Nvidia -backed video generation startup Luma AI is joining a growing wave of U.S. tech companies launching operations in the U.K., with major plans for a London expansion revealed on Tuesday.
The Palo Alto-headquartered startup will look to hire around 200 employees — making up around 40% of its workforce — at its new London base by early 2027, across research, engineering, partnerships and strategic development.
The expansion comes two weeks on from Luma announcing a $900 million funding round led by Saudi Public Investment Fund-owned AI company Humain, which saw it hit a valuation upwards of $4 billion. The startup previously received backing from Nvidia.
Luma is building "world models," a class of AI models that are able to learn from video, audio and images, alongside text, and which large language models (LLMs) like those powering OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini use.
The startup is currently targeting marketing, advertising, media and entertainment sectors with its video models, which it sells via an application programming interface (API) and as part of a content creation suite.
"With this Series C raise and the upcoming build-out of global compute infrastructure, we have the capital and capacity to bring world-scale AI to creatives everywhere," said Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Luma AI. "Launching across Europe and the Middle East is the logical next step in putting this power directly in the hands of storytellers, agencies and brands globally."
The U.K. is the starting point of the expansion because of its access to talent, Jain told CNBC.
"London has some of the best people when it comes to research, given the universities here and institutions like DeepMind," he said. "We also consider London to be the entry point to the European market."