Three former employees of Meta and OpenAI are in talks to raise $400 million for a new AI venture called Aire, according to sources with direct knowledge of the fundraise.
The Founding Team
Aire is being built by a high-profile trio with deep roots in frontier AI research:
- CEO: A London-based executive who previously held a senior role at an AI safety organization and worked at both Anthropic and Hugging Face
- CTO: A former Meta technical leader
- Co-CTO: A New York-based executive previously part of Meta's FAIR (Fundamental AI Research Lab)
The team reportedly connected through professional networks spanning Goldman Sachs in Paris, along with prior stints at Meta and roles in New York.
What Is Aire Building?
Aire is positioning itself around the development of 'AI assistants' and a research & development stack targeting enterprise use cases. The platform is described as incorporating capabilities in vision, language, planning, and agentic AI.
The company is said to have a target team size of roughly 87 people, including several researchers with backgrounds in RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback).
A Crowded But Well-Funded Landscape
Aire enters a competitive European AI lab scene. In France, Mistral AI recently raised $640 million in growth funding, while Kyutai, another Paris-based lab, has also attracted significant backing.
In the UK, the Zuckerberg-backed Wayve raised over $1 billion to pursue autonomous driving AI — signaling strong investor appetite for deep-tech AI labs on the continent.
Aire, Fondation, and the trio were not immediately available for comment.
The fundraise, if completed, would position Aire as one of the most heavily capitalized AI research startups to emerge from the European ecosystem this year.
