Key Highlights:
- Luma AI will open a major London hub with plans to hire 200 employees by 2027.
- The Nvidia-backed startup recently raised $90M, boosting its global expansion.
- London becomes one of Luma AI’s biggest international centers for video-first AI research.
If you have used a text-to-video model, you must be aware of what Luma AI is. The NVIDIA-backed video generation startup is one of the contenders in the ongoing AI race, which is now expanding beyond the US and has officially unveiled its plans to set up a major hub in London, UK to help set its footprints in the UK AI market. The company is also planning to start one of the largest global hiring drives to meet the demand for advanced video-first AI models.
Luma AI expands to the UK, with major hiring plans for its new London office
Luma AI plans to hire around 200 employees for its new London office by early 2027. That number represents roughly 40% of the company’s projected workforce, making London one of Luma’s most international hubs. According to a report by CNBC, Luma AI will hire employees across research, engineering, partnership, and strategic development.
The announcement comes just weeks after Luma closed a massive $900 million Series C funding round, led by Humain. The latter is an AI company owned by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. With the latest investment, Luma AI’s valuation has crossed $4 billion and has become one of the most valuable private companies in the space.
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.”
Jain says the U.K. is the first stop for Luma’s international expansion because of its deep talent pool, particularly in AI research. “London has some of the best people when it comes to research, given the universities here and institutions like DeepMind,” he told CNBC. “We also consider London to be the entry point to the European market.”
Focus on world models
Luma AI is particularly focused on building world models. For the uninitiated, it is a powerful class of multimodal AI systems that can learn from audio, video, images, and text. These models reportedly aim to understand and simulate the real world with high fidelity, which is similar to what OpenAI and Google’s Gemini have been doing for some time now.
As of now, Luma AI has been targeting marketing, advertising, media, and the entertainment industry with its video-generation models. These models are available through an API and as part of the Luma expanding creative suite. It gives brands, agencies, and creators the ability to generate high-quality scenes, assets, and cinematic shots with minimal input.
The race towards AGI and role of world models
Over the past year, London and Europe as a whole have become important markets for US-based AI companies that are looking for top-level AI minds and new commercial opportunities. Anthropic, OpenAI, and many other US firms have announced expansions across the EU. Luma is also joining the game with the latest investment.
Although it has been reported that world models are considered to be about a year to 18 months behind the most advanced language models, researchers argue they are just as important when we talk about achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Jain, who is CEO and co-founder of Luma AI, believes that world models will eventually become the natural interface for AI, noting how much people already spend time interacting with video content.
