AI titan Yann LeCun and ex-deputy PM Nick Clegg, team up to drive Europe’s AI ambitions

Europe’s ambitions in deep tech are receiving a major uplift as Sir Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, joins HIRO Capital, accompanied by acclaimed AI innovator and ex-Meta scientist Yann LeCun. The newly launched HIRO III, a European scaleup venture capital fund which has a target of over €500 million.

HIRO Capital announced that Sir Nick Clegg, former global affairs at META and former UK deputy prime minister, has joined the Fund as a general partner for the launch of HIRO III.

The HIRO III Fund: Powering Europe’s deep tech scale-ups and closing the investment divide

With a target of more than €500 million, HIRO III aims to fill the “European scale-up gap”- a funding vacuum that forces talented founders to seek investment in the US, resulting in a European drain of innovation and expertise.

The fund plans to invest between €5 million and €50 million in UK and European firms working on spatial artificial intelligence, robotics, longevity technologies, gaming platforms, space systems, and new defence capabilities.

From politics and big tech to venture capital

Sir Nick Clegg’s move was announced at the Financial Times Global Boardroom conference, where he spoke candidly about Europe’s “profound dilemma.” He noted that while the continent leads in scientific research and early-stage innovation, a lack of risk-tolerant investment means too many founders are lured overseas. Clegg described HIRO III as a vehicle to bridge this gap, nurturing European tech talent and supporting companies as they scale globally.

HIRO Capital founder and managing general partner, Luke Alvarez, cited Clegg’s unique blend of political and technology expertise as being vital for guiding startups through an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.

Yann LeCun joins as adviser

Yann LeCun, Meta’s outgoing chief AI scientist and Turing Award recipient has also joined HIRO III’s advisory board. LeCun, renowned for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence, will be leaving Meta to establish his own AI company focused on advanced reasoning systems. He has long championed the need for Europe to ramp up its commitment to high-risk, high-reward AI research if it is to compete globally.

Earlier this month Yann LeCun announced he was preparing to launch his own AI startup.

LeCun, who has been at the forefront of AI research for decades, including pioneering work on deep learning and convolutional neural networks, revealed that his new venture will focus on developing what he calls “world models” – AI systems capable of understanding the physical world, rather than merely generating text like today’s large language models (LLMs).

“Silicon Valley is completely hypnotised by generative models. To pursue this kind of research, you have to go outside the Valley – to Paris,” LeCun said during his keynote at the AI-Pulse conference.

The new company, which LeCun has dubbed Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), will have a global footprint but will place a strong emphasis on European talent. “Europe has a lot of talent, which perhaps does not realise its full potential,” LeCun explained. “Providing the right environment for this is essential.”

Renowned for his advocacy of European AI, LeCun was instrumental in persuading Meta to establish its Facebook AI Research (FAIR) laboratory in Paris in 2015 – a move that catalysed European innovation in the field. Under his leadership, the Paris lab played a pivotal role in the development of Meta’s groundbreaking LLaMA large language model in 2023.

We revealed last month LeCun was leaving the company to launch his own start-up. Sources say the move follows growing tensions with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after LeCun was made to report to new AI chief Alexandr Wang. However Meta is backing the new venture.

HIRO III powerhouse advisory board

HIRO III has unveiled its star-studded advisory board, assembling a formidable line-up of global leaders spanning artificial intelligence, astronautics, defence innovation, biotechnology, finance, and big tech strategy.

Among the distinguished members are Malcolm Turnbull, former prime minister of Australia and a renowned investor in emerging technologies; Major Tim Peake, the pioneering British ESA astronaut and scientist; Professor Deeph Chana, an authority in defence and the founding director of NATO DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund; Laurent Solly, VP for Europe at Meta; Hannah Gladman, who leads strategy & special projects at Google DeepMind; Dr Jack Scannell, a biotech investor credited with “Eroom’s Law”; Professor Paul Newman, founder of the Oxford Robotics Institute; Caroline Daniel, a former Financial Times journalist and strategist; and Loredana Crisan, chief design officer at Figma.

Europe’s moment of opportunity

Despite lagging behind the US in developing platform-scale companies, Europe boasts unparalleled strengths in scientific research, university-led innovation, and engineering talent. Sir Nick Clegg and HIRO Capital are betting that with sufficient growth-stage capital, European founders can build globally dominant tech companies without needing to relocate.

Luke Alvarez described the present as the “early stages of a Cambrian explosion of new technologies,” driven by the fusion of AI, robotics, and spatial computing. The HIRO III fund aims to be at the forefront of this surge, supporting innovations that could shape everything from autonomous vehicles and space systems to wearable tech and defence capabilities.

Clegg hits out: The US cannot ‘out muscle’ China in AI race

Earlier this year, in a recent interview with MSNBC, Clegg also offered a stark assessment of the geopolitical race between the United States and China on AI, arguing that Washington is misreading the moment. He said recent efforts to fuse political power in Washington with the influence of Silicon Valley’s tech sector reflect a growing belief that a united American front can reassert leadership over China. But he rejected the idea that the AI race can be won through the same kind of brute-force strategy that defined the 20th-century Cold War.

“You’ve seen this kind of coming together, this kind of congregation of political power in DC and all the kind of tech leaders in Silicon Valley,” Clegg said. “They seem to be congregating around this idea that they’ve got to come together in order to assert American leadership against China in the race to AI supremacy.”

His view, however, is that this approach is fundamentally flawed. “My view is that’s just not going to work,” he said. “You can’t beat China on AI in the way that the Soviet Union was beaten in the Cold War, you can’t out-muscle them.”

He dismissed the notion that AI supremacy will be determined by a single, decisive technological breakthrough. “There isn’t going to be a Berlin Wall moment where suddenly someone in Silicon Valley is going to come up with something in AI and everybody else is going to fall to their knees and say, ‘Okay, you’re the undisputed leader and the rest of us are vanquished.’ It’s not going to be like that.”

Clegg believes that the US should indeed compete with China, but on realistic terms. “Sure, you can compete with the Chinese. I think we should compete with the Chinese,” he said. “But you’re not going to… China is way too sophisticated when it comes to AI.”

He pointed to China’s enormous pipeline of AI talent and its national-level planning around energy infrastructure for hyperscale data centres. China, he argued, is not simply racing for AI capability, it is building the entire industrial backbone required to support the coming generation of AI systems. “They’re producing legions of some of the smartest AI data scientists out of a whole array of top-flight universities in China,” Clegg said. “They’ve got, in my view, a much, much more thought-through strategy to actually providing energy to the AI data centres which are being built at large scale compared to the energy strategy in the US.”

Given this reality, he argued that the US will eventually have to shift from a competitive posture to one that focuses on alliances. “At some point, I think folk in both DC and Silicon Valley will realize that sure, you can compete with China, but there isn’t going to be a sort of knockout blow where China is entirely defeated in this AI race.”

When that moment comes, he believes the US will need partners – especially other “techno-democracies.” “Statecraft and seeking allies and working with the other major techno-democracies in the world, notably India and Europe, in my view, is going to become indispensable if the US wants to continue to be the undisputed leader in the kind of non-Chinese internet,” he said.