Nvidia-Backed Luma AI Expands to London With 200-Person Hiring Push
by Mighva Verma - 1 week ago - 2 min read
U.S. video-generation startup Luma AI, valued at over $4 billion, is opening a major London hub and plans to hire around 200 people by early 2027, roughly 40% of its global workforce, making the U.K. its largest base outside the United States.
The new office won't be a sales outpost. Luma is building research, engineering, partnerships, and strategy teams in London, targeting top AI researchers and graphics engineers from the city's deep talent pool of university graduates and ex-DeepMind alumni. The hub will serve as a gateway into Europe and the Middle East, where Luma is deepening partnerships with Saudi-backed AI company Humain.
Fueled By $900 Million Round
The expansion follows Luma's $900 million Series C funding round, led by Humain, which is simultaneously building a 2-gigawatt AI supercomputing cluster in Saudi Arabia called Project Halo. Luma will use this massive compute infrastructure to train its next-generation models focused on “world models” systems that learn from video, audio, images, and text to simulate and understand physical reality.
Luma's flagship product, Ray3, is a reasoning video model that generates complex scenes from natural-language prompts. The company claims Ray3 beats OpenAI's Sora and matches Google's Veo 3 on quality and coherence metrics.
The technology is already embedded in Adobe's ecosystem and powers video generation for advertisers, studios, and agencies worldwide. Executives believe visual AI trails language models by 12-18 months but will eventually become AI's primary interface since people consume far more video than text.
Part Of A Broader European AI Surge
Luma joins other frontier AI companies racing to build serious European footholds. Anthropic has offices in Paris and Munich, Cohere chose Paris for its EMEA hub, and OpenAI is expanding in London and Munich.
With $900 million in capital, direct access to world-class compute, and a plan to make London half its workforce, Luma is positioning itself as the independent challenger to Big Tech in high-end video generation. The London expansion will test whether world models can match language models in commercial impact, whether European talent will join aggressive startups over tech giants, and whether AI-generated video becomes the default infrastructure for content production.