Nvidia-backed startup Luma AI announces major London expansion

Nvidiapowered video creation startup Luma AI joins a growing wave of US tech companies launching in the UK, with major plans to expand in London announced on Tuesday.

The Palo Alto-headquartered startup plans to hire approximately 200 employees at its new London base in early 2027, accounting for approximately 40% of its workforce in research, engineering, partnerships and strategic development.

The expansion comes two weeks after Luma announced a $900 million financing round led by AI company Humain, owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which raised the valuation to over $4 billion. The initiative had previously received support from Nvidia.

Luma builds “world models,” a class of AI models that can learn from video, audio, and images as well as text, and includes large language models (LLMs), such as those that power OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google’s Gemini usage.

The startup currently targets the marketing, advertising, media and entertainment industries with video mockups that it sells through an application programming interface (API) and as part of a content creation suite.

“With this Series C raise and the impending construction of global computing infrastructure, we have the capital and capacity to bring world-class AI to creators everywhere,” said Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Luma AI. “Launching in Europe and the Middle East is the next logical step in putting this power directly into the hands of storytellers, agencies and brands globally.”

Jain told CNBC that the UK is the starting point for expansion because of its access to talent.

“London has some of the best people in research, considering the universities here and institutions like DeepMind,” he said. “We also see London as the entry point into the European market.”

Luma is the latest in a wave of North American AI labs doubling down on the UK and Europe as they seek to tap into talent pools and revenue opportunities.

In November, San Francisco-based Anthropic announced plans to open offices in Paris and Munich, months after a hiring spree began in London and Dublin. Canadian AI startup Cohere said it would open a Paris office in September to become its EMEA headquarters, and OpenAI announced it would open a new office in Munich in February.

While Earth models are not yet as advanced as Master’s degrees, some researchers say they are as advanced, if not more. It is vital in the quest to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).

“Such visual models are currently about a year to a year and a half behind language models,” Jain said.

But pointing to the amount of time people spend watching video content every day, he predicted that world models will eventually become the “natural interface” for AI in most daily uses.

Including tech giants Google, Meta and Nvidia are all developing world models for various use cases.

Luma launched its latest model, the Ray3, in September; Jain told CNBC benchmarks are higher than OpenAI’s Sora and at similar levels to Google’s Veo 3.