KEY POINTS
- Fei-Fei Li’s startup World Labs closed a $1 billion funding round to develop spatial intelligence AI that understands the 3D world.
- Leading investors include AMD, Nvidia, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity and Sea.
- The company’s technology aims to power future uses in augmented reality, robotics and 3D world generation.
World Labs, the artificial intelligence startup founded by renowned computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, has raised $1 billion in a new funding round as it accelerates work on advanced spatial AI technologies. Known as the “godmother of AI,” Li leads the company’s effort to build AI systems that can understand and interact with three-dimensional environments — a shift away from traditional AI models limited to text or flat images.
The $1 billion financing was announced on Wednesday by World Labs and saw participation from major technology and investment groups. Among the backers, chipmakers AMD and Nvidia provided support alongside software giant Autodesk, which committed $200 million and will serve as an adviser to the startup. Other notable investors include Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research and Sea.
World Labs has not disclosed its valuation as part of the funding announcement, though Bloomberg News reported earlier that the company had been seeking investment around a $5 billion valuation before the round closed. The startup did not immediately respond to requests for comment on its valuation or future funding plans.
The core focus of World Labs is spatial intelligence, a novel approach to AI designed to reason about and navigate the three-dimensional physical world. This contrasts with many existing AI models that primarily process two-dimensional data like text or images. Spatial intelligence could enable machines to interpret depth, space and physical structures in ways that more closely mirror human perception.
Spatial AI has promising applications across a range of emerging technologies. World Labs’ work could support augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) platforms by creating AI capable of understanding and generating immersive 3D worlds. It may also enhance robotics systems — helping autonomous machines operate more robustly in complex real-world environments — and contribute to more advanced simulations for scientific research.
Among World Labs’ known projects is Marble, a multimodal model that can create editable 3D environments from text or image inputs. This model illustrates the kind of generative spatial AI the company is pursuing, enabling the translation of real-world data into richly detailed, manipulable virtual spaces.
Fei-Fei Li is a prominent figure in AI research, having played key roles in seminal projects such as ImageNet that underpin much of modern computer vision. Her leadership of World Labs continues her work on AI frameworks that go beyond traditional patterns — aiming to equip machines with a deeper understanding of context, space and physical relationships.
World Labs is among a growing field of companies exploring “world models” — AI systems that can simulate and reason about physical environments. Competitors and peers in this space include Alphabet’s Google DeepMind, which also develops models capable of generating 3D environments, and other startups dedicated to spatial or embodied intelligence research.
Investors’ interest in funding spatial intelligence reflects broader trends in the AI sector, where demand is rising for technologies that bridge digital and physical realities. Backers see potential for spatial AI to unlock breakthroughs in areas ranging from immersive media and gaming to autonomous navigation and robotics control systems.
The influx of capital positions World Labs to scale its research, expand its engineering teams and accelerate product development across its spatial AI portfolio. As companies and developers push toward more sophisticated machine interaction with the real world, the startup’s progress could influence future advancements in how AI perceives and engages with 3D spaces.
Fei-Fei Li’s leadership — backed by her longstanding reputation in AI research and investment from major tech players — underscores confidence in World Labs’ direction. The funding round also highlights shifting investor priorities toward generative and perceptual AI capabilities that go beyond conventional language or classification systems.
