with the aim of implementing practical intelligence that enables AI to understand and reason about the world like humans.
An AMI representative stated, "SBVA joining us not only as a financial investor but also as a strategic partner spanning the Asian ecosystem demonstrates AMI's global vision and ambitious goals. This partnership will serve as an important turning point in building close collaborative relationships across Asia, including Korea."
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Yujin Jang, Executive Director at SBVA, said, "AMI is a leading company in developing 'world models' that understand the physical world. We expect that this investment will be a significant catalyst for the industrial ecosystems of Korea and Asia to strategically converge with next-generation AI technologies at a pivotal moment when the AI paradigm is shifting to 'Physical AI.'"
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