- Yann LeCun is now part of 224 Ventures, a firm co-led by Oriol Vinyals from DeepMind and Shaun Johnson, who was previously with AIX.
- This new fund comes after LeCun’s last venture, Extelligence Invest, which closed just 8 hours after its announcement on July 15.
- The company says that LeCun, Vinyals, and Johnson will invest only through 224 Ventures.
Yann LeCun, who was previously Meta’s chief AI scientist, has joined 224 Ventures. The new firm aims to support early-stage AI startups working on applications, robotics, and infrastructure.
LeCun leads the firm alongside Oriol Vinyals from Google DeepMind and Shaun Johnson, who co-founded AIX Ventures, a backer of Perplexity, Chroma, and Workhelix.
The 224 Ventures website says the fund manages $100 million and plans to invest $1 million to $5 million in AI-native teams. Most of its 244 limited partners are AI professionals, such as researchers, product and engineering leaders, and chief AI and data officers.
In a LinkedIn post, Johnson said that he, Vinyals, and LeCun will be “investing exclusively through 224.”
A fund that lasted only eight hours
On July 15, 2026, LeCun’s name was linked to another fund. Extelligence Invest launched with LeCun listed as a non-managing general partner to back tech founders across longevity, healthtech, new mobility, and compute.
Its website claimed a track record of 29 backed companies, which were in fact angel investments made individually by the fund’s partners, included to project a history the firm didn’t yet have. Other names listed as partners on the site, including Tony F. Chan and Amy Hu, appeared and were later removed.
Within eight hours of the news going live, Extelligence’s website had been taken offline, and LeCun’s spokesperson said he had withdrawn from the firm, describing it as one of many investment projects he is involved in.
LeCun offered a different version of events. He told Bloomberg the reports around Extelligence were inaccurate due to a miscommunication and misunderstanding, declining to elaborate further.
Who is leading 224 Ventures?
Of the three founders of 224 Ventures, Johnson brings the most traditional venture experience. He co-founded AIX Ventures in 2021 with AI researcher Richard Socher and led investments in Perplexity, Chroma, and Workhelix. Before that, he held leadership roles in product and engineering at Lilt and NimbleRx.
Johnson left AIX in December 2025 without a public explanation. Since then, Socher has started his own AI lab, which is reportedly valued at $4 billion. This shows how closely connected the AI venture capital world is.
Based on public information, Vinyals is still a researcher at DeepMind and the technical lead on Gemini. Neither DeepMind nor 224 Ventures has said if his role at 224 is in addition to or instead of his current job.
LeCun is involved in several projects. He is the executive chairman of AMI Labs, a Paris startup he founded to build world models, which are AI systems that try to understand and predict the physical world. The startup raised $1.03 billion in seed funding at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, with support from Nvidia, Samsung, Temasek, Cathay Innovation, HV Capital, Hiro Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, among others.
LeCun also advises Hiro Capital in London, another AMI Labs backer, which could be related to the “exclusive relationships” mentioned earlier.
Betting on AI beyond the chatbot
224’s stated focus areas — applications, robotics, infrastructure, and what its site calls core intelligence — line up with where AI money has been moving lately. As Tech Funding News has reported, European AI investment reached €44 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, and a growing share of that is chasing companies working beyond large language models.
In world models specifically, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, LeCun’s own AMI Labs, and Google DeepMind’s Genie are already competing for the same territory, 224 says it wants to fund at the startup stage. Newer funds like Merantix Capital’s €103 million AI fund and Cloudberry Ventures’ €50 million infrastructure fund are following the same vision: that the next wave of AI winners will build on top of foundation models rather than try to build the next one.
224 Ventures does not list a headquarters on its website, but its privacy policy references California law. On LinkedIn, both Vinyals and Johnson list San Francisco as their location.
The future of 224 Ventures could depend on whether LeCun’s other commitments, such as AMI Labs, Hiro Capital, and his existing exclusive relationships, align with the firm’s promise to invest only through 224.
