Hiro Capital just made its boldest move yet. The London and Luxembourg based venture capital firm poured roughly €50 million into Yann LeCun’s world model startup AMI Labs, marking the first investment from its brand new Hiro III fund. But here is the twist. Hiro’s boss says the firm is unlikely to back another world model or large language model startup again.
Inside Hiro’s €50 Million Bet on AMI Labs
4 Hiro Capital invested around €50 million in a co-leading investment in LeCun’s much-hyped world model startup AMI Labs, as part of the startup’s $1 billion plus raise announced earlier this year. 5 AMI Labs announced a $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, the largest seed round ever raised by a European company. That is a staggering figure for a company that is barely a few months old. 4 Hiro Capital’s investment, co-led with Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, HV Capital and Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, marks the first deployment out of Hiro Capital’s Hiro III fund, a €500 million plus fund investing in spatial AI, robotics, games, space and defence.
The round also drew heavyweight individual backers. 9The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with participation from several other funds and industry-tied backers, as well as individuals, including Tim and Rosemary Berners-Lee, Jim Breyer, Mark Cuban, Mark Leslie, Xavier Niel, and Eric Schmidt.
Hiro Capital AMI Labs world model AI venture capital Europe
“My prediction is that ‘world models’ will be the next buzzword. In six months, every company will call itself a world model to raise funding.” Alexandre LeBrun, CEO, AMI Labs
Why Hiro Says No to More LLM or World Model Startups
Luke Alvarez, Hiro Capital co-founder and managing general partner, was blunt when asked about future bets in this space.
4 “We have done one investment in world models. We probably won’t do more of those. We are really interested in applications of those world models, in things like autonomy and robotics. We certainly don’t think there is much opportunity to invest at this point in competitors to Anthropic and OpenAI for language and code foundation models.”
That statement sends a clear message. Hiro sees the real money not in building foundation models, but in applying them.
The reasoning makes sense when you look at the wider landscape. 5AMI Labs has roughly a dozen employees, no product, and a research agenda measured in years, not quarters. Backing that kind of company once is a calculated bet. Doing it twice would be a gamble.
Key areas Hiro is watching instead of foundation models:
- Autonomy and self-driving systems
- Robotics powered by world models
- Spatial AI applications
- Industrial automation
- Defence technology
How LeCun and Clegg Ended Up at Hiro Capital
The story of how Hiro Capital landed two of the biggest names in tech and politics reads like a perfectly executed playbook.
4 Hiro’s appointment of LeCun in December last year to its advisory board appears to be an act of foresight, given Hiro’s investment in AMI Labs just months later.
Alvarez did not shy away from the timing. 4“With our relationship with Yann, we did get an early heads up that he was leaving Meta and was going to set up this amazing thing. And we thought that is so perfect within our strategy, we absolutely would like an opportunity to invest in that and maybe lead it.”
27 Nick Clegg, the former deputy PM and former Meta executive, joined as general partner and Meta’s outgoing chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, joined Hiro Capital’s advisory board.
But Clegg’s value goes beyond his political fame. 4“It’s his relationship with Yann, who is an old friend of his, who brought Yann into our orbit and our advisory board. He has been great on intros, great on deal flows, lots of people reach out to him because of his time at Silicon Valley.”
4 “We get amazing AI entrepreneurs who want to work with us because of Yann,” says Alvarez.
The advisory board also includes some serious firepower. 23New additions include former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and British astronaut Tim Peake.
Clegg’s Bold Call on Europe’s Tech Future
Clegg has not been shy about sharing his views on Europe’s place in the global tech race.
30 A multibillion-dollar transatlantic tech agreement announced to coincide with Donald Trump’s state visit represents “sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley,” Nick Clegg said. The former deputy prime minister said the deals, heralded with great fanfare by the government, were “mutton dressed as lamb” and would make the country ever more reliant on US tech firms.
Those words grabbed headlines across the UK last September. 34“We’re a kind of vassal state technologically, we really are,” he warned.
Clegg’s argument is simple. Europe has the talent, the researchers and the universities. What it lacks is growth capital at scale.
That philosophy now drives Hiro’s mission. 4Alvarez says: “I think Nick and the rest of our team are strong believers that Europe needs to build its own globally significant companies.”
20 Clegg himself said: “Unlike other funds, HIRO is wholly focused on those themes, entirely within Europe. This is an amazing moment of opportunity for the UK/Europe’s tech ecosystem. We have some of the most outstanding researchers and universities on the planet, and great engineers and entrepreneurs too. Our problem is not a lack of innovation, it is a lack of capital at scale.”
What Hiro Capital Wants From Tomorrow’s Founders
Hiro III is not just a big fund with big names. It has a very specific thesis about where technology is heading next.
4 The fund is investing at a multi-stage level, deploying cheques of between €5 million and €50 million, targeting the so-called scale-up capital gap in Europe.
Alvarez describes the opportunity in generational terms. He believes we are in the early years of a platform shift where computing moves off 2D screens and into the physical world. Where AI moves off language and into atoms, manufacturing, logistics and the movement of people.
| What Hiro Capital Looks For | What It Avoids |
|---|---|
| Founders building at the intersection of AI and the physical world | LLM startups competing with OpenAI or Anthropic |
| Ambitious, generational companies in Europe | Companies without a clear path to scale |
| Spatial AI, robotics and autonomy applications | Duplicate world model plays |
| Founder-led teams with deep tech roots | US only opportunities |
What makes Hiro different from other European VCs?
25 Luke was co-founder and CEO of Inspired Entertainment Inc, a now Nasdaq-listed games and virtual sports technology leader, founded in 2002 as a mobile payments disruptor. He led its IPO onto AIM in 2006 and its subsequent IPO onto Nasdaq in 2016. 46 His co-founder Ian Livingstone is a video games living legend who founded two games unicorns, Games Workshop (Warhammer) and Eidos (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider). 25 The third co-founder, Cherry Freeman, co-founded the global crafts supplies marketplace LoveCrafts, which scaled through four rounds of venture capital.
That founder DNA matters. Most European VC partners come from finance or consulting backgrounds. Hiro’s leadership has actually built, scaled and exited companies. That gives them a different lens when sitting across the table from a nervous founder pitching a world-changing idea.
Hiro Capital’s bet on AMI Labs is more than just a financial investment. It is a statement about where the future of AI is heading, away from chatbots and text prediction and toward machines that truly understand the physical world around us. Whether LeCun’s vision of world models will pay off remains to be seen. But with €50 million on the table, Clegg opening doors and a clear strategy to back only the applications layer from here, Hiro is putting Europe’s money where its mouth is. The question now is whether other European VCs will follow their lead or keep chasing the LLM dream. Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
