Yann LeCun joins new VC firm backed by 244 LPs

Yann LeCun, the Turing Award winner who left Meta to run his own world models startup, has a new side gig: venture capital. He's teaming up with Google DeepMind researcher Oriol Vinyals and AIX Ventures founder Shaun Johnson to launch 224 Ventures, a fund with $100m in assets under management and 244 limited partners, most of them people who actually build AI systems for a living rather than traditional finance types.

The fund plans to write checks between $1m and $5m for AI-native startups, according to its website. No official headquarters is listed, but the privacy policy cites California law, and both Vinyals and Johnson list San Francisco on LinkedIn, so draw your own conclusions. LeCun's own venture, AMI Labs, raised $1bn last year building world models out of Paris, so he's not exactly short on skin in the AI game already.

What makes this launch interesting is the wreckage it's walking past. A month ago, Sifted reported LeCun had signed on as a non-managing general partner at a different fund, Extelligence Invest. That arrangement fell apart fast. Extelligence told Sifted that undisclosed exclusivity agreements LeCun had with other funds, plus unspecified legal complications, forced his exit. LeCun's version, given to Bloomberg, was vaguer: he called the reporting inaccurate due to a miscommunication, then declined to explain further.

Johnson's LinkedIn post announcing 224 Ventures makes a point of saying that he, Vinyals, and LeCun will invest exclusively through the new firm, which reads like a direct answer to the Extelligence mess. LeCun still holds an advisory role at London's Hiro Capital, so exclusivity apparently has its limits. Whether 224 avoids the same tangle remains an open question, but the fund's LP roster of AI operators suggests it's betting its credibility on insider connections rather than institutional polish.