Yann LeCun launched a new VC fund — then quit. What happened?

0:01Hello and welcome to the Sifted podcast. I'm your host Freya Pratty, Sifted's Associate Editor. Joining me today is reporter Maya Dharampal-Hornby. Maya, this is your first appearance on the pod. You've been with us since the start of last year, but you haven't done the pod until now. So do a little intro for our listeners before we get into the story. Hello, I'm a reporter at Sifted and like Freya, I'm London-based and focused on UK tech. I'm also the producer of this podcast so it's really exciting to be in front of the mic today. It's great to have you in front of the mic. So on Friday last week you broke the news that former Meta chief scientist, AI godfather as he's often known, Jan Lacan was launching a new VC firm.

0:44The story quickly started being talked about on X, on LinkedIn, TBPN in the US picked it up but then on Friday night about eight hours after we published the story it emerged that Lacan had stepped down from the fund. So this is post-publication he had done that. It's been a really wild ride and a fun one to watch you report on. But for people who perhaps haven't followed this as closely as you have, tell us who is Jan Lecun and why is he important as a starting point? So Jan Lecun is a French-American AI researcher. He gained particular prominence during his time at Meta, which was then Facebook between 2013 to 2025.

1:22He began as its director of AI research and became a VP and chief AI scientist. During this time, he also started working as a part-time professor at NYU. In 2018, he received the Turing Award, which is this sort of coveted annual prize for computer science, alongside Google researcher Jeffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning. This trio are often referred to as the godfathers of AI, as you just mentioned. So since leaving Facebook at the end of last year, Jan has been a lot more on Sifted's radar. He launched world model startup AmiLabs. It raised over a billion dollars in March and has attracted talent from the likes of Meta and DeepMind.

2:04Jan's an executive chairman at Ami. He's also, as we'll touch on later, an advisor at London and Luxembourg-based VC firm Hero Capital. Yeah, you're right. We do a lot more on Jan than we were doing this time last year since Ami came on the scene. I think they were targeting 500 million originally. Some of our other reporters saw a leaked pitch deck from Ami. I think they were looking for 500 and then, as you said, they got a billion. So it's become a very hyped company. I was surprised when we heard whispers about this new fund that he had time for both, but he's clearly a talented man. How did you work out then that he was starting this new fund?

2:43So I heard that he was trying to raise for a fund with LPs from two separate people. When I was trying to confirm it, I was asking investors, bankers, AI founders, anyone who I kind of came into contact with, really. It was last Thursday that I got to two sources. So we were happy to run the story saying that Jan's starting a fund. I then compiled all the information I needed, but then got sent some documents about the fund, which gave me a bit more information about the startups it was looking into. Jan's role as a non-managing general partner, as well as other team members involved. So these documents gave me the fund's name, which is Xtelligence Invest, which led me to a website which featured Jan.

3:26Having spent quite a lot of time digging around, trying to find people who would talk about the fund, it was quite funny to just find the information so freely available. Yeah, that was a great moment. I enjoyed that. And what did you find on the website in terms of other people involved in the fund or where it wanted to invest? So the fund was going to invest in early stage startups across Asia, Europe and North America. The website said that it will invest in companies across AI and data infrastructure, healthcare technologies and human longevity, cross-border consumer platforms and frontier deep tech, which includes robotics, new mobility and compute.

4:07So it's going to do quite a lot. It was also going to support startups through multiple funding rounds. It described itself as focusing on companies led by technical founders who were building defensible IP and positioned to scale globally. In terms of who was going to be involved, Yan was to be one of the firm's two non-managing general partners, along with mathematician Tony Chan, the former president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. and I think as you found out Freya that the pair sit on the same election committee for the 2027 computer science award the Shaw Prize so they clearly know each other.

4:47The fund had also appointed two other venture partners. And there were some portfolio companies already on the website which was initially confusing right? Yeah I think that was one which was like a dating AI startup so maybe not the sorts of things we thought Jan would be involved in but yeah they They were, I think, angel investments to prove investors' track record is what a source told me. And crucially, for the rest of what happened next, you received confirmation that this was the real Jan. I did. I did. I was in touch with Jan's spokesperson who, after quite a lengthy exchange over text, confirmed that Jan was in fact involved.

5:30So we published the story, lots of people reading it, lots of people talking about it. It was great. And then you got this message, as we said earlier, which changed things. Tell us what happened. So I first got a statement from Extelligence's team. So this was about six hours after publication. The message did not say explicitly that the fund was shutting or that Jan was stepping down, but rather that it had recently learned that Jan had existing exclusive relationships with other funds that weren't fully understood at the time. The statement pointed to legal and contractual complications, but it was also very glowing and added that, you know, the team had the deepest respect and admiration for Jan.

6:15So it really felt like there were no hard feelings. So yeah, it was a bit strange. I didn't quite know what was going on and where that left the story. An hour or so later, I got confirmation from Jan's team that he had withdrawn his participation from the fund. They declined to give an on-record reason for this, but his spokesperson did describe Extelligence as one of many investment projects he is involved in. About 10 minutes after that confirmation from Jan's team, a spokesperson for Extelligence said that they had decided to withdraw the fund, and they used wording like discontinue the formation process, saying that Extelligence will not be launched.

6:56the website also seemed to shut down at this point so yeah a busy evening ensued updating the article and throughout this we noticed that yan himself was replying to random tweets ai tweets but nothing to do with x intelligence on x which made us laugh that people were maybe stressing about this and he was just perhaps coolly replying to tweets on another topic so what do you think happened behind the scenes if we can piece this together a bit? So I imagine that some of the projects that Jan is involved with might have kicked up a fuss. I think particularly when you think about his position in certain funds, you could see why his reputation as an AI godfather could attract a lot of startups and investment talent to a fund.

7:48So you could imagine fund managers not wanting Jan sort of magnet effect to be diffused by Yan being involved in lots of different funds. He would have also been a general partner here, which is a significantly larger role than what he occupies at other funds where he's an advisor. So I could imagine people after reading the news on Friday going to check their funds contracts with Yan. It should also be mentioned that we reached out to Hero Capital, the sort of aforementioned fund where Jan is an advisor, but haven't got a response from them about whether they played any role in all of these twists and turns.

8:30Yeah, important to know. We don't know the full details of why he withdrew, but it's presumed it would, as you said, be a sort of non-compete situation with a project that he's working on elsewhere. We don't know which, though, is important to flag. so we already thought there had been a number of twists in this saga but there was a final one tell us what happened as people pointed out on X after our updated article had gone out the website was back up and running on Saturday initially it had wiped Jan and left some partners at the time of recording this podcast I don't think it's got any partners mentioned on the website but yeah I would not be surprised if there was another twist or turn to this story Yeah, TBC and perhaps Extelligence will be up and running writing checks.

9:21We don't know. Great. Well, thank you, Maya. It's been a great one to watch you report on, as I said. What else are you working on? What's next from you? So I am currently writing a piece about UCL's influence on the UK tech scene. It was inspired by realising that David Silver, the founder of Ineffable Intelligence, uh lourdes agapito who's a co-founder at ai video startups in these year and neolab recursive super intelligence co-founder tim all belong to the same computer science department at ucl so looking at the university's influence on the tech scene and i will also be editing this podcast which feels slightly like marking my own homework very meta and i am working on something kind of adjacent to that I guess I'm looking at where Anthropic's London office is actually hiring I think there's some fear from perhaps the Neo Labs in London perhaps the older AI companies 11 Labs Synthesia about Anthropic coming to London and poaching all the the top researchers so I'm working on tracking if that's actually happening if that is the highest they want in London which should be interesting thank you Maya for joining the pod in your first in front of the microphone appearance.

10:36Thank you very much for having me, Freya. Listeners, if you want to find out more about Lacan Extelligence, AMI or Hero Capital, we'll drop links to all the reporting discussed in today's episode in the show notes. And if you're not already subscribed, you should sign up to Sifted's daily newsletter where we'll continue to follow Lacan's every move. And if there is another twist in the Extelligence Fund saga, you will find it in the newsletter. As always, please rate, review and share the pod, which, as we've said, is also in re-produced by Maya.