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."

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

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

World Labs did not disclose a valuation. The startup did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Bloomberg News reported in January that the startup was in funding discussions at a valuation of about $5 billion.

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.

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

Li has said spatial intelligence models could be put to use in the future for augmented and virtual reality or robotics.

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.

Yann LeCun, formerly Meta's META.O chief AI scientist, left the Facebook-parent to launch his startup, AMI Labs, which will focus on developing AI systems using world models.

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.