BENGALURU: Luma AI has raised $900 million in Series C funding led by HUMAIN, a public investment fund-backed AI company developing one of the world’s largest computing clusters, as the Palo Alto startup accelerates efforts to build a multimodal artificial general intelligence that can understand and simulate the physical world.The round, also backed by AMD Ventures and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners, gives Luma access to HUMAIN’s 2 GW project Halo supercluster in Saudi Arabia. The companies announced the partnership at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., and outlined plans to train “World Model,” a next-generation system that learns from vast amounts of video, audio, and language.“To develop AI that helps humans in the physical world and expands our understanding of the universe, we need systems that can learn from a quadrillion multimodal information tokens,” Luma co-founder and CEO Amit Jain said in a statement. “HUMAIN is deploying frontier computing infrastructure at an impressive rate, which is critical to achieving Luma’s mission.”HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin said the investment reflects the company’s strategy to create a “full value chain” combining capital, computing and frontier model development to meet the growing demand for high-performance multimodal systems.Founded in 2021, Luma is gaining traction in the entertainment and advertising space with its Ray3 model, which the company describes as the first inferential video system capable of producing physically accurate animations and visuals. The company’s Dream Machine platform is already integrated into Adobe’s global creative products and is used by studios, agencies, and brands.This new capital will support Luma’s expansion into simulation, robotics, and design, and deepen its collaboration with HUMAIN Create, an initiative aimed at building AI models trained on Arabic and regional data for businesses and governments in the Middle East and North Africa.Jain, an Indian-born founder, worked at Apple developing cameras and computer vision systems before working at Product Hunt, Circle Medical, and his previous venture, Cultured Pixel. He co-founded Luma AI in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021.Luma’s backers currently include HUMAIN, a16z, AMD Ventures, NVIDIA, Amazon, Amplify Partners, and Matrix Partners, as well as operators and angel investors across the AI and entertainment ecosystem.
