Yann LeCun joins new $100M AI fund, weeks after his last one lasted 8 hours

Yann LeCun can't seem to stay out of the venture business, even after his first attempt this year blew up spectacularly. On July 15, a firm called Extelligence Invest launched with LeCun listed as a non-managing general partner. Its website claimed a portfolio of 29 backed companies, a track record that turned out to be angel investments made individually by the founders, dressed up to look like institutional history. Within eight hours the site was pulled offline entirely, and LeCun's team said he'd already withdrawn, calling it just one of many projects he dabbles in. LeCun told Bloomberg it was all a miscommunication, though he wouldn't say what exactly got miscommunicated.

Now he's back with 224 Ventures, a $100 million fund co-led with DeepMind's Oriol Vinyals, who is currently the technical lead on Gemini, and Shaun Johnson, who left AIX Ventures in December 2025 without much explanation. AIX, for context, backed Perplexity, Chroma, and Workhelix, so Johnson isn't short on credibility. The new firm plans to write checks between $1 million and $5 million into early-stage AI companies working on applications, robotics, and infrastructure. Its 244 limited partners are almost entirely AI insiders — researchers, product leads, chief AI officers — which is either a sign of deep domain expertise or a very tight, self-reinforcing circle depending on how cynical you're feeling.

Johnson posted on LinkedIn that all three partners will invest exclusively through 224 going forward. That's a notable commitment given how tangled LeCun's other affiliations already are. He's executive chairman of AMI Labs, a Paris-based world models startup that just raised $1.03 billion in seed funding at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, backed by Nvidia, Samsung, Temasek, and Jeff Bezos among others. He also advises Hiro Capital in London, which happens to be an AMI Labs investor too. Whether 224's exclusivity promise survives contact with those existing relationships is an open question nobody at the firm has addressed directly.

The fund's focus areas — infrastructure, robotics, and what it calls core intelligence — track with where money is actually flowing right now. European AI investment hit €44 billion in the first half of 2026, and increasingly it's chasing companies building on top of foundation models rather than trying to out-build GPT or Gemini. World models specifically have become a crowded lane, with Fei-Fei Li's World Labs and DeepMind's own Genie project competing for the same territory LeCun's AMI Labs occupies. Newer funds like Merantix Capital's €103 million vehicle and Cloudberry Ventures' €50 million infrastructure fund are chasing the same bet.

What 224 Ventures doesn't have is a listed headquarters, though its privacy policy cites California law and both Vinyals and Johnson give San Francisco as their location on LinkedIn. Given how fast Extelligence fell apart, that omission feels less like an oversight and more like a firm keeping its options open until it's sure this one sticks.