SBVA said on Tuesday it invested about 50 billion won in the seed round of AMI (Advanced Machine Intelligence), a global frontier lab founded by AI scholar Yann LeCun (얀 르쿤).

Global institutional investors including Greycroft Partners, Cathay Innovation and Hiro Capital, as well as Nvidia, took part in the round.

SBVA said the investment was made through its existing 2023 Alpha Korea Fund and Alpha Intelligence Fund, along with the newly formed Alpha AI Architecture Fund.

AMI aims to develop a “world model” centered on self-supervised learning and Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, or JEPA. It aims to implement “practical intelligence” that enables AI to understand and reason about the world like humans.

An AMI official said SBVA joining as a strategic partner spanning the Asian ecosystem, beyond being a financial investor, showed AMI’s global vision and challenging goals. The official said the partnership would be an important turning point in building cooperative ties across Asia, including South Korea.

Yu-jin Jang (장유진), a managing director at SBVA, said AMI was a key company leading “world models” that understand the physical world. Jang said she expects the investment to become an important opportunity for South Korea and Asia’s industrial ecosystem to strategically combine with next-generation AI technology at an inflection point as the AI paradigm shifts to “physical AI”.