Luma AI—a startup specialising in multimodal artificial generative intelligence—has successfully raised a total of $900 million in a Series C funding round that was led by PIF-backed HUMAIN with participation from other investors, as per an official press release.
The other participants in the round were AMD Ventures, Andreesen Horrowitz, Amplify Partners, and Matrix Partners. Apart from AMD ventures, the rest are existing investors.
The update comes as HUMAIN—the Kingdom’s homegrown AI startup which was launched by the Saudi Arabian’s Public Investment Fund in May—goes full throttle on its expansion plans, rolling out multiple initiatives such as plans for an AI-powered OS and an agreement with Qualcomm for AI chips. HUMAIN is also currently building Halo 2, a 2-gigawatt SuperAI cluster in Saudi Arabia.
Investment activity within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia includes a minority stake secured from oil conglomerate Saudi Aramco, which is also owned by the PIF.
The funding round was announced at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, a day after Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed Bin Salman, told reporters that the Kingdom will be stepping up initially agreed-upon investments into the U.S. from $600 billion to $1 trillion, as per a CNBC report.
“To create AI that can help humanity in the physical world and expand our understanding of the universe, we need to build systems that can learn from a quadrillion tokens of information – roughly the collective digital memory of humanity – contained in video, image, audio, and language,” said Amit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Luma AI.
“HUMAIN is deploying frontier compute infrastructure at impressive speed, and this is critical to achieving Luma AI’s mission,”