Business

World Labs Raises $1B Series C for Spatial AI World Models

SAN FRANCISCO: World Labs raises $1 billion in Series C funding with Autodesk investing $200 million. The AI startup, founded by renowned computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, advances spatial intelligence technology. Investors include Autodesk, NVIDIA, AMD, Andreessen Horowitz, Emerson Collective, Fidelity, and Sea.

Autodesk invests $200 million and serves as an adviser to the startup. The design software maker explores collaboration to integrate World Labs’ models with its tools. The partnership focuses initially on entertainment use cases. Bloomberg reports the round values World Labs at approximately $5 billion.

World Labs develops world models that perceive, generate, understand, and interact with 3D environments. The technology moves AI beyond 2D pixels and flat images. Spatial intelligence enables reasoning about how the 3D world works with geometry, physics, and dynamics.

The company launches its first product, Marble, a generative multimodal world model. Users create spatially coherent, high-resolution 3D worlds from images, video, or text inputs. The platform enables creation from simple text prompts, single photographs, or multiple views.

If AI is to be truly useful, it must understand worlds, not just words. Worlds are governed by geometry, physics, and dynamics, and reconciling the semantic, spatial, and physical is the next great frontier of AI,

Fei-Fei Li, Co-founder of World Labs.

The startup raised $230 million at a $1 billion valuation in September 2024. World Labs emerged from stealth just four months after founding. Li co-founded ImageNet, which helped advance computer object recognition capabilities and enabled current AI innovations.

“We are focused on accelerating our mission to advance spatial intelligence by building world models that revolutionize storytelling, creativity, robotics, scientific discovery and beyond,” World Labs said in a blog post.

The funding accelerates applications in robotics, scientific discovery, AR/VR, and immersive experiences. Competitors include Google DeepMind’s Genie models and Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs.

Yashika Aneja

Yashika Aneja is a journalist at Tea4Tech with over five years of experience in reporting and editorial writing. Her work spans technology, environment, education, politics, social media, travel, and lifestyle, with a focus on fact-based reporting and explanatory storytelling. || At Tea4Tech, Yashika contributes original reporting and analysis that adheres to the publication’s editorial standards for accuracy, originality, and responsible journalism. Her reporting is informed by curiosity-driven research and a multidisciplinary approach to news coverage.