What comes after LLMs now has a New Zealand face on it.

Two of the world's most respected AI researchers just raised around US$2 billion to build what comes after large language models. One of the best funded teams chasing the same idea is led by a Kiwi from Auckland.

Within weeks of each other, Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li raised about US$2 billion combined for the same contrarian bet. Not bigger LLMs. Not more parameters. Not longer context windows. Something fundamentally different.

LeCun, who spent more than a decade as Meta's chief AI scientist, co-founded Paris-based AMI Labs and raised US$1.03 billion, the largest seed round in European history. Li, the Stanford professor behind ImageNet, raised US$1 billion for World Labs, backed by Nvidia, AMD and Andreessen Horowitz. Both are building world models: AI that learns from video, observation and physical reality and builds an internal picture of how the world actually works, rather than predicting the next word from text scraped off the internet.

The thesis is simple. LLMs are brilliant with language but have no grounding in reality. They do not understand cause and effect, physics or consequences. World models are the attempt to fix that, and serious money now believes it is the next layer of the stack.

Here is the part that should make every Kiwi sit up. The "what comes after LLMs" bet now has a New Zealand face on it.

Odyssey, a London-based world model company, just closed a US$310 million (NZ$529m) Series B at a US$1.45 billion valuation. The round was led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel and New Zealand's own Icehouse Ventures all in. Odyssey's co-founder and CTO is Jeff Hawke, a University of Auckland graduate who cut his teeth at self-driving startup Wayve, itself founded by another New Zealander, Alex Kendall. Two Kiwis at the frontier of teaching machines to learn from the real world.

"A lot of AI companies are building tools on top of the big models," said Icehouse Ventures partner Mason Bleakely. "Odyssey is building one of those models for the physical world, which is a completely different level of ambition."

In the same week, 21-year-old Thomas Mosen from Coromandel raised US$25 million from Caffeinated Capital for Sea12, his New York based back-office AI platform serving steel, construction and logistics firms. He started with US$30,000 and two interns in May 2024. Today Sea12 runs seven-figure revenue with 14 staff.

Two Kiwis, two very different bets. Odyssey is wagering on a new architectural layer, world models trained on simulation, where the upside is robotics and physical infrastructure and so is the capital intensity. Sea12 is wagering on workflow specificity, that a steel fabricator will pay real money to automate the document chaos generic AI tools cannot reach. Both theses are credible. They are simply measured on completely different timescales.

The lesson for New Zealand business is not that we should all rush off to build foundation models. It is that the talent shaping what comes next is ours. We are not just consumers of this technology. Increasingly, we are helping build it.

Sources

• Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raises US$1.03B to build world models, TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/09/yann-lecuns-ami-labs-raises-1-03-billion-to-build-world-models/
• Fei-Fei Li's World Labs lands US$1B, TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/18/world-labs-lands-200m-from-autodesk-to-bring-world-models-into-3d-workflows/
• World model maker Odyssey nabs US$1.45B valuation, TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/world-model-maker-odyssey-nabs-1-45b-valuation-backed-by-amazon-and-other-big-names/
• Kiwi founder Jeff Hawke secures $529m for Odyssey AI, NZ Herald: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/kiwi-founder-jeff-hawke-secures-529m-for-odyssey-ai-with-backers-including-amazon-icehouse-ventures/2G42UFXPPNGYFKFM43WR6XWNTU/
• Coromandel's Thomas Mosen lands US$25m for Sea12, NZ Herald: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/coromandels-thomas-mosen-lands-43m-backing-for-ai-start-up-sea12-in-us-boom/premium/AIIGQULDDNBCTHITBFOFEL7IY4/