Luma AI secures $900 million to speed up multimodal AGI push

BENGALURU: Luma AI has raised $900 million in Series C funding led by HUMAIN, the Public Investment Fund-backed AI company developing one of the world’s largest compute clusters, as the Palo Alto startup accelerates its effort to build multimodal artificial general intelligence capable of understanding and simulating the physical world.The round, also backed by AMD Ventures and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners, will give Luma access to HUMAIN’s 2-gigawatt Project Halo supercluster in Saudi Arabia. The companies announced the partnership at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., outlining plans to train “World Models,” next-generation systems that learn from vast volumes of video, audio and language.“To create AI that can help humanity in the physical world and expand our understanding of the universe, we need systems that can learn from a quadrillion tokens of multimodal information,” Luma co-founder and CEO Amit Jain said in the announcement. “HUMAIN is deploying frontier compute infrastructure at impressive speed, and this is critical to achieving Luma’s mission.”HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin said the investment reflects a strategy of building the “full value chain,” combining capital, compute and frontier model development, as demand rises for high-performance multimodal systems.Luma, founded in 2021, has gained traction in entertainment and advertising with its Ray3 model, which the company describes as the first reasoning video system capable of generating physically accurate animations and visuals. Its Dream Machine platform is already integrated into Adobe’s global creative products and used by studios, agencies and brands.The new capital will support Luma’s expansion into simulation, robotics and design, and deepen its work with HUMAIN Create, an initiative aimed at building AI models trained on Arabic and regional data for enterprises and governments across the Middle East and North Africa.Jain, an Indian-origin founder, previously worked on camera and computer-vision systems at Apple before stints at Product Hunt, Circle Medical and his earlier venture, Cultured Pixel. He co-founded Luma AI in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021.Luma’s backers now include HUMAIN, a16z, AMD Ventures, NVIDIA, Amazon, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners, alongside operators and angel investors from across the AI and entertainment ecosystem.