Laurent Solly

Laurent Solly is a French executive, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of AMI, and a senior public-affairs and operations leader whose career has crossed French government, broadcast media, and the global technology industry. He spent twelve years at Meta, joining as Managing Director of Facebook France in 2013 and rising to Vice President for Europe before leaving the company on December 23, 2025. As of May 2026, he runs operations at AMI Labs following the company's $1.03 billion seed round announced March 9, 2026, and is the only AMI co-founder whose primary record is in operations and public affairs rather than research.

At a glance

• Education: Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), 1994; École nationale d'administration (ENA), Promotion Victor Schœlcher, 1994 to 1996.
• Current role: Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of AMI since late 2025.
• Prior roles: Vice President for Europe at Meta, January 2025 to December 2025; Vice President for Southern Europe, 2016 to 2025; Managing Director of Facebook France, June 2013 to 2016.
• Earlier career: Director General of TF1 Publicité, 2010 to 2013; senior leadership roles in the TF1 group from 2007; Chief of Staff to Nicolas Sarkozy at the Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of the Economy, 2004 to 2007; Deputy Director of Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign.
• Recognition: Chevalier de l'Ordre national du Mérite (2009).
• X / Twitter: @laurentsolly
• LinkedIn: laurent-solly

Origins

Solly was born March 27, 1970, in Villefranche-sur-Saône in the Rhône department of France. He completed his secondary education at the Lycée Notre-Dame de Mongré with a baccalauréat in economic and social sciences. He went on to the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, commonly known as Sciences Po, graduating in 1994. From Sciences Po he entered the École nationale d'administration in the Promotion Victor Schœlcher of 1994 to 1996, the standard preparation route for senior positions in the French civil service.

The Sciences Po and ENA pairing placed Solly in the French haut-fonctionnariat track that has historically produced senior officials, ministerial cabinet members, and chief executives across the public and private sectors. He pursued the prefectural career path on graduation rather than moving directly into the private sector, a choice that anchored his next decade in French government service.

Career

Solly began his career in 1996 as Sub-Prefect and Director of the Cabinet to the Prefect of the Lot-et-Garonne department, the standard ENA-graduate entry into prefectural administration. From 1999 to 2001 he served as Secretary General of the Prefecture of the Territoire de Belfort. From 2001 to 2003 he held a coordination and procurement mission at EDF, the French state electricity utility, his first private-sector role.

In 2004, Solly joined the cabinet of Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, as a Technical Adviser. He moved with Sarkozy to the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry the same year as Chief of Staff (Chef de cabinet), then served as Director of the Cabinet of the UMP presidency from 2004 to 2005 when Sarkozy chaired the party. When Sarkozy returned to the Ministry of the Interior in 2005, Solly returned with him as Chief of Staff. He was named Préfet hors cadre on government mission in 2006, and was Deputy Director of Sarkozy's successful 2007 presidential campaign. The five-year period in the Sarkozy political cabinet established him as one of the close operational managers of the Sarkozy team and produced the public profile that journalists later summarized as "Sarko-boy."

After Sarkozy's election in May 2007, Solly left government for the Bouygues group, joining the TF1 holding on May 23, 2007, and being named to TF1's general management on June 22, 2007, with responsibility for operational and functional missions including the establishment of a group purchasing department. From 2010 to 2013 he was Director General of TF1 Publicité, the advertising sales arm of the broadcaster. He left TF1 in April 2013, age forty-three, to join Facebook France.

Solly joined Facebook as Managing Director of Facebook France on June 3, 2013, leading the company's commercial, public-affairs, and operational presence in the country. In September 2016 his remit expanded to Director of Southern Europe, covering France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Israel, and in 2017 he was named Vice President of Facebook (later Meta). In January 2025 he was appointed Vice President for Europe, the broader regional role covering Meta's continental relationships with policymakers, advertisers, partners, and the Fundamental AI Research laboratory in Paris. The Vivatech 2025 panel "Shared Progress: How Can Open-Sourcing Speed the AI Race?" was among his last major public appearances under the Meta banner.

Solly announced his departure from Meta on LinkedIn on December 23, 2025, thanking colleagues and partners and writing that "the time has come to begin a new professional adventure" without disclosing the next role. The departure followed Yann LeCun's exit from Meta on November 19, 2025, and French press reported that Solly was a candidate to succeed Pierre Louette at the helm of the LVMH-owned Les Echos-Le Parisien group before joining AMI.

In late 2025 Solly co-founded AMI with Yann LeCun, Alexandre LeBrun, Saining Xie, Pascale Fung, and Michael Rabbat, taking the role of Chief Operating Officer. The AMI launch and $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation were announced March 9, 2026, placing the company at approximately $4.5 billion post-money. Cathay Innovation's announcement described his contribution as bringing "deep experience in global technology operations" to the founding team. He runs operations across AMI's four sites of Paris (headquarters), New York, Montreal, and Singapore, the operating counterpart to LeBrun's chief-executive role and LeCun's executive-chairman role.

Affiliations

• Préfectures of Lot-et-Garonne and Territoire de Belfort: Sub-Prefect, Director of the Prefect's Cabinet, and Secretary General, 1996 to 2001.
• EDF: Coordination and procurement mission, 2001 to 2003.
• French government cabinets: Technical Adviser, Chief of Staff, and Director of the Cabinet to Nicolas Sarkozy at the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of the Economy, and the UMP presidency, 2004 to 2007; Préfet hors cadre, 2006; Deputy Director of the Sarkozy 2007 presidential campaign.
• TF1 (Bouygues group): Director, TF1 General Management, 2007 to 2010; Director General of TF1 Publicité, 2010 to 2013.
• Meta (Facebook): Managing Director of Facebook France, June 2013 to 2016; Director of Southern Europe, 2016 to 2017; Vice President of Southern Europe, 2017 to 2025; Vice President for Europe, January 2025 to December 2025.
• AMI: Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, late 2025 to present.

Notable contributions

Solly's record is in operations, public affairs, and commercial leadership rather than research or product invention. The signal across his career is in organizations scaled, government-and-industry relationships managed, and revenue lines built rather than papers, models, or patents.

• Chief of Staff to Nicolas Sarkozy (2004 to 2007). Operational manager of the Sarkozy ministerial cabinets at the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Economy, and director of the cabinet during Sarkozy's UMP presidency. Deputy Director of the 2007 presidential campaign that produced Sarkozy's election in May 2007. The political-cabinet years built the public-affairs network Solly later carried into media and technology leadership.
• TF1 Publicité (2010 to 2013). Director General of the advertising sales arm of France's largest commercial broadcaster, leading the regulated television advertising market through the early-2010s broadcast-to-digital transition. The TF1 period gave him the commercial-leadership record that Facebook later recruited him for.
• Facebook France and Southern Europe (2013 to 2025). Built Meta's French commercial and public-affairs operation from a small market presence into the company's largest non-headquarters European operation. Managed the regulatory and political dimension of Meta's relationship with the French and Southern European governments through the post-2016 period of intense scrutiny over content moderation, election integrity, the General Data Protection Regulation, and the Digital Services Act. The 2025 promotion to Vice President for Europe placed him in the senior continental relationship with Brussels and member-state policymakers, including the engagement with the FAIR Paris laboratory.
• Public commentary on European AI policy and open source. Sustained public-engagement work through Vivatech panels, the Mondial Tech speaker circuit, and French-tech press appearances. His 2025 Vivatech panel on open-source AI and European sovereignty alongside MIT Technology Review's Niall Firth set the public record on Meta's open-source positioning during his final year at the company.
• AMI launch (March 2026). Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of the world-models research company alongside Yann LeCun and Alexandre LeBrun, with operating responsibility across the four-site Paris-New York-Montreal-Singapore footprint.

Investments and boards

• AMI (AI): Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, late 2025 to present. AMI announced a $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation on March 9, 2026.

No public personal angel-investor activity is on record in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy as of May 2026.

Network

Solly's strongest professional relationships sit in three distinct cohorts: the Sarkozy political cabinet of 2004 to 2007, the TF1 and broader Bouygues media ecosystem of 2007 to 2013, and the Meta European leadership cohort of 2013 to 2025. The political-cabinet network includes ministerial and prefectural colleagues from the Sarkozy era who later moved into senior public-affairs and corporate roles across French industry. The TF1 network connects him to Bouygues group executives and the French television-and-advertising industry.

The Meta European leadership cohort is the most relevant to his current AMI role. The twelve-year tenure overlapped substantially with Yann LeCun's tenure as Vice President and Chief AI Scientist of Meta and with the founding of FAIR Paris. The professional relationship with LeCun, Alexandre LeBrun (head of FAIR engineering from 2015 to 2018), and the broader Meta-Paris cohort is the structural anchor of his AMI co-founding.

The AMI founding cohort places Solly alongside Yann LeCun (Executive Chairman), Alexandre LeBrun (Chief Executive Officer), Saining Xie (Chief Science Officer), Pascale Fung (Chief Research and Innovation Officer), and Michael Rabbat (Vice President for World Models). Public coverage has framed Solly as the operational and public-affairs counterpart to a research-heavy founding team. He is married to French television journalist Caroline Roux, who presents the daily public-affairs program C dans l'air on France 5.

Position in the field

Solly occupies an unusual structural position among AI-startup operating leaders. The combination of a Sciences Po and ENA education, a five-year senior cabinet role under Nicolas Sarkozy, six years in senior media leadership at TF1, and twelve years running Facebook and Meta's French and European operations gives him a public-affairs and government-relations record few peers in the AI cohort match. Among the AMI co-founders, he is the only one whose primary record is in operations and public affairs rather than research or commercial founding.

The Chief Operating Officer role places him at the operational center of the most-watched non-LLM frontier-research bet of 2026. Industry coverage has framed his recruitment as a public-affairs and government-relations asset for AMI's European positioning, including the company's relationships with Bpifrance (the French state investment bank and an AMI strategic investor), the European Commission on the AI Act and Digital Services Act, and the broader French-tech ecosystem that includes Mistral AI and the Choose France initiative under President Macron.

The closest structural comparators among current frontier-AI operating leaders are public-affairs and operations executives at Mistral AI and the chief operating officers at peer Insurgent labs such as Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines Lab, though the senior-government-cabinet credential and the duration of the Meta tenure distinguish his profile.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• AMI's regulatory and government-relations posture. Whether Solly's senior-cabinet credential and Bpifrance relationship produce procurement opportunities under the Choose France framework or with the European Commission, and at what scale.
• Operating-site execution. Whether AMI's four-site model across Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore scales without losing research coherence. The AMI scaling problem is multi-continental and pre-product.
• Hiring at the operational layer. Whether Solly recruits a senior public-affairs, finance, and people-operations bench from his Meta and TF1 networks.
• Public commentary on AI policy. Solly was a central public voice for Meta's open-source positioning in Europe through 2024 and 2025. Whether the AMI period produces a continued or shifted position on the AI Act and Digital Services Act is a watchable signal.
• Subsequent fundraising. Whether AMI raises follow-on capital and at what valuation will indicate continued investor conviction.
• Compute and infrastructure deployment. The $1.03 billion seed implies substantial compute investment. Vendor relationships, datacenter siting, and timeline have not been disclosed publicly. The procurement decisions sit largely in the chief-operating-officer remit.

Sources

• Laurent Solly French Wikipedia entry. French Wikipedia summary of biographical and career detail, including birth date, education, and prefectural-and-cabinet positions.
• Le Français Laurent Solly quitte ses fonctions de vice-président Europe chez Meta après 12 ans. L'Usine Digitale on the December 2025 Meta departure and twelve-year tenure.
• Après Yann LeCun, Laurent Solly, le patron de Meta en Europe, quitte à son tour le groupe américain. Maddyness on the December 23, 2025 LinkedIn departure announcement.
• Laurent Solly rejoint AMI Labs, la start-up de Yann le Cun. Stratégies on the AMI Labs co-founder appointment.
• Laurent Solly devient vice-président en Europe de Meta. Stratégies on the January 2025 promotion to Vice President for Europe.
• Laurent Solly quitte TF1 Publicité pour Facebook. Stratégies on the April 2013 transition from TF1 Publicité to Facebook France.
• Laurent Solly LaREF profile. MEDEF La REF speaker page summarizing his Meta-era role and career arc.
• Laurent Solly Vivatech speaker page. Vivatech 2025 speaker entry as Vice President for Europe at Meta.
• Open Source and the future of European AI sovereignty: Insights from Vivatech 2025. Open Source Initiative recap of the Vivatech 2025 open-source-AI panel including Solly's commentary.
• Laurent Solly Mondial Tech speaker page. Mondial Tech speaker schedule entry.
• Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raises $1.03B to build world models. TechCrunch on the March 2026 AMI seed announcement and founding leadership team.
• Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) is Enabling the Next AI Revolution. Cathay Innovation announcement of the AMI seed describing Solly as bringing "deep experience in global technology operations."
• Photo: Laurent Solly Wikimedia Commons entry, CC-BY 3.0 by APIdays via Wikimedia Commons.