Nvidia-backed $4 billion AI startup announces major London expansion

Nvidia-backed video procreation startup Luma AI is joining a increasing question of U.S. tech companies launching operations successful the U.K., with large plans for a London enlargement revealed connected Tuesday.

The Palo Alto-headquartered startup volition look to prosecute astir 200 employees — making up astir 40% of its workforce — astatine its caller London basal by aboriginal 2027, crossed research, engineering, partnerships and strategical development. 

The enlargement comes 2 weeks connected from Luma announcing a $900 cardinal backing round led by Saudi Public Investment Fund-owned AI institution Humain, which saw it deed a valuation upwards of $4 billion. The startup antecedently received backing from Nvidia. 

Luma is gathering "world models," a people of AI models that are capable to larn from video, audio and images, alongside text, and which ample connection models (LLMs) similar those powering OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini use. 

The startup is presently targeting marketing, advertising, media and amusement sectors with its video models, which it sells via an exertion programming interface (API) and arsenic portion of a contented instauration suite.

"With this Series C rise and the upcoming build-out of planetary compute infrastructure, we person the superior and capableness to bring world-scale AI to creatives everywhere," said Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Luma AI. "Launching crossed Europe and the Middle East is the logical adjacent measurement successful putting this powerfulness straight successful the hands of storytellers, agencies and brands globally."

The U.K. is the starting constituent of the enlargement due to the fact that of its entree to talent, Jain told CNBC.

"London has immoderate of the champion radical erstwhile it comes to research, fixed the universities present and institutions similar DeepMind," helium said. "We besides see London to beryllium the introduction constituent to the European market."

Luma is the latest successful a question of North American AI labs doubling down connected the U.K. and Europe arsenic they look to instrumentality vantage of endowment pools and gross opportunities.

In November, San Francisco-based Anthropic announced plans to unfastened offices successful Paris and Munich, months connected from kicking disconnected a hiring spree successful London and Dublin. Canadian AI startup Cohere said it would unfastened a Paris bureau to go its EMEA office successful September and OpenAI announced a caller bureau successful Munich successful February.

While world models whitethorn not yet beryllium arsenic developed arsenic LLMs, immoderate researchers accidental they are as, if not more, crucial successful the pursuit of achieving artificial wide quality (AGI).

"These kinds of ocular models are astir a twelvemonth to a year-and-a-half down connection models close now," said Jain. 

But satellite models volition go the "natural interface" for AI for astir day-to-day usage successful time, helium predicted, pointing to the magnitude of clip radical walk watching video contented each day. 

Tech giants including Google, Meta and Nvidia are each processing satellite models for a scope of usage cases.

Luma released its latest model, Ray3, successful September, which Jain told CNBC benchmarks higher than OpenAI's Sora and astatine akin levels to Google's Veo 3.