Luma AI to Bring 200 Jobs to London with EMEA HQ Launch

“We don't want to be just another tech platform. We want to be something that is really serving the creative community and the creative economy.” Jason Day is a month into his new role as EMEA head of Luma AI, and as he prepares to launch the creative gen-AI video platform’s first international office London, he’s very clear about his ambition to become a bridge between worlds.

Jason joins from Monks, where he was EVP of global growth, bringing with him 15 years’ experience growing global client relationships at the likes of ad giant WPP. He’s tasked with the mission to introduce Luma AI’s to the heart of EMEA’s creative hubs, bringing its unique multimodal platform directly to makers and creative professionals across the worlds of entertainment, brands and gaming.

Luma AI was founded in 2021 by former Apple engineer Amit Jain. This expansion follows a recent series C round, which raised $900m and the news that they have partnered with HUMAIN on Project Halo and building a two gigawatt ‘supercluster’, giving them the infrastructure to power their ambitions and really make a splash with this expansion. “It gives us the financial runway to scale the business and to continue hiring great people, but it also, and very importantly, gives us access to the compute power for us to actually train the models. And that's a real competitive advantage that we have that puts us in a very small league to build models that are going to be really fantastic for creative professionals to use.”

In London, the new office will be a “full HQ” in that it spans the gamut from engineering and research capabilities to commercial teams and creative. The location of the London campus will be revealed next year, but in the meantime one thing Jason can share is that the team will be bringing an outpost Luma AI’s signature Dream Lab in LA over to the UK.

“This is a small but mighty studio, where we do our proof of concepts, our pilots, our education, our training, and it's filled with fantastic AI-first creatives,” says Jason, who says that this flagship studio was one of the things that persuaded him to join Luma AI. “That's not to compete with agencies, it's to make sure that we're training our models in the right way, it's to show what the art of the possible is, and then to help educate and train agencies. But we're going to be looking at creative talent as well, and really investing in the creative community, not just the engineering and development community in the UK.”

The Dream Lab, says Jason, is a sign of the kind of relationship that Luma AI is cultivating with creatives. “There's a reason that our Dream Lab is in LA.”

Indeed, Jason is directly appealing to ambitious and curious talent to get in touch. “To anyone reading this article: if you want to be involved in what we think is going to be a world-class creative platform, and you have an AI-first mindset, please get in touch or look at our website for roles.”

In terms of the culture that he’s looking to build in the EMEA team, Jason is very clear that he’s looking for people that can authentically bridge the worlds of tech and creativity. “We want people who understand creativity. We want people who have really walked in those shoes. We want people who are going to be enabling the creative community to really thrive over the next five, ten years.”

Luma AI's big picture goal is to build a “multimodal artificial general intelligence” to transform the creative industries. What that means for now is that their tools allow creatives to make video content using multiple kinds of inputs, beyond the limitations of prompt-only LLMs. That means, so the pitch goes, that Luma AI’s flagship products like Dream Machine and the recently-released reasoning video model Ray 3 are more in tune with how creatives actually imagine and work.

The key word that crops up again and again is ‘multimodal’, that is the platform is being built around the idea that creatives need more than one way of directing AI. Text alone (particularly the kind of pedantic text required for most LLMs) is cumbersome and can overcomplicate instructions that in live action filmmaking might just require a gesture from the director or in VFX, the ability to drag and drop.

“Our multimodal approach is one of the reasons that I joined Luma, and I think we've got just an amazing tool for the creative community. We don't think that the existing way of doing things is enough, linear prompting or a non-multimodal way of prompting,” says Jason. “And as Amit has been very clear about saying, and as we as a business are very bullish on, we believe that you need to have a much more intuitive way of prompting that is more aligned to how humans and creatives think.”

Looking to the advertising market specifically, Jason sees opportunities across the board, from holding companies to indies and in-house. Where the holding companies generally have fairly sophisticated “continually developing AI strategies” that Luma AI will be able to integrate into, Jason says there are also plenty of resources and support for smaller companies, such as self-serve online training and drop-in virtual clinics.

In the post-covid landscape, Jason is excited about the way that new creative hubs can emerge by harnessing the tech offered by creative AI. He describes a “great creative awakening, a great creative renaissance” of independent agencies run by talented teams, in the UK specifically but also across EMEA that he is keen to connect with.

And what about brands? Jason’s also seen a great sea change there. “Overwhelmingly, what I've seen over the course of the year is much more of a willingness and much more positivity around the adoption of AI,” he says. “If I think back to two years ago, when I was first having conversations about how we could deploy AI as part of workflow within an agency… there was a lot more hesitancy, a lot more reticence, a lot more, "Well, we'll sort of test it in a very closed environment." Nowadays, there is a clear demonstration that brands want and need to be adopting AI uh to deliver against their objectives.”

On brand safety and legalities, Jason says that it’s something the team is very mindful of and that they are keen to help shape and contribute to a regulatory framework that works for governments, consumers and brands.

“One of the reasons that we're very positive about the UK being our regional headquarters is you've got successive governments, not just this government, but successive governments that have been very clear that they want the UK to be a hub for AI,” says Jason. “They want a very clear regulatory framework that we can all operate in. I think we're seeing the changes happening and it is obviously a slightly fluid environment, but without doubt, brand safety is very important. Without doubt, complying with legislation is very, very important, and we want to be part of shaping that conversation.”

In the meantime, Jason’s got a crunchy but exhilarating job on his hands. In Q1 of 2026, he’ll be building that team and starting to bring the Luma AI brand to the market. And by 2028, the Luma AI team expects to have opened more roles to the UK, Europe and Saudi Arabia. “It's an incredible opportunity. It's going to need a lot of hard work. We are very ambitious, and we want to move very quickly. And I need great people to join me on that journey,” says Jason.