AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raises $1 billion in funding

Feb 18 (Reuters) - Prominent computer scientist Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $1 billion in a funding round as the startup accelerates its efforts to advance "spatial intelligence," it said on Wednesday.

The startup said the investors included semiconductor companies AMD AMD.O, Nvidia NVDA.O, software firm Autodesk ADSK.O, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company and Sea SE.N, among others.

Separately, Autodesk said it invested $200 million in World Labs and will serve as an adviser to the startup.

World Labs did not disclose a valuation. Bloomberg News reported in January that the startup was in funding discussions at a valuation of about $5 billion.

The startup did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Spatial intelligence, a novel approach to AI, refers to the ability to reason how the 3D world works — rather than relying on 2D data like flat images or text. World Labs' foundational models can perceive, generate and interact with the 3D world.

Spatial intelligence models, according to Li, could be put to use in the future for augmented and virtual reality or robotics.

Widely known as the "godmother of AI," Li raised $230 million in September 2024 to launch World Labs.

World Labs, along with Google DeepMind GOOGL.O and other startups, is working on so-called "world models" that can process visual data from the physical environment around them to develop advanced reasoning.

Google DeepMind's Genie family of models can generate and simulate 3D environments. Similarly, World Labs has said that its Marble multimodal world model creates 3D worlds from image or text prompts.