Luma AI raises $900 million in funding round led by Saudi AI firm Humain

Luma AI, a startup specializing in video generation, has successfully raised an impressive $900 million in its latest funding round, spearheaded by Humain, a Saudi Arabian artificial intelligence firm backed by the Public Investment Fund. This significant financial boost was revealed during the recent U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum and also saw contributions from the venture arm of Advanced Micro Devices, alongside existing investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners, and Matrix Partners. With this new funding, Luma AI's valuation has reportedly soared to over $4 billion. The company focuses on developing advanced multimodal 'world models' capable of learning from diverse data sources, including text, video, audio, and images, to simulate real-world scenarios. CEO Amit Jain explained in a CNBC interview that these models transcend traditional large language models that rely solely on text, offering enhanced effectiveness in practical applications. "With this funding, we plan to scale our efforts in training and deploying these world models today," Jain stated. In September, Luma launched Ray3, an innovative reasoning video model that interprets prompts to produce videos, images, and audio. Jain noted that Ray3 currently outperforms OpenAI's Sora 2 and is on par with Google's Veo 3. Humain, initiated in May, aims to establish comprehensive AI capabilities to elevate Saudi Arabia's status as a global AI leader. The company is headed by Tareq Amin, a seasoned professional with previous leadership roles at Aramco Digital and Rakuten Mobile. Collaboration between Luma and Humain also includes plans to develop a massive 2-gigawatt AI supercluster known as Project Halo in Saudi Arabia. This initiative is set to become one of the largest GPU deployments globally, reflecting the growing trend among major tech firms investing in supercomputing resources for training extensive AI models. For instance, Meta recently unveiled plans for a 1-gigawatt supercluster named Prometheus, while Microsoft launched a supercomputing cluster utilizing Nvidia's GB300 NVL72 platform in October. Amin emphasized the significance of the investment in Luma AI and the establishment of the supercluster, stating, "This positions us to train, deploy, and scale multimodal intelligence at a frontier level. This partnership sets a new benchmark for how capital, compute, and capability come together." Additionally, the collaboration includes Humain Create, which aims to develop sovereign AI models trained on Arabic and regional data. Jain revealed that Luma's models and capabilities will be utilized by businesses in the Middle East, addressing the underrepresentation of non-Western cultures in AI-generated content. Despite facing criticism from the entertainment industry over copyright issues, particularly regarding Luma's text-to-video platform Dream Machine, Jain reassured that the company has implemented robust safeguards against misuse. "Even if you really try to trick it, we are constantly improving it," he said. "We have built very robust systems that are actually using models we trained to detect them."